Something for fun...

The process of UV mapping (the way i do it)

Basicly from the images below, i have tried to keep the same kind of materials together and objects, so these are the buildings, steps brick work. The glass is on their as well not sure if different materials make a difference but yeah.
I started by scaling the smaller building, then using some maths and a ruler on the screen i worked out the proportions for the other objects, once again i dont know if scaling effects the quality of the textures (stretching) but this will be looked at more next week.
I used planar mapping mainly by grabbing faces that were facing the same direction on the building and projecting them i did a test to see if overlapping effected the objects in maya and so far it seems that it doesnt effect it, so all is good so far. Automatic mapping was used for the house detail and that seems to work quite well too.
All the stone objects now need to be textured and they are sorted. (I hope)
I do know that texture artists do use the whole UV area but i dont know how they get everything to sit perfectly yet, more research is needed.

UV update

After talking to Alex about UV mapping and boosting my confidence, i have decided that it isnt as complex as i thought.

So today i have been trying it out and doing some tests below are two images one of the uv texture editor and one of a render screen of what they have done. Lost render shot and have now changed UVs, so no render shot but an update instead on the UV map (the bigger one).

I am excited about this now as i thought this would be the one thing stoping me in the project. But, in time i will hopefully get this looking good.

Thinking

Ok as usual, thinking before i went to bed, part of that was on this project and how i am going to complete it with 5 weeks left i have a broad scope so where i want to be at the end of each week, then every friday i would put on here what i want to do for every day in the next week, its Friday.

Week 5; Understand UV, UV, Texture, Model and Concepts
Week 6; Model, Lighting, Camera, Render, All Concept done
Week 7; Model, UV, Find textures
Week 8; Place Textures, Make sure everything is done, Render
Week 9; Render and Composite

Week 5;
Monday, understand the uv whats best for different shapes, start uving from the high poly count model, find textures that can be useful, start playing around in photoshop.
Tuesday, Photoshop create textures and place in position in the afternoon figure out specular and normal mapping.
Wednesday, if high poly model is done the textures will be pretty much the same for low and med LoDs so im hopeing it will be a case of moving the UVs, if not texture them as well.
Thursday, refine all texturing making sure everything looks right and is at the best of my ability.
Friday, Hopefully all texturing will be done for the exterior. And might be able to start the interior.
Evenings, concepts for interior tasks that havent been completed.

Busy week :)

Color

Yesterday had a great lecture about color and made me remember how important color is in film, we dont just slap a green top on someone we have it to make the viewer understand why he has a green top on. This is something i will experiment with the interior and see if it adds different effects.

This week i am concintrating on a showreel its not long but there is a deadline for friday to hand it in, i dont have much to show so i am rendering some stuff at the moment.

Whilst this is happening i have started work on the office/bedroom/lounge part of the chop-shop with tools, food etc in the room so it looks occupied. Here is the first image so far and an idea of what the lighting will look like. The way i have modelled it is by using backface culling on the exterior so i am using the correct dimensions, its a little bit tricky but its the way i want to work. i have decided to give this room a maximum of 5000 polygons leaving 15000 for the actual garage, this may change in the future as i have ideas for the other side, so at the moment i am doing some basic modelling.

Concept_003

Prefer this one to the second one the style is more like the halo concept but a bit more rigid i would say.

Concept_002

Another concept piece, feel this is weaker than the first one but still is progress.

Concept Work

So yeah as promised this is my first attempt of Concept work using photoshop im pretty happy with it, especially as it was done with a mouse, painfull. But yeah i was influenced my some of the concept work form Halo 3: ODST. (Still got a lot to learn)

Progress and Escape

Ok so i changed part of the exterior, i have now added a sign to the scene.

Which means i have now completed the low, med and high polygon counts, the poly counts are 500, 2500 and 5000 the exact amount the brief says so im happy with that.

On Friday Escape came in and spoke about a lot of stuff, i was really intrested in the course and feel there is a lot to learn from it. They also gave advice on CVs aand Showreels which will be very helpfull in the future and told me what was wrong with my work or trates in the industry that you shouldnt do.

Still waiting to hear from Alex Hulse about texturing, but in the mean time i have started the interior and some concept work that will be posted after this.

Clean Up

Today i have cleaned up my scene using various techniques i knew and some i have learnt (optimized scene size) deletes everything in a special way i think.
I have also tweaked the design by having a sign at the front of the building, so renders i have tested will be rerendered luckily it didnt take long.
I have also emailed Alex Hulse no reply yet but i am hopeful he will, i emailed him as i found relevant information about UV mapping but dont know how to use it in my project it seems to go wrong, or it goes right but i need to move some stuff?!
In the mean time i can now get on with the interior of the Chop-Shop this will require me to do some more concept, i have a few layouts in mind it just putting them on paper and seeing what works best!

Medium Level of Detail and Tests

Well that has been completed today its on exactly 2500 polygons so i am pleased, its looking good as well.
I tested out the render farm and it did all my work smoothly with out any problems and very fast too.
For now i got occlusion tests of low and medium and tests of depth of field with the two in premier pro i tried fading the two and it loos ok for now some tweaks will be needed that i can see of, like a plane that is floating!
I also have started to try and UV map by using a few tutorials on the internet, but at the moment i have had no luck in getting it correct so im going to give it a few more trys befora asking Alex or one of the tutors. I spent a long time on this and testing as i want to do this project correct and to a industry way so hopefully i will find out more soon!

Discussion with Jared... And the others

Tuesday saw as get into groups of which brief we were doing and we each spoke what we were going to do for this project. I told Jared about my idea and that it will be a FarCry/Resi 5 style to it he seemed please. But we then spoke about other ideas and i thought a Flinstone Chop Shop could be quite funny or one in space instead of the normal type of chop-shop.
However, with alot of work already done i will stick to my original idea which i am still pleased with and the areas i will be concintrating on are 2D concept, modelling, texturing and rendering.
Hearing other peoples work they have some good ideas some i would like to use as well or at least adapt, but depending on time i will see. But for now its work like usual and im not changing the brief as i feel it still reflects the game industry at the moment looking at other tutorials on the internet.

Low Level of Detail Screenshots

As the video was taking forever to upload i will show some basic screenshots of techniques i used in order to get it to 492 polygons (planes are a best modellers friend).

As you can see below planes have been used for a lot of modelling as they only use two sides. So two planes will have 4 polygons whilst a cube has 12, this was the main technique i used to lower it whilst creating some 3D in the scene by having the planes in a + form.

Low Level of Detail

The past two days i have tried to lower my polygon count i have decided to stick to the brief and the poly counts it has got their. The basic scene i wanted came to 1500 polygons, so i gave myself the task of lowering it as much as i could, i have been able to get it to 492 polys. Below is an occlusion test to see the Chop-Shop (occlusion test to come later).

I am pleased with the design, but the textures will need to be good in order to give more depth and detail.

Lighting

As part of the project is an external scene of the building i need to decide what type of lighting to choose so far i am using directional lights. From the same book below the description of a directional light is;
The directional light icon depicts several parallel rays. This is because it's purpose is to simulate a distant light source, such as the sun, whose light rays are coherant and parallel.

DoF Research

This is taken out of a book called Learning Autodesk Maya 2008 The Special Effects book;

Depth of field is a photographic effect in which objects within a certain range of distance remain sharply focused. Objects outside this range appear out of focus. You can simulate this using the camera's Depth of Field attribute. This is not a post-process effect in mental ray, but true depth of field.

Ther are 3 settings under depth of field, i played around with the distance attribute apparently i was partly wrong and i should be looking at the F Stop attribute i did so and below are 4 images with the distance 80,60,40 and 20.(in decending order?) I think more blur may be needed in the far away shots as the detail will be lower.

Lighting and Depth of Field

So in the past few days i have looked a little into lighting as i really didnt understand it in the last project i kinda just copied my teams lights, whilst taking in little bits. My scene is gona be set at dusk or dawn still to decide.
Its kinda early to worry about lighting and DoF (depth of field) but if i leave it till week 7 or so i will probably do a botch job so every few days i am going to concintrate and read up about things i dont know much about that will be useful modelling in the industry.
As shown below in older posts if possible i would like my work to reflect the games industry now and try to pick up the techniques they use to achieve the quality in AAA games.

Low Level of Detail

Today i have just been playing around seeing what i can do with 500 polygons, below are two shots of a 512 polygon scene, i also played around in photoshop and created that texture using a number of filters and image from the internet, i added a bump map to it just copied the file easy way. (not the right way, i think?)

Looking at it, it feels 500 is very small not allowing for objects etc within the scene, but have a few ideas on that as well.

Process of Working

I am not sure if this is a good way of doing it but im going to do the exterior first in terms of modelling render occlusion, shadow passes. Whilst its rendering i will be working on the interior side of things, i have started the concept work for it but dont want to be going from one part to the other. Or model exterior then interior then texture then render, but from the last project rendering can be a nightmare.

Concept Work

These are some quick ideas i have created they go in ascending order with the first idea at the bottom. The latest image is the one i will probably go with and adapt a little i dont want to bog my self down in ideas as im not getting assesed on that, but it could do with some tweaking and drawings from different angles as this will help me in the modeling side of things.

Research

These are just some of the images i have looked at for research on exteriors, interiors and objects i may need to model for this project. They will also help me develop my concept work for the project. (Various Resources ign.com and google images mainly)

LoD (Level of Detal) Love ol'Dat)

So yeah more research more writing should have broken the writing down woth some lovly pictures of barrels and fences, oh well.

The writing below has come from a book called 'Game Progamming Gems' by Mark A Deloura.

The simplest way to select which level of detail to render is to apply a threshold to the distance of the object;

0-500 - high LoD

500-1500 - meduim

1500+ - low

This does give popping to the object though between the distances (this is undesirable and distracting). Something i have seen recently is a type of motion blur on far away objects, im not sure if this stops popping altogether or makes it easier on the eye something to look into (see images below from ign.com).

Magnification Factor;

Is the screen size of the object realtive to its physical size. As the object grows larger on screen, we choose higher levels of detail.

Hysteresis Thresholding;

Uses an upper and lower point and decides which to level to apply based on previous output value. Allowing for a stable flow and deciding what LoD to show.

Game Engines cont.

There are other game engines out their including Rage which Rockstar currently use, ther are around 100 game engines around the world, some are free to use others have more details and specifications which cost more.

Unreal Engine 3

If i was to base my project on the unreal engine here are some specifications taken from unrealtechnology.com/technology.php;
Normal Maps & Texture maps
We are authoring most character and world normal maps and texture maps at 2048x2048 resolution. We feel this is a good target for games running on mid-range PC's in the 2006 timeframe. Next-generation consoles may require reducing texture resolution by 2X, and low-end PC's up to 4X, depending on texture count and scene complexity.
Environments
Typical environments contain 1000-5000 total renderable objects, including static meshes and skeletal meshes. For reasonable performance on current 3D cards, we aim to keep the number of visible objects in any given scene to 300-1000 visible objects. Our larger scenes typically peak at 500,000 to 1,500,000 rendered triangles.
Lights
There are no hardcoded limits on light counts, but for performance we try to limit the number of large-radius lights affecting large scenes to 2-5, as each light/object interaction pair is costly due to the engine's high-precision per-pixel lighting and shadowing pipeline. Low-radius lights used for highlights and detail lighting on specific objects are significantly less costly than lights affecting the full scene.

With these specifications it will allow me some more freedom with the polycounts i dont want to go overboard and set a higly detailed workload for my self which i cant acheive, but over the next few days i should set myself a target.

Research

Now knowing what a Chop-Shop is i can start to look at refrences inorder to get some ideas having already looked at Far Cry 2 and Resi 5 for the theme, i also need to look into exteriors and interiors and how other games and films have set out this.
So here is a list of possible things to look at;
Wall-E
GTA
Eastenders (Phils Garage)
Biker Mice From Mars
Need For Speed
Cars
Godfather
No More Heros
This list could go on and probably will but for now that will do.
Tomorrow (Thursday) i am hopeing to visit my friends garage as he is a mechanic i will also drive around and look at other firms in the area this will give me an idea of the dimensions of these kind of buildings.
Then theirs objects that will be inside and outside the building depending on poly count for example oil barrels and spray cans.
As in the post below i will also have to look into and understand Game Engines and LOD's.

Theme

So the theme of my work as it is a brief by rockstar i was going to go along with a GTA style and guessing the building would be in an openworld type of game.

But i think i may go a long the lines of a Resident Evil 5/Far Cry 2 style, it will still be for an openworld game though. Both games are based around Africa/desert areas of the world.

The exterior and interior will be seperate for polygon counts to keep them to a specific LOD, with envancments in technology since this brief was set, i may change some of the polygon counts i will be looking into game engines to see what is capable for PC's and Consoles.

Below are some images from ign.com on Far Cry 2 and Resi 5.

Brainstorm

This was taken from a small film studio currently working on a short it kind of related so i adapted it to the project i am on, by taking sections out.

Note

Over the Christmas period i started another project with a similar brief in terms of poly count so taking that into account the interior should be very detailed with a 20000 poly count i will be able to do the basic layout and add props, early examples would be tools, barrels etc
For the outside 5000 sounds very constrictive but will see how it goes and the textures will hopefully bring in detail.
From what i can tell at the moment it seems like the interior is the more important part (thats what i get from the poly count anyways)

Areas of Study

a) 2D conceptualization
b) character animation
c) visualisation (and modelling)
d) visualisation (texturing and rendering)

We are aloud to focus on two areas i will be concintrating on visualisation (and modelling) and visualisation (texturing and rendering), but will look into 2D conceptualization to get some rough ideas put down.

Brief A; Game Design

“I want your students to design, build, and texture a “chop-shop” for us. In case any of the students are wondering, a chop-shop is a garage where stolen cars are taken to be either re-sprayed and given new number plates, or broken up for spare parts. If they want to come up with a name for the chop-shop and appropriate signage then that would also help us out.”

“They should use a 3D modelling package that is preferably Max or Maya. The submitted work should consist of both an exterior and an interior.”
“When they model the interior then they should use a 20,000 polygon limit as the game engine won’t be displaying anything other than the interior and characters at a fixed LOD (Level Of Detail).”
“When they model the exterior then they will have to build three different LODs, high (5000 polys), medium (2,500 polys), and low (500 polys), for viewing at three different distances within the game engine.”
“The texturing of their models is as important as the geometry; their models should be textured using TGA format image files of 256 x 256, 512 x 512, or 1024 x 1024 resolutions.”