Back on track

Ok Iv been neglecting my blog for a little while as Iv been on with work. Last week I had a list of assets I wanted done by Sunday and I did manage to do them, Modelled, textured and exported.


So not bad going really,
Since there is a presentation looming next week Id like to get as much done as I can before then for good feedback, this week Ill be doing a similar sort of thing of modelling, texturing and exporting all the larger assets, There are not that many left now so with any luck they'll get done. I think after this week the rest of my project will be tarting around with the final assets - texturing them and positioning. Im confident that Ill get my stuff done for the deadline provided that I continue to work. Iv came along quite a way and got quite a few things done now but its just a matter of continuing to do so.

SO my next Asset list (as things go I may add a few things If i get through them steadily.
A rickety Fence
A rickety Gate
Logs for my Log house
Another variation of houses overlooking my little field
the Pub building which will be based from my research and modified a bit
Alpha plane LODS for all my trees
Little Chicken house things
Ropes
and a Few rocks.
I also hope to get my terrain completed by the end of this week also which Today I have made a few tileable textures ready for painting.

Getting sorted

Right today id like to make a start on some more of the tier1 assets for my level, this time on the market stalls - how many ill do Im thinking around 3-4 but we will see how it goes.

I need to fill out my asset list with my updated models and also do a count for textures so I know where im at.

80,000 was my tri limit and 120mb for textures ill do this first so I can ready myself and also sort out my folder structures.

Ok so updating my asset list im at 35388/80000 triangles
and as for textures 52mb/120mb. With the texture ill continue as I am then if I realize that some files are rediculously big I shall rescale later on.

Ok so on with the market stalls

Looking at my research and reference, not to mention the other elements in my level there is a lot of wood everywhere and I think it might be interesting to have a bit of material, so i was thinking for my market stalls I could have a sort of canvas around the back which could maybe flap in the wind. It would add a unique texture to the area as well as a different colour to make it a little more interesting.





Ill like a little table also but I think ill make a separate model for that so I can position where I need it.

Water Continued

So With this I looked over that first tutorial again and went through the stages and it actually worked this time! (I did have settings from yesterday on a seperate material but I customised with the tutorial to get my desired effect) Still it remains very opaque and Ill have to look over the settings so it fades out at the sides. Again tweeking is nessesary but its comming together now!


The issue though is that the sun doesn't look like a sun on this, but just a circle which needs addressed also.





Ok so now I need to tweek it in my level as the sizes are different between BSP planes and all. It looks a bit iffy at the moment but thats because I dont have a skydome yet. Once i get a good texture it will look a lot better, ill borrow one for the moment while I test it.



Right getting a bit tired of water for the moment So thought I could make a few lillypad decals which can go on the surface.


Unfortunatly it didnt work as planned and went through my BSP plane and onto the terrain underneath.. Damn.
Well I have 2 options now - to either try on a proper bsp brush which might not allow the reflection to work as well or simply make a little model and apply the texture with an alpha channel applied.

Water

Right Since i recently got the pier finished I wanted to try out some water. Iv found a few tutorials online how to set up the shader but they are quite difficult to come by.

The first I found was http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/UT3_Water_Reflection_Tutorial.html
who specialised in real time reflections on water which would really help me as Im wanting to do a day/night cycle also....


But it didnt quite work, wasnt sure why exactly but the tutorial wasnt very clear. I tried playing around with the values which was slightly better but had a really weird colour style on it


Few more tweeks and I still didnt get it


At this point I didnt see much hope in that tutorial for me so I looked around some more.

I found one from Hourences and it looked alright but this was using a sky texture which wouldn't have been that much good since my sky would be changing but I thought I could use the same techniques as the previous tutorial to compensate.



Yeah this didnt work brilliantly first time either, for some reason there was 1 element which didnt work at all in the tutorial probably because im using a slightly different version but because of that I wasnt able to enable it properly, although it was slightly better around the edges than the other version.

Something about one of the nodes being undefined (even though they were?) It was very confusing.


Finding no help online I thought to abandon how they did it in the tutorial and try it with my reflection map that I was introduced to last tutorial... which gave the same error message.
I tried to tweak the settings to try and get it to work but still it wasn't having it so unfortunatly I abandoned it and had a look elsewhere.

I had a look on the example maps in UDK how they did their water and was pretty complicated with loads of nodes all over the place. I tried to borrow elements from that and with my tutorials. I managed to get that reflection map thing from the first tutorial and merged/moulded with the nodes to try and create something.



It taken me to this stage and it looked alright actually still some issues and I would like to try and get the effect from Hourences with the smooth fade to the shore.
Simply playing around with the panning and texture co-ordinate nodes makes it easy to adjust.





I managed to get to this sort of thing but you only got that nice effect from very high up and the reflection is wrong which ill try to fix now. Shader editing is pretty awkward I find as I don't fully understand how the nodes work and a lot of these changes are little tweaks in panning and texture coordinates by small values. I find it difficult to get what I want but thats shader editing for you.


The reflection is really weird as demonstrated above, even though the reflection plane is positioned correctly everything seems on an angle and I dont fully understand why. Also the colour from the projection is all wrong, let the tweeking commence..


In the viewport it looks alright, Im not entirely sure where this plane should be positioned, right now its only just above the water as iv found that under it looks a bit strange.


Managed to get the colour back by modifying my additional reference parameter to 0 which controls how much of the reflection to show. For mine 0 is probably a bit too low so will increase a bit.

f4, static mesh, rendering, detailmode DM_High and untick hidden game.

Ok so That didnt really work before but after several hours of testing and reading up more on material editors that I could sort of cheat how to get the reflection. With that reflection plane from my first tutorial - though it didnt work when I tested it (and not very well in other ones) I could maybe apply it.
I made a new default scene with a terrain in (Wanted to use the clouds in the default scene as something to work to) and Made another material with a couple of normal maps and arranged so it would simulate the wave movements. Then I did that reflection plane and somehow it managed to work properly and I found that the water material was transparent but could see the reflection also! I positioned the reflection plane just below the surface and it worked pretty well!




There is however 1 issue which I need to address, you may notice in the above images there are quite a lot of black areas which arnt really that realistic and the reason was basically that the reflection plane has reflected the underneath of the water texture which made it look darker.



Also yes in this test it was quite severe and for a river it would NEVER be that clear but these are things I can adjust with multiplier and vector parameters.. Tis all good but just needs tweaked a little more.

Piers

Right, since the trees were starting to drive me BARKing mad I decided to start something different today and in that case the piers. I will be doing 2 variations of piers - one being looked after and another being quite shabby and disused.
Ill start with the looked after one first as its then easier to change later on for the more dilapidated.

Since i discovered that multi-subobject does actually work in UDK (previously thought otherwise) I thought I would do the same to save on texture budget. I thought that I could reuse one of my bark textures and apply to the tieup poles on the pier. Now at the moment I only have 1 variation of Oak and Ash each but I thought that using Ash would make more sense, being a bit thinner.

So I started drawing cylinders quite similarly to the trunk of my trees, Now I did want these to be a bit straighter especially for the more looked after of the piers. I can add loops for the more dilapidated one a little later on no problem. I seperated the model into its respective channels having the top part of the posts on a seperate channel so I can edit it properly. (I thought I could do the bottom section of the pier with decals to simulate the water line, I have a theory for how to do this but im not entirely sure about having the decal box a cylinder somehow anyway this is something i can try later on.



I also drew some boxes at 96x32x32 to suggest where the player stands and I thought having it wide enough for 3 people to stand simultaneously would be a suitable width. Ill use this as my template.




Hm looking at this so far, I did the planks the similar technique to the houses, this seems pretty weak. I know ill have supporting sections underneath and across the bars but it doesn't seem wide enough.





Oak..ay so Managed to get it to this stage. Once this section is textured I can duplicate elements to make the othersides of the pier. Its going well but I dont think the colours should be different like that. I can either make the planks the same brown as the trunk or make a new trunk to a similar grey ish shade. There are a lot of greys on my houses but having it on the pier maybe wouldnt matter as it wont really be close... Im not sure. I can desaturate my trunk in UDK rather than making a few material.


So yeah this is it base textured, I think it could do with some decals placed over the top of them but that is UDK work than Max I think. Yeah I think the trunks need to be darker than that - again can be done in UDK with no expense on texture amount. All ill have to do now is duplicate the elements a few times to get the mesh done.


I decided that my planks of wood were a little too small so I widened and deleted a few (triangles reaching 3600 from 4100) Iv also varied the height on some of the planks to give it a more battered appearance.


This is just placing inudk with a few assets placed on it, I think it looks alright actually. Once I get a few more assets onto it It should look pretty good, ill get a few decals made and placed ontop of it to add more to it.

Update

Ok so just an update of what iv done today, been working on an Ash tree this time and it went a lot quicker than my last tree attempt.
The only issue though is that my computer couldn't really handle everything that well particulary when I was having to change things to bake the maps. Also the placing of leaves takes a long time. Anyway It worked fairly well, not really my favorite tree but a tree is a tree. Ill do a few more later on but I think I need a bit of a break from them and work on more tier1 assets.





Its likely when I get my terrain textures on the leaves will change a little, a simple hue/saturation job.


All in all the level is coming along and its starting to look as it should.



Im sure once I get more of the level completed it should look pretty good.

trees

Trees,trees,trees,trees...Oak trees..

Right so I will be trying to model a tree with guidance from a tutorial,
I will be doing an Oak tree and have got a couple of texture shots of leaves but also an oak branch.
The idea with this tutorial is to make high poly models with textures applied and using some render to texture techniques to create the alpha texture.
So firs thing is first is to model the branches, the tutorial uses the graphite modelling tools to be able to make branches quite quickly (basically acts as a quick extrude tool) yet some things need tweaked afterwards.



So after the first section is now done its about connecting loops of edges and extruding out for more branches, but not too many should be done.


Ok so looking alright, next is to get the branch quite smooth looking by using a turbosmooth (this model is going to be used as a alpha so triangle count is out of the window for the moment) not actually done this properly before. On my first tree attempt i tried but I couldn't get the hang of it.

So the first branch was done and the idea now is to model the leaf for the specific sort of tree. Now I made textures previously from photos and what is to be done now is to apply the texture to a plane with a few segments and with the 'preserve uv's' tickbox so that the texture doesn't warp then basically moving vertices to the leaf to get its shape. Afterwards a symmetry modifier is applied to give the leaf a 'clay' look with a bit of substance then a turbosmooth modifier to get it nice and slick.

So that went alright, next is to use a FFD3x3x3 modifier and bend the model with the control points so it looks quite natural.




Ok so next is to duplicate the leaves and make a few variations with the FFD modifier. And make them smaller, the next stage was quite interesting again using a tool I never used before where you can 'paint' selected models onto another model which is dead handy for trees and so forth!

You can change the settings of how the models are painted with live results also so is a pretty good tool for this.

Apply a basic material to the branch for now and start on the other branch, and basically do the same thing all over again.




So its a trickey process as Im pretty new to tree modelling and the techniques for it I didn't fully understand so I ended up restarting this 2nd branch a few times, not to mention that my computer was struggling with the large amount of triangles, anyway managed to progress in the end by hiding what was on screen.



So yes this is it all done, my bark texture will be applied to the branch and this is now ready to have some render to texture action. Its quite a complicated process to go through but basically there will be a basematerial, an alpha, lighting, specular, colourvariation, alphaleaves, gradiant and a normal map. But first is to set up the scene.


SO here are all my maps, quite a few there!

And here is my texture map with all these maps merged and it works pretty well .


So now was a case of separating these sections, adding a few segments to them and modifying the vertices to make them look like natural leaves. Then making a few clumps of them.
Next was simply making the trunk which was done with splines and the path deform WSM modifier where you can draw a cylinder with segments and get it to follow the path pretty good - another modifier I didn't really know about.





So this is my final tree and I think it works pretty well! In the tutorial it covers how to get the leaves to move also but ill look into that a little later.





And i placed a few around my level and it instantly raised by motivation with the project, seen here is the same tree scaled slightly differently and rotated different directions. I will be making more trees now, my original plan was to do about 2 variations per type but I will see how it goes. To me it didn't cross my mind that my trees were the same as from the different angles they all look the same. Not sure but yes ill try another tree - this test taken quite a long time but I have learnt quite good techniques and I hope that ill be able to do more trees quicker and more effectively.