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3D & Animation environmental art

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daschewy

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Jan 9, 2006
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#1
I started messing around with blender today, and created a small rural Russian house. Its basically a square box, with a side storage area (held up by some logs).

I'm not sure where to proceed from here, the logs look kinda meh, but Im not sure how much detail is worth putting into them. Right now the whole scene is 200 faces, I converted it to triangles, so Im assuming that is the total number of triangles.

I kinda want to add wooden shingles to the roof to give it a bit more detail. Ill probably make the walls brick or wood once I get to putting a texture on it. I guess if its a wooden house Ill try to make wooden boards, I doubt that would necessarily up the triangle count.

What is the max number of tris that would be acceptable for this type of environmental art? Im aiming for now more than 2000-2500 tri's.



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This was my inspiration:

http://www.manufaktur.dk/panzer080207.jpg

http://www.mediastorehouse.com/image/a_russian_village_world_war_ii_1942_1239570.jpg

http://www.firstlegionltd.com/images/Ter02_maincat.jpg <- might do one or two similar to that for variation.
 
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#2
It's a good start but far from completion.

Notice how houses never have sharp edges try to smooth out the edges, theres usualy a tool called chamfer that you can use to smooth out edges, i'd suggest you make the roof abit "removed" from the walls, so it doesent just have a clean edge and then theres roof

like you can see at [url]http://www.manufaktur.dk/panzer080207.jpg[/URL] the roof is something that was probably attached on as the solid walls were placed.

Also on thouse pictures the windows are quite small you should try to make your windows smaller and not so sharp edged imagine them like circles that are stretched out to be a window but the thing is not perfectly fit so there should be no straight lines.

I wish you good luck and try to use as much reference pictures as you can, also try to scale it properly for the game. (i guess it's kinda hard for that now but you could import it into UDK and see how the scale is)
 
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#3
Sounds good, thanks for the feedback.

How would you recommend doing wooden shingles? Im thinking of subdividing the surface and extruding individual faces. That might be able to serve as an LOD model, and maybe I can model a few variety of shingles and place them individually.

From what I have gathered about the destruction system that is used in RO, the destroyed meshes will need to be modelled as well. I figure there is some hit detection/trigger system that identifies a region of the building that got hit and then replaces it with the corresponding mesh. I figure modelling individual pieces might make that a bit easier but Im not sure.
 
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#5
http://www.firstlegionltd.com/images/Ter02_maincat.jpg

Im thinking of using that as my standard model and making variations of it. It doesnt seem like it would be that hard to make the 2 LOD models.

I am thinking of making the individual parts of the cabin, and then combining them in blender. This way if I need to reuse parts I wont have to model them separately.

However Im not sure if this is the most efficient use of tri's. I figure a board with some roughed detail wouldnt consume too many tri's (maybe 10-15 max).
 
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#12
For simple environmental art is it worth investing time into making bump/normal maps?

What Im confused with atm is how much detail should go into a simple house mesh. I mean how much detail can you put into a board of wood. Looking at pictures online it seems that log houses still had fairly clean edges and corners, even if made by hand.

Ill try to post a wireframe render when I get home to show where the vertices are. Im starting to think 2500 tris might be too much, especially if I need to use 30-40 houses in a map. I will probably lower the side count on the logs, right now they are at 26 sides, I figure I can get a decent looking mesh using 16-18 sides. That should bring the count down a fair amount (hopefully).
 
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#13
Here are the wireframe shots of one of the sides:





Based on the wireframe shots, will I have any issues unwrapping the model? Im just worried that if I overdue the edges the UV map is gonna look like ****.

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From that image Im wondering if it would be better to make either a simple 6 sided rectangle and add in the details with a bump map. If I did make the bump map, Im not quite sure how to model in wood cracks (to generate a high poly model).
 
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#17
I dont see why you are modeling the sides as seperate elements. With flatter surfaces you want to give depth using normal maps and have your geometry detail on the edges and where a player will actually see it.

Maybe just wait until the sdk arrives as it will be more clear how TW make thier models. It's possible to export meshes as OBJ files and still preserve UV maps(!) so that will be a great learning tool.
 
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#20
smokeythebear said:
I dont see why you are modeling the sides as seperate elements. With flatter surfaces you want to give depth using normal maps and have your geometry detail on the edges and where a player will actually see it.

Maybe just wait until the sdk arrives as it will be more clear how TW make thier models. It's possible to export meshes as OBJ files and still preserve UV maps(!) so that will be a great learning tool.
Click to expand...

Thats what Ill probably end up doing, right now this is just a quick run through to get use to modelling. Once the SDK is released and I can import a scale model, Ill start the bulk of the effort.

Looking at the maps it looks like they used bump maps to give depth to stuff like brick walls (a flat edge), and then detailed the edges (breaks hanging out, destruction, etc). The wooden planks they have are just rectangles with some detail on the ends. From the spartkavaka map videos Ive seen it looks like they modelled individual logs for the houses, but things that appear as planks seem to be one object with a bump map applied.

My only curiousity is how do you add detail to a flat edge? I know you could add more vertices but Im not sure how you would get the same detail as modelling the indivdiual pieces.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Textures/Maps/Bump_and_Normal_Maps <- I figure Ill be consulting that in the near future. Also I gather from the article, that I would need to model the individual pieces of wood on the walls and then use that to generate the bump map? Im assuming getting the lighting to be correct is important to generate a good map?
 
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