Bakeing Normals

normalmaps and their creation have been my bane for some time now BUT NO LONGER! I found a great tutorial(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzoALLUakGI) which clearly broke down the entire process. They are mysterious no longer and what i learnt from this has made teh whole throne room feel allot less daunting.

Tank Update

I rebuilt the turret to remove the odd faces, now its nice and smooth :). i'v also added most[but not all] of the detail on the top of the turret. the pipes still need some added detail as does the back of the turret.

The Highpoly is sitting pretty at 15,395,173 and when all the pieces are set to visible my pc begins to chug, i'm gladd i'v broken the tank into mask-able layers.

 As you can see the back of the turret still needs work as does the engine block and the back storage rack.

Belated Ue3 Blockout

A bleated block out for posterity. Many fixes and changes are needed.[high polys,gap in the floor, proper lighting,throne, ceiling stars] Though now its blocked out i'm quite sure the scale is good.

TuesDay Textures

today i wanted to mock up the kind of shader that will be used to place and show the marble floor tiles.

Step 1: build my maps, i planned to use multiple marble tiles and i knew i would also need some tile masks. in addition to this i built a few normal tiles and a roughness map for the tiles.

Step 2: pretty simple, upload the maps to UE4 (making sure the normal maps are being treated as normal maps by the engine)

Step 3: The most time consuming, authoring the material. I used multiple masking layers to place and orient the tiles so that the repetition wasn't immediately obvious. I tried to keep all my Texture UV modifiers coming off the two master nodes meaning that changing the scale of the textures was quick and easy.

Step 4: a quick variation of the white marble made black

Step 5: dump em into the scene

Step 6+7: take sex poses with MR Teal

there are still somt things to do do before this material is final. (increase the randomization,Varying tile sizes? a deeper white?)
Stating at 9:00 finished by 12:00

lunchtime lenses

Today i worked on the lens assembly. first i built the flimsy holder as seen below, although i liked the rimless lens it looked far too frail to support itself.

the next design was rooted in the looping rings that backed the throne area. i personally liked this one however my teammate felt that it looked impractical. so we decided to get some feedback from polycount.

during this process I backed the throne with a disc to separate it form the noisy backdrop created by the intersecting rings. this worked quite well and we are keeping it to help highlight the throne even though now the reason for it being put there has been removed.

Lastly i assembled the upper lens assembly and gave it heir achy so that they all move and rotate appropriately.

Makeing the king kingly

Aafter receiving some interesting feedback (here) I decided that i had spent too much time focusing on my greek reference. just because its marble doesn't mean it has to be the Parthenon right? in addition I agree with he critique that the horizontal is clashing with the gyro centerpiece. Initially i experimented with simply replacing the columns with twisting supports. however the horizontality remained with the stone doughnut cementing that horizontality quite strongly.
so i completely removed it and started the center piece again keeping only the gyro and the throne.

This first design is quite noisy but i like how the lines all lead around and up. perhaps a backpeice to the throne would focous your eye down to it?


The second design is replicating the gyro itself architecturally and isn't so close and grabby to the throne.
i like how it mirrors the gyro on a larger scale. I'd intend for these to not move but in theory you could make them spin about their axis slowly with dates and constellations inscribed on their inner surface. the second design also offers a largely unobstructed view of the dome form the throne which would be important.

Throneroom Changeup

after a feedback session me + charlie have deiced to change the layout of the room so that the dome on the top can rotate like an observatory. in addition to this we are moving the throne around so that it sits above the gyro to make it feel more regal. The braises and gyroscope are charlies. This round room follows more closely with the Greek architecture I have been using as reference.
also tested the scale in Ue4. (lotsa bloom) it feels sufficiently grandiose now and doesn't feel cramped anymore ^_^

More throne room planning

Some quick updates, here are a few rough mural ideas i'm gonna run by charlie.(personally i like number 1 and number 3)
and a few ideas very roughed out. the red drapes worked out nicely so will need to be placeholder ed as will the twisting gold ornamentation on the pillars. also a rough mock up of the bookshelves in the walls will also be necessary Me and charlie are currently discussing wither to have one person do all the mechanical modeling so charlie does the lens too or wither we should split it so we both get to do some. The glowy bits floating around the gyro look naff however so i think we are gonna need a better way of showing the starscape.



[Edit]- mocked up some of the planned additions, the lens requires charlies input and i think he had done some braziers already. also changeged the yellow spot to give shadows to see how the shadows fall in the scene.

Throneroom Catastrophy

made a stupid mistake yesterday. tired arfter my first 8 hr day in a while i forgot to save my work to drive/usb and lost ALL of it. Thankfully i still had the rough base so i could rebuild it and i think the rebuild is nicer than the other anyway so bonus ^_^
first heres it with the temporary gyro

now here's it with Charlies gyro added, starting to cometogether, tomorrow i'm going to be looking into wall+ roof detailing and drapes. I also ant to experiment with some ornimental cages round the base of the pillars.

Tank Progress

23 hours in and i'v almost finished the highpoly. after taking a break for Christmas i was slack and apprehensive about continuing this project but its back on now. The barrel has been completed now leaving the Tracks, the rear engine block and the turret top + barrel cover.

also gonna give it a bit of self analysis

you can see some odd smoothing going on on the wheels and the turret. this is due to the way i'v been doing my hard surface modeling. i'm gonna need to do a bit of research into how i can get the detail highlighted through the turbo smooth but not get those polygonal defined faces on the curves. the Green arrows of things i think have gone well. I'm going to model the rest of the turret peice next, starting with the barrel cover panel.

,

Polycount throne room comp

Created the High polys for the pillars, I built them in sections so i could adjust their height and details. some of the experiments came out nicely so i used those as the designs for the columns in the throne room.

Next i created sections of wall and facade and used the bend modifier to curve them round to meet in the middle thus creating the curved wall.

The total process time was 4 1/2 hours. In theory it should all be completed now however i got distracted and thus it is not finished yet. i should focus more on the work at hand. 

Throne Room Competition
Me and a colleague are taking part in polycount's throne room competition. (http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=146940)

Starting at 9:00 we began brainstorming ideas and styles we both wanted to work in and settled on the ideas of vertical and not dark.from that we sketched ideas and looked through reference images to find what we were looking for. This searching was unstructured and no time limit was set as such it took around 4 hours for us to finally blockout the scene. we decided on a Greek aesthetic with a large gyroscope like object behind the throne. This took way to long so next time i think we'll set time sensitive goals before we go browsing. With the initial placeholder and first pass tasked given out we began work. I severely underestimated how long this planning stage would take.

With the new Year the final GMP project has begun. In that i have to keep a work log so i'v decided to keep that here. The first part of the project is a 4 week sprint where i'm gonna build this. ->




In addition to this i'm participating in the global game jam which i will postmortem on Monday. I also plan to have the Tank high poly finished by next week.