My UV Layout Post

So, James has been ruling the roost (pun completely intended) here with all of his awesome bird posts and I've been largely silent lately. Mostly I've not been able to work on the project as much as I'd like and also I've been doing the utterly unglamorous job of laying out UV's on the three buildings.

But it is time for me to post again. Here are some pictures of UV's.

The base building UV's.

The top railing. This could easily be a part of the main building but as birds are known for hanging out at the top of buildings, this seemed like a place for its own texture.

The pipes & lantern. The lantern is very low-rez at the moment and if it has any prominence in our shots will surely be art directed with more care than its gotten so far. This works for now though.

The first pic shows building two with a UV layout texture applied to it. The texture is hella ugly by most standards, but it's designed to make laying out UV's easier. The grid pattern & color cycle work as a visual guide, showing you how your UV's look on the model, where there's stretching, relative scale, etc.

I've broken this building up into 6 texture groups. One texture for the main building, one for the three lower doors & steps, one for the top railing, one for the windows, one for the pipes & lantern and one for the signs. This texture assignment is somewhat arbitrary as our shots aren't blocked out yet. I wouldn't be surprised if, on a shot-by-shot basis, the texture sizes & assignments change pretty dramatically. For background shots, for example, this whole building could be taken care of with one camera projection. On a close-up, any one door or window might actually need multiple textures.

I only screengrabbed pics of three textures but they're all there, on all three buildings. Laying all of these out like this was pretty tedious but it gives us the flexibility we'll need later on.

Cheers.

Two Weeks, One Building

Now that is one hell of an achievement!!!

Or something.

It's the same old story, work is kicking my ass. On top of that I picked up a small page-layout gig that's been taking a bite out of what little free-time I've got. Having said all that, here's one little update. This is the end of the modeling for now and it's time for some UV layout and some basic texturing. My UV layout skills are not great so here's a chance for them to get better.

Cheers.

Some messed-up normals in that new building, fixed in the subsequent pics.

Not Dead Yet

Over a week since the last post, that's not great.

But I've been working on the scene in my free time and I'll have a new building or two to show pretty soon. I spent so much time earlier on modeling the clocktower (which I fear I will have to substantially rebuild) that I never got to model any buildings. So now, whether or not it's truly necessary, I'm giving myself the chance to kick out a couple of apartments. I'm quite enjoying it, though I'm having trouble integrating some of the steampunkish elements into the buildings. All of this means little without pictures, so I'll try really hard to have a picture post up this weekend.

Cheers.

City Building 3

This is a rough shot with the two new buildings in place.. No lighting to speak of, and as you can see some of the placement is far from perfect. At this stage we are just replacing our Lego buildings with the actual models to refine things and get them into the scene to see how they are working out. The previews that follow are for the building in the far left.





This one is behind the clocktower for a large portion of the shot, But the camera comes very close so it will need a big chunk of time before it is completed. Right now it is still at the earliest stages. Obviously since no work has been done on lighting or texturing, these still look very low rent...But not to worry the detail (and beauty) will come with time..

Finally, a post of this model in a bit more detail:

City Building 2

Here are some renderings of the nearly finished building model.

This represents the second or third-from-highest level of detail we will be modeling into the foreground buildings of our city scene. Models with this level of detail will be used for medium shots.

Once this model is brought into the main scene, some additional steps will be taken to integrate it into the scene itself, such as power lines, dirt buildup around the building's base, and a few outlying props to really sell it.

In the case of this building, such props would include barrels under and around the water collection system, and a specialized dolly to move the barrels. Final details will include some of the power lines and pavement details as well. With additional refinement to be done as needed.

As will be the case with most of these buildings, many of the final steps will be handled based on the building's position in the scene with respect to the camera's view & other buildings in the scene.

For now now no additional detail has been added to the rooftop, as I am not sure if it will ever be seen in the shot. The roof extension which has been added to this model really exists to carry our European / Mediterranean art direction throughout the model, and to increase the interest of the building's profile.

City Building

This is a concept skematic Barry worked up to describe the structure of the city buildings in more detail:These screens show the 3D model in its current state; I hope to be finishing it up soon. After our discussions concerning some new additions to the buildings I will be adding just a touch more detail, in terms of power lines, and a support structure for the drainpipe and water tank. As a final touch I will put a few crates inside the exposed space in the second level, as well as adding an internal staircase from level 2 to 3.




This is a quick render of a building I am working on for the city space.

2 Screens

Getting some work done over the long weekend, blocking in some of the background buildings and finding - then filling - holes in our modeling reference.

Every once in a while I'll fire off a render and have the wrong window active. I did that twice today and I liked the renders enough that I saved them.



There's something about the rendering style that I like in these shots. Granted, neither is anything at all close to how we're finishing the shots but I guess that's why I'm posting them now. If I don't, they'll never see the light of day.

I'll update within a day or two with notes on what's going on in these shots.

City Layout

I just glanced up and saw the thumbnail of this image and for a second thought it was a spilled bowl of Fruity Pebbles.

Needless to say, this colors here in no way reflect the art direction we're going for. No, what this is, is simply a breakdown of all the visible buildings in the first shot. 53 visible buildings, counting only the garishly colored ones.

That's all for now. Tomorrow or in the next day or two I'll drop in a post about how we wound up with this layout and why we needed to have this reference document.

Building lots of buildings

This first shot is gonna have a fair number of buildings in it.

I'm only about a third of the way through breaking down the scene into discrete units and I'm at 16 buildings that need close-to full modeling. It's no Coruscant, but it's gonna be pretty damned poly-dense.

In order to streamline the actual design & modeling of the buildings, as we have no dedicated concept artist, I started building a couple "schematics" or visual quick-references for how our buildings will look.

These are still very much WIP's but they're the beginning of our town and they've establishing a few rules for how things will fit together.

One of the next steps is for me to start organizing our photo reference library and creating meta data tags for each picture. Bridge is the "asset management" tool we're using and I'm totally a fan. It's turning our huge dump of photos into an easily searchable database of references that should allow us to quickly find modeling and texturing references as we work.

How we're doing it is as follows:
We have a central folder of images, mostly grabbed from Flickr, numbering somewhere in the hundreds and growing every day. This folder has plenty of sub-folders and the photos are all accurately named. For a while I thought that would be enough, but that's not turning out to be the case.
So what's happening now is that all new photos and, slowly, all our older photos are getting meta data tags, examples being "window shutter," "cobblestone," and "drainpipe." The really brilliant thing with Bridge is that it allows you to create live sets, like iPhotos Smart Sets, that are dynamically created every time you access them. What that means is that when it's time for me or James to model some window shutters, all we need to do is click on the live set labeled "Window Shutters" and every photo we have that's appropriately tagged will be referenced in that set.
Eventually we'll have live sets for every aspect of our models and textures right at our fingertips.

The most recent version of the reference folder lives on my iPod and I sync it to both my work and home computers a couple times each week, so that we've got copies. It's not failsafe, but it's better than nothing.