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.