Carpets, models, kitchen redux (again)

Big changes were made over the week: I got a bit down but a good friend of mine helped me out of it, and I got inspired to continue working hard.

On to business, this is the environment thus far.

The changes I made were based on additional research. Primary change was that the kitchen location just was not good: it looked far too out of place. So, I moved it into an alcove to fit snugly behind where the bathroom was supposed to be, and moved the door farther back into the wall to make room for a storage cupboard I can fill with junk.

I made a shader for the lightshafts; Initially, it was derived from the shader model from the UDN, but I modified it with my own textures and added panning clouds and noise to simulate dust and smoke passing through from the dusty weed-filled apartment.

I also got around to modifying and texturing the carpets in the scene: they stuck out way too much for me to ignore them any longer. My workflow was as follows:

Instead of having a 1024/1024 for each carpet, I thought it much more useful to unwrap them all (but one) to fit a 2048/2048 as this is less memory-intensive and  packing them in this way also avoids stretching of textures. I left the biggest carpet out as it was square and I felt it needed the extra space.

I then sculpted in folds and pinches into the carpet using Zbrush, mostly using the Smooth and Dam Standard brushes. The reason? it's very rare for a carpet to lie flat without any wrinkles, especially in apartments like this where there is a lot of foot traffic. There's also the natural pinching that occurs if heavy furniture (i.e. the bookcase) is moved, trapping the carpet beneath it.

Finally, I used Xnormal to bake the texture. I find it a more reliable program for baking organic models, as Zbrush often gives me normals that are too powerful. For the AO, I experimented with desaturating the normal map and overlaying the result at high contrast, as I couldn't get a good AO bake for some reason.

The result, when imported into UDK, is as follows:

I had to boost the normal map using shaders, but it's evident nonetheless.

Here's a lighting-only view:

Next time I will be adding lintels to the windows, redoing the wallpaper and adding some decorative meshes to the remainder of the apartment. Thanks for reading :)