Environment Update

Just another update on the environment itself: I've been following Jordan Walker's example and have converted some key lights to Toggleable Point Lights. Although this is more performance intensive, for this project I wanted gorgeous shadows, so I'll let it slide. It also helps bring out stronger specular maps.

Here's a current shot. Aside from lighting, I have been doing a few texture/shader tweaks and replacing blockout meshes with textured and remodelled iterations. 

The round table was based on an English antique, despite the other furniture being slightly Oriental. The reason? I wanted a nice table that stood out on its own, as it was in the middle of the scene, and why not?

Here's a reference photo.

For the details on the legs I experimented with highpolys in Max. I couldn't get it exactly like the photo, but I feel it looks detailed enough to be impressive.

 Here's a few Marmoset renders:

I also textured the vinyl cases. I had a revealation whilst doing this that the scene needed more varieties of vinyl case, so I set to making some silver ones as opposed to the felt model I used in the concept.

I'll keep on it, and hopefully work on some more daytime renders and polish off the copter soon. Thanks for reading :)

Hipoly Copter update

I spent most of today adding more to the copter highpoly to meet my Christmas quota, and I'm pleased to reveal it's almost complete :)

Here's a render:

Right now, I've been having a few issues with the main body's scale: something knocked it in the optimising phase so that the rivets float above it. I guess those incremental saves will come in handy!

During the modelling of this I put aside as many iterations of the model as possible so that I have more base components to build the lowpoly from. As I do more on this asset, I will test the effects of this workflow, as this is the first asset which I will go from highpoly to lowpoly as opposed to my previous, alternate workflow.

My self-imposed Christmas deadline for this has almost been reached, which is good though. In the next update I will focus again on the environment.

Thanks for reading :)

Apartment Interior: The walls are alive and changing and stuff

In this update, I have taken a step back from the highpoly helicopter and done some more work on the apartment itself. Here's a screenshot:

The things I bring in this update is:

• Two more textures for assets
• Updated lighting
• Updated textures/models for the shelf assets
• Replaced one brick wall with wallpaper for added cohesiveness.

The lighting in the small kitchen area was originally very dim, but to add contrast and generate another focal point I made it brighter, as though the lightbulb in this area still worked.

Loads more texturing to do, but here's some Marmoset grabs of the newer assets. I feel through this project that my ability to texture wood is improving greatly :)

Next time is the time to texture more: If I get the main bulk of work done  as early as possible, I can spend more time refining it and responding to feedback.

My contact has also given me some pointers and advised me to also show of a daytime-lit version of the scene. I'll keep you posted and try and make the end product as high-quality as possible.

Thanks for reading :)

Highpoly chopper begins

Just a brief update on my plans regarding a copter outside the scene: I have been working on the highpoly. It's been a struggle and it's definitely WIP, but here's a preliminary render:

I need to find decent reference and sort out smoothing groups, but I hope to grace you with a decent render before Christmas. I'm putting parts aside as I build for use on the lowpoly.

The plan is to have the copter(windows blacked-out so I don't need to make the interior) outside the scene hovering and supplying the unnatural dominant light in the concept. In the game's storyline this would be justified as 47 is on the run from the police following an explosion.

Stay tuned for more updates :)

Lighting experiments, ventilation and vertex floors.

In this update, I have added a new textures, tweaked the old and looking for new ways to make the scene better. Here's a screenshot:

Since quite a bit has happened, I'll list some updates that I felt needed to be done:

Firstly, I retextured/topologised the chinese lantern, adding a normal map to make the lantern look less as if it was made out of card and more like metal. I also tightened up the specular highlights and tweaked the alpha and shader of the bulb to make the normal map pop more. I'm considering also adding a light function to the light on the object.

I added in the sofa and chair textures, and used a detail map to make it look more like fabric. I've been using this extensively, as it gets past resolution issues stemming from directly texturing the diffuse in Photoshop.

I've also had a deal of fun texturing the ceiling ventilation pipe.  First, I started by baking the highpolys in Max(much better for hard surface), and then I ensured that the specular and gloss were quite high for the reflectivity of the material to be spot-on. I made four pieces, the pipe, the end grille, a bend and the ceiling clip on  a 1024/1024 sheet.

In the level, I used a cubemap and a subtle fresnel highlight to simulate the reflective material, also using a mask to place the cubemap only on the section I wanted.. The result is pictured, and works rather well.

I also wanted to change up a floor a little, as it was just textured BSP in the end and my fascination with the potential of vertex blending wasn't going away. The process was slightly different compared to the walls, but I had some fun doing it.

I began by mapping the texture to a plane roughly the same resolution as the texture on the level's floor, using the existing wallpaper mesh as reference for its size in UU. 

To make the floor more interesting, I made some tile sets of wear and missing floorboards that snap together on the grid, then welded and lightmapped them. This would make the floor's silhouette different whilst still being consistent with the texture, providing enough verts for blending.

For the texture, I added some faint highlights to the floorboards and made a lighter and more stained texture to simulate a more worn floor. It's very subtle but a definite improvement, and I will add more variation in the future.

My contact advised me to try the scene in different lighting, and I find that this is actually a neat idea, as it allows me to judge textures better than in a dark scene. Here's a shot of a quick morning light setup below.

My next move in the project is to make a bona-fide highpoly hero asset. The one I had initially planned to do was the addition of a police helicopter outside, similar to this:

This chopper would fly outside the scene and shine its searchlight in the window as a dynamic light.

Thanks for reading :)

Sofa So Good: A tiny update

Just a brief update before the next: I have been working on the sofa this week, which proved more of a challenge that I initially thought. As I'm feeling good about overcoming them and stupid for falling for them, I will detail the issues encountered below;

I began with sculpting the highpoly of the sofa in Zbrush as planned, and this went well initially.I split the mesh up in the above manner for baking to avoid the meshes clipping or the raycasting catching the surface of the other objects: since I was dispensing with unique UV space to keep with my texture budget, these pieces are all I needed to sculpt. 

 The first problem I encountered was that doing the taselled ridges on sections where the fabric has been stitched relied on hand movement in Zbrush, and thus wouldn't be as perfect as I would want. The solution was to make those ridges in max and Turbosmooth to ensure their form fit the shape of the mesh.

After I finished, I baked and thought my problems were over: I then learned after previewing in Toolbag that despite my penchant for optimal UV usage, the arm rests were uniquely laid out and thus low-res.

I knew I could go higher-res, so I chose not to settle for it and remade the mesh to make those arm rests share texture space, thus making them much sharper and making less of my sculpting work go to waste. In the process, I made another mistake of messing up the UVs on the back of the sofa, but planar mapping and careful tweaking sorted that out.

More problems abounded when I learned that I couldn''t export OBJs out of Max without it taking forever, so I opted for Max baking of normals when the going got tough. I learned here that when Max bakes normals, the Green channel is inverted, and must be flipped in Photoshop.

But eventually, I made the final sofa after hours of tweaking. In the sculpting and texturing, I tried my best to make the sofa look beaten-up and well-used, without going over the top, and it turned out quite nicely. 

I also tweaked the geometry of the final model slightly, which made it look more flimsy and also disguise the re-use of textures.

I've yet to put the new asset in the engine, but that's for the next update.

Thanks for reading :)

Smoke and Materials

After fawning over the Bathhouse, I got back to work on my environment. A coursemate told me also that my environment lacks specular highlights, so I will focus on tweaking specular and gloss maps from now on.

I added the textures for the two blankets today as I felt the environment needed more colour overall. Sculpting them presented an interesting new exercise for me, as the cloth was draped over a surface and not hanging like the others in the scene. As a result, the surface of the bunched cloth looked as follows:

Perhaps a bit to aggressive for the material, which looks like wool when the sculpt looks like silk. That's a mistake on my part in retrospect.

For the diffuse, I decided a neat addition would be some melted candle wax that was stuck to the cloth, so I added it in photoshop and then used Ndo to generate the normal map. I also learned here that adding gaussian blur to a Gloss map is great for liquid gloss like this! Here's a render of the cloth(s) in Marmoset (if you couldn't already tell, I like Marmoset);

And here's the scene. Studying Jordan Walker's bathhouse gave me the idea for planes on the ceiling to represent smoke layers, rather than particle systems. The only problem is that they move too fast, so will have to slow their panning a bit.

I've also been making lens flares as a test for final rendering. These ones are just placeholders for now.

Here's a shot of the concept part of the scene:

I may actually be bold enough to try the scene in daylight for my next post, so stay tuned for that :)

Thanks for reading :)

Adding more meshes, and modular building fun

In this post I will be talking about a modular building workflow I have recently been using for the kitchen area.

Firstly, here's the current scene. I've added some interesting new meshes to serve as focal points, such as the laptop in the center of the room and the cardboard boxes, as well as new furnishings.

The kitchen's units were a happy accident: initially, I was going to model the drawers, smaller shelves etc individually, but when I learned that I could modify my existing cupboard model to make new furnishings I decided that that was a more time-effective and ultimately more useful approach. 

And thus this:

Could become all this:

The advantages to modular building in this fashion are as follows:

• More resource-effective to reuse the same texture for a different model
• A lot quicker to implement than making new textures from scratch
• Easy to keep consistency across assets

Whereas the disadvantages are:

• Repeating textures may look jarring to a player, especially if it has unique elements
• Transforming objects with UV coordinates from another asset(the drawers for example) can cause texel rate issues
• Using existing texture sheets may bottleneck a modeller, for example if an asset needed an extra chrome finish and the given texture was completely made of wood

However, overall I deemed it a useful way to complete all the kitchen's units quickly. The unit itself could have a better texture(need to improve with spec highlights, and the chrome handle is too matte), but I'm reasonably happy with how it turned out.

As for the environment, I've recently been playing around with the Cascade particle editor, as for my apartment to be a bona fide drug den, a lot of smoke needs to be involved. It's definitely WIP, but I'm having fun with it anyway. I need to dive into the Bathhouse to find out how Jordan Walker created his effects for reference and research.

Thanks for reading :)

Speaker done!

Today I completed my highpoly of the speaker, based on the popular KAM range of speaker system. 

Why not the speaker design in the concept, you may ask?

The simple answer is that a KAM speaker looks nicer, as it has the grille and feels more like a music lover's speaker than the older model in the concept. Even though I am working from the concept, I can still take artistic liberties with it :p

 There it is rendered in marmoset 2.0, which is a really nice-looking realtime render package:

I then baked the highpoly to my premade lowpoly and began to texture. It was quite fun, and to add more character I decided to add some hippie/free love style stickers to the casing, as if the hippies wanted to spice up the speaker as they did the wall.

Pictured above is the diffuse. On this model I decided to employ my trick of overlaying UV shells, which I have done with the sides/top of the model and the speakers themselves. This is done to push the texture and maximise usage of texture space, lending to higher res images: with the self-imposed size limit of 1024/1024,

I need as efficient a usage as possible.

And here's the finished speaker. I really had to fight to get the spec highlights right, but it was worth it. Probably one of my best assets to date.

I also sculpted the cloth banners on the ceiling and completed the texture, which it shares a 1024/1024 with the Peace banner(similar materials). 

The cloth sculpt was tough but fun, as I bunched up areas for more visual interest:

And here's a Marmoset render; it looks a bit waxy but in-engine I have used a detail map of cloth to add the fabric texture in a more efficient way.

But lastly, here's the current environment.

The environment so far is coming along well. I recently used DOF in order to blur out the skybox; given the smoky nature of the indoor area and the rain and moisture in the air outside, I found that it works well, and fits the atmosphere of the scene. I have also lightmapped the windowledges, as in previous posts they were not lit correctly(lack of lightmap UVs was to blame).

Well, that was long. Thanks for reading if you're still there :)

Update on progress

I've not updated in a couple of days, but I can at least show you what i've been working on. Firstly:

Here's a hi-res screenshot of my current progress. I've been using Lightmass to build, which gives me much better lighting, and I've also textured the plant pots.

The plant pots were originally ceramic, but I realised that hippies would never have the funds for all those pots, especially to provide for an operation as big as featured in the concept, so I went with plastic pots. I created a highpoly to catch the detail on the pots' bottom.

And here's the finished pots To make the rope I used a rope texture and used Ndo to generate normals for it, as well as highpoly modelling the grooves in the string.

I've also been working on the speaker, which I am currently in the process of finishing up the highpoly in time for baking to the new lowpoly. I prefer to start with a lowpoly and then unwrap/lightmap that for my baking workflow, as this saves time on having to retopologise the highpoly. For the grill on the front of the speaker, I have used a mask to provide the effect. on a plane, unwrapped to make as efficient a use of UV space as possible.

In terms of research, I recently discovered that Epic employee Jordan Walker has allowed his Bathhouse scene to be downloaded and observed by any willing parties, so I acquired a copy of his files  for study. I discovered that a lot of the DX11 features, such as Image-based reflections are used in his work, as well as fresnel effects: in particular his shader trees were quite informative, and I will continue to pick through his scene to learn as much as possible.

This weekend I hope to bring more updates:  as an aside I decided to leave the skybox for now and focus on interior assets. Thanks for reading :)

Modular building and skyboxes

Today I have been trying to get better architecture in my skybox. Here's an idea of my modular workflow(still learning):

I referenced from this building, which is a classic example of old Chicago architecture:

And here's a shot of the very WIP diffuse:

As you can see, not that good. The normals need fixing and the diffuse looks very blank and uninteresting: I will also need to sculpt some interesting fixtures when I detail the model.

Other things I've done today is work off feedback my colleagues gave me about my environment:

• The AO is too strong
• Too dark overall
• White assets break composition
• No discernable focal point...yet.

To remedy this, I tweaked the lighting and also tried using Lightmass when baking lights: the results were as follows:

The lighting feels much richer in the scene now, I think I will stick with this :)

Tomorrow I'm going to put more work into the building and try and get it into the level.

(P.s. this is the last post with screengrabs, as they are too low-res on the screen. after this I will use hi-res in engine shots for progress)