22 réponses à ce sujet

[PJ156]

For my new project "The sea of the Dead" I want to do a desert town. I have the RWS adobe set but I want to expand it to have some simple eastern style fortifications.

 

Problem is, blender is pretty hard to get to grips with. I'm getting there though.

 

This is my wall first draft, there will be towers to match. I built it in a flat plane first and then extruded to form the walkway and arches. Was that the right way to do it? Do those arches have enough subdivisions (that's a re-build if they don't but its all practice )

 

 

I am going to use the adobe textures from the RWS set if that is okay with the author but appluing them is a step I have not got to yet 

 

I would be happy to have pointers on anything that is clearly wrong with the model above.

 

PJ

[rjshae]

It looks good to me. Based on your shape, I'd guess the main issue is whether you have enough subdivisions to make the arches look smoothly rounded.

 

You might end up with some darkening of the placeable texture where you see those dark areas along the arches. That happens when sharp corners are combined with surface smoothing. There's an edge split modifier to fix that, I believe.

[kamal_]

I am going to use the adobe textures from the RWS set if that is okay with the author but appluing them is a step I have not got to yet 

 

I would be happy to have pointers on anything that is clearly wrong with the model above.

 

PJ

Pretty sure RWS will approve. There are always tons of other adobe/desert textures you can use.

[PJ156]

Yeah gods this is hard

 

This sucks up time more than anything I have done.

 

Ha!

[kamal_]

Yeah gods this is hard

 

This sucks up time more than anything I have done.

 

Ha!

This is why I stick to retextures and cutting bits off existing placeables.

[PJ156]

I see your point Kamal_ 

 

I have rebuilt the wall, I wanted to add some more edges to the arch and add loops close to the corners to sharpen them up.

 

I am going to do it again for the practice but follow a step wise tutorial to make sure I am following the steps properly.

 

Meanwhile:

 

The wall has the dark faces within the render. The faces looked different during the build but I thought it was the crappy lighting (part of the tools I really struggle with  )

 

Anyone know how I might cure this.

 

 

PJ

[Tchos]

I'd say that unless you want to make a rounded surface, beveling those edges is unnecessary.  If you want to make edges with a normal stone bevel, the usual practise in games is to do it with the texture, and not with the geometry.  See this screenshot of a quite recent game.  Note the pile of stone blocks near the middle-right of the screen against a wall.  Those are plain sharp-edged cubes, and the apparent bevel is accomplished through the texture.

[PJ156]

Hmmm I can see where you are coming from. I don't know how I will achieve that in practice though.

 

The tutorial I followed use the step of applying a subdivision surface to tidy up the model. Without that the edges are too sharp but it you apply the matrix without the extra loops you get this.

 

 

I'm as new to texturing as I am to modeling (newer if anything as I have not done any yet) so I don't know what leaving the edges sharp is going to look like in game.

 

PJ

[Tchos]

It all depends on the UV map, and the skill of the texturer.  Game assets are generally given their own UV map textures, which have edge details you don't get with a simple repeating texture.

[PJ156]

UV mapping is next on the to do list I think which means creating the texture, or though this program seems to allow you to use part of the texture against specific faces. I'm not clear on how that works yet but them I am not clear on how any of it works at the moment

[kamal_]

If you look at the elven marble walls picture I posted, it's very obvious the stone wall placeables are sharply edged. The stock stone wall doesn't look sharp because of the textures.

[rjshae]

If you look at the elven marble walls picture I posted, it's very obvious the stone wall placeables are sharply edged. The stock stone wall doesn't look sharp because of the textures.

 

Yes, the surface smoothing will give the corners a gentle edge unless you deliberately make them sharp.

 

PJ you're making good progress. I'm looking forward to seeing the final model in the toolset.

[Tchos]

In this case we're not talking about surface smoothing, which actually changes the way light plays about the surface, making it seem curved, but an illusion created by the choice of texturework, where surface smoothing is deliberately left off.  In the example I posted, the edges are not smoothed.

[PJ156]

It's not too big a deal in this case since the model is not large. It would be good to know for the future if the textures I have access to or can create are good enough to give the impression of a smoothed surface.

 

Only one way to find out.

[Calister68]

I'm not sure this will help you, but I can talk about my experience on bevels, which gave me a lot of headaches during the development of my tileset

 

This is a gmax view of a stone block I made for one of my placeables. You can clearly see the bevels I made to smooth the edges of the block. In order to increase the effect on the edges, I also painted white lines on the stone texture to give a worn aspect on the edges. This is the result in game. The most difficult part is to apply correctly the texture on the model... depending on the complexity of your model, this can quickly drives you crazy

 

As Tchos said, you can also make the same thing without the bevels on the model, just by using the worn effect of the texture. That's how I made some smaller placeables, like the supports of my chains. But the effect obtained is better if you use bevels on your model, that's why I use the "texture trick" alone only for small objects (it helps me to save some poly count).

 

Sorry if I was not clear

[PJ156]

That was very clear thanks Calister.

 

As it goes it progressing well but ...

 

I created a UV map and applied texture to it. I applied my material and then the texture and it show up black. Not sure what is going on but, if I can fix this one I can screenie you the fruits of my labour.

 

PJ

[Tchos]

Did you give it a normal map?  It needs a normal map, or it will be black.  You can apply a flat normal map called "ts_n", which is in the stock resources, and works for that purpose.

[PJ156]

It's appearing black in blender, not sure how I would add a normal map there. I know how to do that once I get to mdb stage. 

 

Right now I have just attached the textures to the UV map location. That gets me thinking. I wonder if this is an alpha issue?

 

PJ

[Tchos]

I don't know what Blender calls it, but you should find some texture field called something like "bump", and that's where you put the normal map.  Your image texture is typically called "diffuse".

[PJ156]

Blender seems not to consider anything but the UV map. The tutorial I followed simple created a .png from the exported UV map and applies that tot he model. There is not reference to varying file types or layers.

 

I want to try to build the wall again. In part to simplify it and in part for practice. Then I will try again.

 

PJ

[rjshae]

When you click on the texture panel and select a texture, I believe the usage is set down in the Influence panel. A diffuse texture will have Diffuse values, while the normal map will have a normal value in the Geometry. These are set when you import a mdb model.

[PJ156]

I could not get this to work last night but the model was not taking the material changes so I may have borked it somehow in the build process.

 

I spent this morning rebuilding the wall three times, mostly to play with differed techniques and to tidy up the build process and model. The new wall looks as below with different battlements as I changed (reduced) the number of faces I had to play with. The second image is the before and after wireframes. The newer one is much cleaner and takes the material layer changes so maybe I will have some more luck tonight.

 

The main thing I got from this morning was being comfortable with building to scale. Once you get with it the build proceeds proceeds quickly and the final effect is better imo.

 

On the subject of luck, I am being sent to a very old city (Baku) for work next week. I hope to take a camera and collect some textures

 

 

The wall model

 

 

New wire frame with old inset.

 

This is a very absorbing hobby. Hours fly by, I need to get quicker at it though as I want to build modules not models.

 

PJ

[PJ156]

While I was away, I have decided to shelve this project.

 

Kamal is doing such sterling work with the re-texturing project that this becomes redundant for an area that will be visited for only half of the next module and the time/benefit balance is just not there. As a stand alone item it's benefit is limited, in needs towers and step sections and I don't see myself completing those.

 

I don't want to drop blender, I have a hankering to try some simple placeables. That will bring my skills up and keep me productive in the creation of my new module which is the part of this that I love. When I have a better grasp of the package I may come back to this who knows.

 

Thanks for the support with this guys, I will be back for more help soon

 

PJ