Update, added textures etc.

Just a brief update on the weekend's work.

I've added textures for the skirting boards, the curtains and also remodelled the TV stand.

I found a new reference image with a Chinese spin, and used that to improve the design of the table. 

The reference image used....

And a current render of my work.

The texture will need re-visiting, and the bakes didn't work out for the sides, but it will do for now.

In a bit of a slump at the moment as I figure out what I'm gonna do for certain assets, what to add etc. My contact has advised me to try the scene with different time of day lighting, to get a better feel for the assets, which I will do when I next post. That's all for now :)

Smallish update about windows and stuff

No posts for a few days, so here's an update:

With this update, I've textured the Peace banner, made a start on the window texture and made a few other small tweaks here and there.

For the banner, I decided that I didn't want to just make it a cloth actor, as it was a pivotal part of the scene; therefore, I decided to sculpt the cloth instead. It was a good study for me to get used to sculpting cloth, and I find I'm enjoying it:)

 Also, I didn't really like the initial model, so I folded it over the rope to make it a bit more logical how it was dangling there, and to add a bit more character to the material I put scorch marks on the edges of the cloth, where it had been accidentally seared by candles. Here's the banner in-engine:

As part of my expansion plan, I have also modelled a Chinese table and some beanbags to fill in the center of the room a bit more, and later on will have some high-quality props on them. I also redid the ceiling's beam distribution to make it resemble an attic's roof better.

Stick around for more, and comment with any critique if you want to give it.

Thanks :)

Wallpaper micro-update

I found I enjoyed texture painting, so I used it to add some much-needed sparkle to the wallpaper texture.

For my workflow, I first measured out the exact size of the section of wall in UU, and then made this in blocks in 3DS Max(my grid was set to UU units). I then put the existing wallpaper texture on a plane and duplicated this to match the wallpaper blockout:

After I lightmapped it, I put the mesh in UDK and fit it to my wall, ready for vertex painting. Since the brick had gone so well, I wanted some variation on the wall too, to show the disrepair of the environment and the shoddy decorating job the occupants had done, so I came up with the peeling wallpaper idea.

For this, I combined vertex painting with a custom shader tree I found on the Internet, which I have detailed below(the Wizardry section is the new technique):

What I found when ordinarily using vertex painting is that the falloff is always very soft, and since it stems from vertices it  can't hope to simulate the randomness of plaster/paper tearing unless the mesh was tesselated hugely. What this shader does is allow the vertex nodes to control an Alpha cloud texture, which is clamped to the values 0 and 1(on or off respectively) this same Alpha is also rotated and added in order to preserve tiling. This cloud then controls the distribution of the plaster texture in a more organic fashion, and since the value is clamped results in hard edges, perfect for wallpaper.

I've included the shader above to share the knowledge, as it is perfect for peeling wallpaper. I'm going to do more work on it, I enjoy playing with shaders. 

Next up is to do the same for the other wallpaper, and tweak the mesh to make it look more peeled. Stay tuned, thanks for reading :)

Bricks are the best thing ever made.

As you could probably tell by the nature of this post, the brick texture has been changed considerably. Following the advice of my contact, I redid the entire brick texture from scratch, even using my own photographs for texturing. The result, when compared to the previous texture, is striking:

Following the advice given to me, I played around with the spacing, color, mortar and made cracked and chipped bricks in my sculpt. I also baked the texture using depth grab as a heightmap onto a plane and got the AO and cavity from there in Xnomal. I then overlayed the matcap white from Zbrush to bring out the detail and used a photo of a brick wall to texture (much better than polypainting for this particular texture). Here's an example of a Matcap:

And lastly, I made three variants: Normal brick, chipped and broken brick, and brick that had been handpainted by the hippies, perhaps to try and colour the wall to their tastes. the result, when texture blending was used, is this:

The brick in this screenshot is the result of that, much better by far and has enough variance to look really visually interesting.

Another great idea given to me was the use of edge decals, as displayed above: essentially, a curved mesh is overlayed with a texture to get the look of chipped material. The one I created was really brief but does the job, looking great at a distance and removing the sharp edge.

That's all for now. Have a nice render:

(side note: my contact informed me that the game I am emulating has a texture size limit of 1024/1024. I will try and scale down my textures to conform to this in the future of this project)

Feedback, brick walls redux and more.

I recently had the opportunity to show my work to a member of IO interactive, who worked on the Hitman Absolution game the concept is created for. He looked at my progress and gave me some sound advice, which is really helpful:

• Use props creatively to add character to an environment
• Vertex painting is a must in UDK: make a room's walls and floors as visually interesting as possible
• Try different times of day to evaluate scene props
• Edge decals can add so much more to walls
• Soften the edges of the wood assets
• Inefficient to pack carpets into one 2k texture: be just as useful to split them up
• Use decals a lot more instead of separate textures

The biggest point made was about the brick texture: essentially, the texture was matcapped, and as such was subjected to the scene lighting prevalent inside ZBrush. To help me capture a better texture he shared his workflow, which proved to be extremely useful:

• DepthGrab the Zbrush 2.5d canvas and use that to displace another plane
• Use Decimation Master to reduce poly count on the hipoly mesh
• use Xnormal to bake normal, AO, cavity and curvature maps

Unfortunately, my cavity map was lacking: where specific bricks were there were black shapes on the map, where I assume the projection clipped through them, Also, for some reason xNormal crashed when rendering curvature maps, so I couldn't get that either. But...

Old brick flats left, new brick flats right.

But what I did get was a marked improvement in the texture: I resculpted the bricks to make them more cracked and less of a space between them, as per feedback, and applied and blended the maps I did get out of xNormal. Unfortunately, I have to polypaint the texture manually, but the direct lighting is gone! Hooray!

Here's the current scene. For the purposes of polypainting I have chosen to replace the entirety of the wall with a static mesh, with decent enough tesselation. I will be using edge decals and adding colour to the wall's diffuse when I go texture hunting this weekend.

Thanks for reading. I'm gonna need to step up the pace now to keep up with my peers, but i hope to improve.

Little update and paintover

The past couple of days I have done only a small amount, texturing a little of the skybox and the Moroccan lantern, which was sticking out like a sore thumb. Here's a screenshot:

For the lanterns, I had to use separate materials and an alpha channel in order to get the look at relatively low poly, and I may revisit it in the future to tidy it up a bit too. 

One thing I have added is a road texture to the skybox outside. To create the road, I turned on the grid in 3DS Max and made individual pieces which fit together, textured differently to reflect different patterns of road and lanes/crossings etc. 

As I wanted the exterior to be raining too, I also added a specular and used Ndo to generate a bump map to reflect a wet surface. The results in the scene:

I also added lights to represent streetlights, helping the exterior look more like a city.

On another note, upon seeing the blank look of the main apartment area in the last screenshots, I added a paintover to show, roughly, my ideas for filling this space in a more interesting way.

In the next couple of days I will find reference and model the assets in the scene and try and flesh out this area, adding textures and models where necessary. Thanks :)

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 :)