DMUGA Week 17 - 'Boot Camp': Game Production

Okay, so let's get this straight. I made a very silly mistake and went to the wrong workshop... Great way to start the week! I was supposed to have Visual design/Life drawing this week, but instead I went to the game production one. Anyway, here's how the week panned out:

Day 1 - Basics + Street Project, Road surface & pavement Texturing

The fundamentals surprisingly enough were almost everything I knew already (Which is a good sign!), although there was a few tricks I picked up on. For example, I knew about the swift loop tool, but had no idea you could hold down 'shift' and create an extra loop but averaged outwards away from the object. It's funny that this was exactly what I needed the night before when working on my van project. Another neat trick involved resolving the 'target welding' problem, in which the normals are flipped the opposite ways on the 2 polys, so you couldn't weld the vertexes together.

UVW Map for the road & pavement - 1024x2048

We then began to work on the road surface by producing a very basic model of one side of the road & pavement, then going on to texture them. I started doing what I have been taught to do which is to have all the textures on different sheets, then apply the materials to the appropriate faces using a multi-sub object and materials ID's. However, I saw that Steve (our tutor), was using a 1024x2048 texture instead of the usual square ones that I learnt about. There are pros and cons of both ways, but because I'd never used this before, I wanted to try it out. The good thing about this method is that you get more control of blender between the textures, but less control over the size of them. Nevertheless, I did it anyway just to have the experience of using it in this way.
In addition, I played about in Photoshop a bit more and found out about the HDR toning adjustment which personally, I think can really make the textures 'pop'. I also tried a few different techniques on cleaning up the textures using the 'patch tool' & 'clone stamp' etc.

Day 2 - Making assets

I worked some more on my road textures because it just didn't look right. Here's an example of the first one:

Road Texture Example

As you can see, from this point of view it generally looks alright, but once I'd copied the road over for the other side, the pavement looked way too small.

Render of my 'trash scene'

This meant that I had to scale the pavement up, which of course made the bricks look too big and completely out of proportion. I went to change the size of them in Photoshop, but it meant that they looked even more tiled than they did before hand. This lead to the problem of: A) Spend hours playing about with the bricks to try and make them look more random, or B) get to work on other assets so that my scene didn't look so empty. I therefore opted for B and got to work on my bin bag, crisp packet & cardboard box. The bin bag had it's own issue when it came to unwrapping & texturing, but it turned out alright. However, If I did it again, I'd want to try texturing it a bit better than I did in terms of the specular maps, and the diffuse itself. The crisp packet was obviously rather easy to do, but the box gave me a slight headache as I had to try and match up the 'amazon' words from plane-to-plane; not a big deal though.

Day 3 - Building more assets

Place sign

Street warning sign - Please excuse the sky!

By this point, I'd already stayed up late trying to get each little project finished for each day and it was clear that I'd be doing that all week. Having said that, at this point I was feeling rather good/proud of myself that within a couple of days of pure 3D modelling & texturing, I'd made so much progress.

Day 3 was the making of my streets signs. There was the place sign itself, plus a warning sign. these two object were rather plain and easy to make, and unwrapping them wasn't exactly too hard considering they were simple. Although, the place sign unwrapping was a bit harder than expected and I'm not sure why. Everything was box-like and so could be unwrapped into a clean net, but when it came to relaxing it, 3ds max just wasn't having any of it. Nevertheless, I completed both of them and started on making the bollard for the scene too.

I had a lot of fun creating these, and I was especially proud that my warning sign looks photo-realistic! I reckon if placed in a real-life scene, you'd have to look pretty hard to see that it is just a model.
 I also got to work on my bollard. This wasn't too bad to make, a small issue with connected a few verteces up but nothing too problematic. The real issue came when it was time to texture it, but didn't start this properly until Thursday.

Day 4 - Getting as much done as possible

Finished Bollard

Diffuse texture for the bollard

At this point, I'd stayed up every night in order to make things look good and making sure I've got enough for my scene. I still didn't have a phonebox, a ticket machine, or a postbox. In the first half of the day I set my goal on finishing the bollard for the afternoon and I did. Now, as you can see from the texture, I found that by unwrapping it in this way, it wasn't so hard, but it did mean that in order to get it looking good, I had to spend a long time in Photoshop building it from the bottom to top in segments, whilst trying to keep it looking in perspective as it bent round. The other way of doing this is to make it into a sqaure shape uv, which I did for a different asset the next day. The dome at the top was quite a challenge to texture, I should have done the same thing and built of the base to the top, but instead to save time I used the patch tool and tried to merge it all together.

In the second half of the day, I worked on my ticket machine, which again, was easy to model, but texturing it was harder than expected. Still, it wasn't something I could handle, and I think it turned out very good, especially the specular & bump maps on it. However, for some reason, the specular for the information block on the top of it just didn't want to work.

Finished ticket machine - slight problem with specular on top

In the evening I start of my postbox because in order to bring some vibrancy into my scene, I was in desperate need for something red. The postbox seemed like a manageable task to get finished for the next day and looking good. The model of done, it just needed texturing.






Day 5 - Finishing off & scene setting

The last day was a chance to learn more about rendering techniques and basic lighting. I still had the postbox matter to tend to and I finished that off first before trying to lay out my scene. As you can already see, I've imported models from previous projects into my scene I.e. the building, trees, and the wheelie bin. After finishing the assets I needed, it was almost hand-in time, so I had a couple of hours to get my scene set up, lighting fairly good, and all my renders done, before submitting it and linking all of the textures so that they'd work properly. Here's the rest of the render of my scene:

 Summary

To be completely honest, this week has been such a massive help in terms of getting to spend more time with 3ds max & Photoshop. I've learnt so much more about texturing properly, unwrapping in different ways, and in general producing better results than I was previously. The importance of getting good references was clearly highlighted and I love that I now have a better understanding of height, bump and specular maps. Baring in mind because it's the first time I tried creating my own height & specular maps, I kind of went a bit crazy with it, but I know that I need to tone it down a tiny bit, or at least have more control over it - not to mention only putting it where it's needed to bring the object some complexity. I now look forward to the visual design week, but have already seen the amazing work they've produced... Let's just say I don't feel up to scratch.