Touchup and new houses

Right, yesterday I managed to get on pretty well but I think ill change the colours quickly on the workshop. I don't really like the overly brown tint as it looks pretty fake so ill lay it off a bit and see how it goes.

Quick 2 minute job


This works better as it blends with the other houses also, I think I will model or make some alphas of foliage which can intersect or overlap the roofing area. My very tightly packed texture sheet for this workshop (and other buildings) wont allow me to do this but in UDK it should work a treat.

Right next I think ill try and texture my longer house (yellow with beams) and also my first house I attempted. I need to speed up in the modelling of these buildings now so I can place properly.


Right a few texturings later, still to be finished but i think to have some form of climbing plants on the sides of the house would help it. Its looking a little too plain and needs some colour to break it up. If I should paint on these plants or leave it for my models. Not really sure, the PSD of the texture sheet will be kept handy if it comes to that.
I will continue on this house until all the areas are covered.

Right after this I was starting to get a little bored and I was interested in looking about how to do convincing grass, I managed to find quite a good tutorial which helped - it focused on rendering to texture techniques which I didn't really understand.
While I realize these are small assets which i'm directed against it will be quite a bit part of the level and while I wanted to get a sense for how foliage can assist my buildings.

Anyway yes it started with making a few high poly meshes involving the bend, FFD3x3x3 (which I never even heard of before!) and turbo smooth modifiers.
The idea is to model the individual blades of grass, taper them and with this ffd modifier being able to bend the blades to get a natural effect. Make a few variations of the blades then with a 2x2 segmented plane in the background arrange it so the bottom 2 segments will be 1 model while the halved segments above will be 2 different models.



I haven't really experimented that much with high to low baking or other render to texture techniques. In my vehicle project I learnt about lighting maps which was just a touch on this.
Anyway yes, the idea was to then duplicate the blades and move around as desired. Have them quite close together but not too close and to add to the natural effect to have smaller blades on each side of the 'model'.

Then after that is quite a long technical way of doing things with rendering to texture making alpha maps, colour maps, highlights 1, highlights 2, and base colour.

These are all the maps I created from the render to texture 3dsmax route.


Fairly easy to do actually and the plan was to merge these all onto 1 PSD to get that nice looking grass texture you see in games.
It s actually very technical to do but produces really nice effects, I couldnt believe the result!



Was pretty chuffed with this.

So then was about assigning the textures to models and then arranging around using bend modifiers so the model is seen from all the way around. Then arranging in clumps, I thought doing it as 1 big clump, a medium clump and a small clump which can be put in certain areas would be useful particular around my other assets.



SO put into groups and then exported to UDK, and here is what they look like in Udk.


The idea is to have a grassy texture underneath the grassy model so at the moment it looks a little weird but im confident that when I come to terrain texturing it will work well.



So yes that's grass, Im really pleased with the results and I feel a lot more excited now to see it actually working. Why I didn't do this in the first place I don't rightly know but there you go!

Right Iv sort of sidetracked a little here but I still plan to get all my buildings done and placed by the end of this week. Once they are done and placed then everything will slot together.

Ok so more progress.


Its slowly getting there though my reference for this house isn't as good as my others so iv been having to nick some textures form other houses its going well though but I still reckon it looks quite boring and not much going on. Ill try to crack the clay towards the bottom of the model for interest and maybe add a few bits of moss but that's about it. I think in udk once I get the fences modeled ill vary it a little and maybe have a little bit of a wild garden around areas. Also maybe I could model some little plinth things which could be nailed onto the wood, whatever I do I don't think ill be able to fit anymore on my texture sheet for this building so ill have to place things onto it. Which is good as it gives me freedom to move around.





Ok so that's house 3 done, though I think this looks more of a store room. Think it works reasonably well but again ill have to see what other foliage ill use and see if I can place around to make it a little more interesting. So next ill work on texturing up my first house then after that Ill have to model and texture 4 others.