We have been creating random textures of materials and started putting material sheets together ready for texturing, our planned approach to texturing is going to basically be to not use 0 to 1, overlap the uvs to the needed material on the material sheet. This saves on the amount of textures that will be needed and reduces the amount of draw calls the engine will have to do to get the textures in the scene.
Carrying on with organising the scene. I have finished taking everything to 0,0,0. I have named all assets and I have taken each asset to it's own individual layer, organised via colours to separate the building the piece belongs to. The reason I took this approach was because now anyone can work on texturing anything, the mesh does not have to be moved, it remains at 0,0,0 so any changes to the uvs, then the user can just re-export over the old .ase and the unreal file will update accordingly, hopefully without any problems.
Thursday, 23 December 2010
UDK
I decided to start taking the scene from Maya to UDK to face any issues we might have. setting pivots and moving everything to 0,0,0 one by one is a long, repetitive process.
I have exported half the scene and imported in to udk, the scene works, all static meshes are ok, everything joins up correctly. Though I thought there was a slight problem with the normals when running in UDK, so i looked in the actorx export options to find i did not have smoothing groups turned on.
Next is to continue to export the rest of the scene and re-export the ones done already with smoothing groups applied.
I have exported half the scene and imported in to udk, the scene works, all static meshes are ok, everything joins up correctly. Though I thought there was a slight problem with the normals when running in UDK, so i looked in the actorx export options to find i did not have smoothing groups turned on.
Next is to continue to export the rest of the scene and re-export the ones done already with smoothing groups applied.
presenting to Eurocom
This week we presented our work to the guys from Eurocom, they seemed happy with our idea, their concerns were basically to make sure that the scene would run smoothly, they liked that we had run from concept art by our team's artist, James. and they gave Calum a few pointers on character modelling which was insightful to industry standard methods.
Their concerns about it running smoothly should not really be an issue, a massive majority of the scene is modular, and while this doesn't mean everything is free, it cuts down on the engine having to draw it all, the whole scene so far, including a lot of duplicated objects, is around 60k tris. As we are using the Unreal engine, we should be ok. the next job is to get it all into udk and make sure of this to eliminate any concerns.
Their concerns about it running smoothly should not really be an issue, a massive majority of the scene is modular, and while this doesn't mean everything is free, it cuts down on the engine having to draw it all, the whole scene so far, including a lot of duplicated objects, is around 60k tris. As we are using the Unreal engine, we should be ok. the next job is to get it all into udk and make sure of this to eliminate any concerns.
Thursday, 11 November 2010
This past week has been more about theory for me. After showing my workflow to Dave Wilson the first tip I got was not to use 0 to 1 UVing when creating environment textures, He showed me a case study of an example. I had used a similar method in college but was told never to do it.
Another tip was to take the brick texture and just import it as a seperate material. This really surprised me, I had no idea you could use more than one material per object in UDK, so now we can use high res tiling textures.
During the week, Chris and myself had some free time so we decided to go texture sourcing, to create a pool of overlays and grunge brushes for the group.
The groups focus has been shifted to getting the street modelled before monday. I have created the corner shop and am starting work on the monorail/ train.
Here's a quick render of the store, it is not decorated as this will be modelled after everything is in place as the buildings hold priority over props.
Another tip was to take the brick texture and just import it as a seperate material. This really surprised me, I had no idea you could use more than one material per object in UDK, so now we can use high res tiling textures.
During the week, Chris and myself had some free time so we decided to go texture sourcing, to create a pool of overlays and grunge brushes for the group.
The groups focus has been shifted to getting the street modelled before monday. I have created the corner shop and am starting work on the monorail/ train.
Here's a quick render of the store, it is not decorated as this will be modelled after everything is in place as the buildings hold priority over props.
Sunday, 31 October 2010
Modular design
For over the past week I have been studying Modular level design as I thought this would be the most practical route for our group. I had a good Idea what it was and ran a few tests through UDK, to make sure I understood. On monday we had a lecture on the subject which clarified and confirmed what I was thinking about. I had made a small template and readme for the group which consisted on how to set up Maya to UDK's measurements, along with some template geometry, set to perfectly snap together. After a few more tests I began to create modular geometry, I have finished the first piece of wall for the bottom of the building.
To create the texture I created a couple of bricks in Maya and imported them into Zbrush and beat them up a bit. I then imported the high poly bricks into Maya and created a wall and ran it through Xnormal. For the diffuse I grayscaled the normal map and used colour and texture photo overlays. I will continue my work on this building using the same brick texture to keep the map efficient.
To create the texture I created a couple of bricks in Maya and imported them into Zbrush and beat them up a bit. I then imported the high poly bricks into Maya and created a wall and ran it through Xnormal. For the diffuse I grayscaled the normal map and used colour and texture photo overlays. I will continue my work on this building using the same brick texture to keep the map efficient.
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