Latest level screenshots Warhammer "Warpub"

Plants and foliage for the Warhammer Warpub scene.

I first created my grass texture a mud texture and a merge texture grass to mud UDK is great at blending textures but wanted an edging texture which I could lay pebbles etc on later. I then creted a grass blade texture and object to be used as a foliage layer allowing me to paint on the grass where needed.

 I also added a sky dome using a panoramic photo from http://www.cgtextures.com/index.php edited in photoshop and mapped to a hemisphere. This uses emisive lighting to give a nice starting point to the lighting. I also added fog to get the mood of the scene taking a break from modelling and keeping things interesting.

I also had some problems with shadows on the grass but lighting it independently of the scene and turning shadows off sorted it ..

 

 When creating the trees I started with speedtree to see the kind of results I could achieve. It was very fast and convenient but slowed my machine it had nice animations but also couldn't control the blending of texture at base of trunk as trunk texture was tiled looked pretty good though.

 Using what I learned from Speed tree I constructed my own fantasy tree from some warhammer Fantasy reference first creating the trunk, mushrooms and surface detail and then unwrapped.

Then I created a separate cross plane object for the small branches and applied an alpha texture which was on a separate smaller 512 texture sheet.

Next I tested in unreal to see the scale and how the textures were working..

After getting the grass in I decided to add more dacal objects first a kind of Hero Decal object with the Toadstool. These were created in a small group as they seemed to grow like this and seemed to make sense the size and rotation could be varied for each object in UDK.

Then to add some colour and variationn I added flowers and changed the Alpha on one of the grass objects. this was a quick fix but added a lot of detail making the scene more natural. I think adding a slight transparancy to the end of the grass material may soften it further. Also I think bushes and brambles need to be added to give the ground a more wild feel and give more variation to the ground.

Environment objects for the Warhammer Warpub scene.

 After finishing the Warpub model I wanted to learn more about UDK and its tools so decided to create an environment for the building to go in...

The Concept

 After creating a reference/mood board I created a quick concept covering the layout and mood I wanted for the scene.

 This then gave me a clearer idea on what objects needed to be created and rough scale. It also was useful to plan what objects could be instanced to fill the scene.






Objects and scene elements

Generic Barrel

The first object I tackled was the favourite in FPS games the generic barrel again modelled in XSI in 3 sections and sculpted in Mudbox. After creating the textures I did a quick test against the emissive light to see how the normal map was working OK.

Later when finalising the textures I think the wood parts the door and barrels need a little de saturation...

Wooden cart

Next I tackled the cart using the same method as the warpub building remembering to add smoothing edges before subdividing!! to make sculpting easier in Mudbox.

I only exported half of the elements needed for mudbx as these can be duplicated and the repetition removed in the texture.

  

Testing the rendermap results the handles lost some detail when generating the maps but I will resolve this with Crazybump.

 Also the emissive material was a worry so had to be tested and textured now Im happy with the results created with an RGB Mask emissive specular texture. It looks a bit weird too with all the windows being lit so will amend the final texture when detailing.

 The scene so far now I have tested each element and material in the scene and pretty much got it to where I want it I will continue to construct all the final scene objects and could do with some trees!!

Unreal Asset creation Warhammer "Warpub building"

 After watching the excellent Tutorial http://eat3d.com/pillar by Eat 3D It inspired me to start modeling an Environment asset suitable for use in the unreal engine I chose to base it on a concept created by Games Workshop and to create a fantasy asset rather than your usual dark future setting used in Gears of War or Unreal. Also I was recommended to update my portfolio by Artists at Black Rock studios so here goes........(This will be a record and notes through the process)

1.Reference

Needing a building design I searched the web for a feature (Hero) building and found this concept by Games workshop from warhammer online.

http://www.warhammeronline.com/

2.Blocking out

First I blocked out the main shapes with low poly objects making sure I working to the correct scale I also used the scale of an Unreal character 96 units which is the relative in XSI. It is also a good idea to separate objects that can be instanced and repeated such as windows and each floor as these could be used to construct separate buildings or assets.

 Next I subdivided each element into a more dense mesh of even quads to quite a fine level ready for sculpting and adding extra edge loops to preserve hard edges. They were then frozen and exported as OBJ's.

*Note. I think I could have subdivided the mesh far more here and also divided the mesh into more parts for sculpting enabling more detail being added for areas like the steps which were redone at the end...

3.Mudbox sculpting

 I created a mudbox file for each relevant floor and imported the separate OBJ's then subdivided them and added detail first the main objects forms such as the boulder stones. I used an actual castle wall picture as a stencil first quickly pulling out the shapes then sculpted it. I did sculpt a little surface detail but will concentrate on this later by doing it in the the texture and normal map using crazybump.

* With the steps it would have been better to have separated them individually to have given them better definition and subdivided the more in the 3D package which I learned later in another Eat 3D tutorial worth checking out

The Fountain - High Res Modelling http://eat3d.com/fountain_highres

4. Optimising your High res meshes

I took the high res objs from Mudbox into meshlab http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/ 

and optimised them ready to import them into XSI so more manageable this is great for keeping you silhouette and reducing triangles. These need to be saved as OBJs ready to import into XSI.

5.Creating your low res meshes

 For you lower res mesh the one which will be exported to the game you could use meshlab but this can mess up your nice edge loops so I used XSI its great to use modify polygon mesh polygon reduction in conjunction with a weight map to selectively reduce areas of the mesh keeping the details you need. I then tidied up all the meshes up afterwords making sure to keep their shape.




6.Unwrapping the lo res mesh

I unwrapped all the lo res objects giving them as equal as possible UV space also keeping all the objects separate who needed there own sheet due to resolution or material.

7.Transferring the Hires model details to the low res model

 Using property ultimapper you can capture the information from the hires model and bake it into a texture which can then be applied to a low res mesh. Such as normal, AO, depth and Albedo (A colour map you must apply a coloured material to the high res objects when generated for this to work) this can then be previewed using the preview shader tree.





8. Texturing

 Using the maps generated from ultimapper I combined them with photos in photoshop using tthe stamp mesh as a guide creating a working psd for the diffuse material, Specular and Normal map and for the windows I created an image to create an emmisive material.
I like to block out the whole object all its materials before detailing.


9. Testing in UDK

 It was also a good idea to test the object and materials in the game engine so I merged all the objects to one mesh this will then apply each material from each of the separate objects to a cluster on the final single mesh. I then exported the final mesh using actor X and imported the mesh textures and created the relevant materials needed in UDK.

 In the engine I could see how it would look and spot errors with the materials resolution and mesh.






10. Adding more details to textures and fixing

 Finally I fixed areas of the model needing work and added grime and grunge maps to make the building more worn and also adding the details to the sign, lamp, Windows and barrels.










11.The Final object(WIP) 

Learning UDK... with Eat 3d Old pillar tutorial

 After feedback on my showreel from a games company Black Rock it was time to update it and show off my 3D Models in a game engine. So I went on eat 3d website http://eat3d.com/pillar and started this tutorial which has been great I have learned a lot and after this I will create a larger scene or arena.







 The model was created in XSI although the tutorial is for 3dsmax it can be done with some slight modification :) and lateral thinking ..