I have been working on some prop pieces along with the Riviera, I am building “kits” that can be tiled and configured in different ways to quickly create dynamic scenes . The above image is an example I threw together in about 20 minutes. I will be updating the scene tomorrow, and I will post another render when I am finished.
I have been trucking away at the textures, normals, spec maps, etc… on the Riviera since the last update.
Below are two progress renders:
I’d say I’m about 85% done now. There’s some details I still plan to add, a few areas need touching up, and the weapons need textures… Other than that this asset is pretty much completed.
From this point on I wont be posting anymore renders from 3DSMax. I will be posting in-engine images from UDK. They will give a better indication to how the car looks.
-Johnny
The nature of our project lends itself well to lots of tiling assets. The trick to making tiling assets believable, it to make them look like unique versions of the same thing. In the same way that no two manholes on a New York City street would collect exactly the same wear, We don’t want any two tiled assets in our game to look like exact copies.
To this end I’ve been building some simple tests in Unreal to get the most mileage out of our props.
To give you some background on the layout of this test scene, it’s just a bunch of simple BSP cubes. The floor and back wall have a neutral grey material with no specularity applied to them. You’ll see the color of the floor and back wall change though. This is because the level is lit with a single light with Lightmass (Global Illumination) set to 6 bounces. Since the only real color in the scene is red, everything else gets chroma-shifted in that direction.
First off, the scene with a 128×128 Brick texture applied to everything:
Next, the same material with a grunge mask, locked to the world position.
You can see that the grunge mask adds a bit of nice detail to the otherwise plain surface, but still it’s fairly obvious that it is just an overlaid texture.
Finally, the same material with a grunge mask locked to the world position, and a detail mask of a larger tiling scale locket to the world position. This detail mask is designed to add detail near the ground to make it look as if dirt and grime have collected there.
In the course of putting together this project, I made another personal discovery, Global illumination looks a little silly when the entire scene is dominated by one color (In this case, Red.) In actual application this shouldn’t be an issue.
Finally, here’s the material network I created for this demo. The only thing not shown in this picture are the scale values in the TexCoord nodes. I played with the values to make the grunge appear more subtle, and to make the detail layer fit the block height.
