Week 15 Update - More merchandise

This week I spent 7.5 hours adding more stuff to my general store.  I made horseshoes and flour bags, and finally put in my Snake Oil from last week.  I also spent a little time working on the lighting because there were dark shadows behind the center shelf.

The texture for the horseshoe is 100% done in dDo.  I used its material abilities to make Iron from scratch.  It turned out pretty dark, but doesn't look too bad.

This is the material inside of UDK.  I recently discovered the "Specular Power" material input, which is the same as Gloss.  I didn't realize how useful it is to add realism to shiny textures.  I am now unsatisfied with all my normal spec maps by themselves.

Last week I said my normals for the snake oil were acting weird, and they are definitely messed up. I tried every setting in the baking process, but the normals were not showing up right at all.  I removed them and now I'm just dealing with a sharp-edged bottle.  The liquor bottles to the right were made over the summer for the Saloon, but I figured they could be used in here too.

The bags of flour look a tiny bit flat, but they aren't too unrealistic based on pictures I've seen online.  I'm really happy with how dirty and terrible the texture turned out, but for some reason it doesn't look as detailed in the store because of the lack of lighting.

 I decided to reuse my baking soda box and turn it into an ammo box for shotgun shells, since I have the guns in the corner of the store.  I whipped together this texture in about an hour, and I can't wait to see what it looks like on the model in my store.  I really like making these small objects, but they take a lot of time.  I don't think I could possibly fill the whole store by the week.  I'll try to at least fill up that section of shelves.

Week 13 Update- Cans and Bottles

     I spent 7 hours this week continuing to fill my general store.  It is taking longer than I thought since I am putting details into the merchandise and experimenting with proper baking techniques.  The ladder, guns, and toy trains were made over the summer, but I wanted more stuff in here to get the feeling together.  I also added barrels that I made earlier in the semester.

     The only new items in these screenshots are the two cans, one for soup and one for evaporated milk.

I worked in dDo some more to get the can dirtiness.  It worked great for rust and scratches and tears in the paper.  This was one of the first times I did a legitimate high-poly to low-poly bake with my cans and the bottle.  I had to waste a lot of time figuring out problems and doing some research, but so far it has turned out ok.  I haven't had a chance to get my bottle of Snake Oil into UDK yet, but it has rendering problems in Maya where the normals get fuzzy when viewed at a low angle.  I'm still impressed by how effectively I turned the single hard edge of the model into a nicely rounded edge by the use of computer magic.

Next, I need to send my bottle into dDo and dirty it up.  Then I'll stick it on the shelf.  I might create a new texture for the same bottle to get some variation, but I don't have solid plans for what next piece of merchandise I'm making.  

Week 12 - Filling the General Store

Just to make sure my joy is clear, I will repeat that I finished all my buildings last week!  I spent a little time reorganizing my town and moving the buildings closer to one another.  Here it is!

I spent 8 hours this week starting to fill my general store.  I built shelves and my first object, a box of baking soda.

I love working with small objects and adding details to them, so this has been fun.  I actually baked out normals (including object space) for this things and painted the logo by hand.  I threw it into dDo in order to have dirt, dust, and edge wear.  I want a large portion of the items in the store to only use one material, since it would be inefficient for a game engine to have so many different materials running at once.  The final resolution for the baking soda will probably be half of what it is right now.

I started on a tin can that will probably have a few different variations, and modeled the high-poly version of a medicine bottle (or something like it).  These will be baked down into low-res models.

Week 11 Update - Jailhouse finished

After 13.5 hours of work this week, I finally finished my final building of the Old West town.  The jailhouse/sheriff's office is complete!

I used dDo to make the iron all rusty and scratched and I really like the outcome.  I also used it to make the mattress pad nasty.  Overall I like the whole interior.  The shadows are a tiny bit blotchy because of UDK's ambient occlusion and the limits of shadow map size.  My lighting is a little dark and maybe a little too moody.

Next, I will be working on filling up my general store with merchandise.  I've started making the shelves so I can get the general layout done right away.  Then I'll just be doing one little object at a time and putting them on the shelves.  By completing this building today, I officially met my revised deadline for completing the buildings.

Week 10 Update- Post Office texturing

This week I spent 9.5 hours finishing up my post office and starting the sheriff's office.  Like I said in my last post, separating the post office into 2 materials was very beneficial.  I kinda wish I had separated the whole scene into different objects so that I could have shadow maps that were more accurate.  I combine everything in Maya and ship it over to UDK in one object to make it simpler, but having all the envelopes stuffed into one shadow map with the rest of the building produces undesirable effects.

I started my final building (YAYYY!!), the sheriff's office.  This one should be pretty simple.  It will have a desk, chair, 2 jail cells, cots and buckets.  I need to finish this building by November 7th to meet my revised deadline for having every building done.  It might be a stretch, but I could do it.

Week 9 Update - Post Office

I spent 11 hours this week making my post office.  I took my bank building and reshaped it to speed up the process of building the base. I have the main texture for the building done, and I just finished UVing the furniture inside.

 I learned from my bank that it is easier to keep the insides and outside of the building in separate textures.  For this project I made the building a 1k map and the insides another 1k, instead of putting them together into a 2k.

For the inside of the post office, I have mail bags, a desk, a small table, large table, a set of mail boxes/slots, a stepping stool, a large envelope, small envelope, and a roll of paper.

I should be able to finish texturing the inside objects by the end of next week and start on my final building, the sheriff's office.  I really want to start doing some smaller props for the general store.  

Week 8 Update - Finished Bank

This week I spent 10 hours completing my bank.  I kinda regret including the vault door and desk with the main building since it messed up my UV space and made it hard to work with the texture.  I did some more UV stacking, but I still messed up a little bit by having 2 different brick parts and some other areas that could have overlapped.  It worked out ok in the end and I'm still learning.

I like how everything turned out and my normal maps are the best ones yet.  It is just under 2000 tris and the texture is 2k.

I need to fix the lightmap UVs because there is a lot of shadow bleeding around the desk area.  I had to set the resolution really high so that it looked acceptable for the picture.  I felt like the vault door was a little plain, but it works.

Midterm Progress Report

After my 8th week in this class, I have completed the church, hotel, general store, water tower, bank, and barrels for my old western town.  It took a total of 73.5 hours to do all this, and there is still plenty of work to be done.

Compared to what I had at the beginning of the semester, the town is really coming along nicely.  I was sick of the ugly placeholders that were making it look terrible.

 This is what it looked like before

and this is what it looks like now.  

It doesn't seem much different, but everything is prettier up close.

Week 7 Update - Bank Modeling

I spent 13 hours this week on the bank of my Old Western.  After learning a lot of lessons from my previous buildings, I'm hoping this one will turn out the best.  With the other buildings, I was only building the facade and maybe a few extra walls, but this bank is coming with a complete desk, vault door, and more.  I just barely started texturing.  I spent a lot of time getting the UVs perfect and overlapping everything in the most efficient way.

I modeled the outside of the building to be exactly twice as long as it was wide.  That way I could make the walls out of 1 or 2 perfect pieces that tile the textures perfectly across all 5 faces.

The vault door is open just enough to let you see the back wall and shelves of the vault.  I didn't want to make the vault super detailed, so I hid most of it.  I will make some gold bars and bank notes later and put a bunch on the desk for the player to look at.

The whole bank is a little over 1900 tris right now, and I think I'm probably done modeling.

I'm trying to save on texture space, but this bank is different from my other buildings in that it has furniture and stuff built into it.  I'm thinking of using a 4k map for the texture; it sounds like a lot, but if I separated out the doors and desk and bars, it would still add up.  Next week I will finish the texturing and hope that it looks amazing.

Week 6 Update - General Store

I'm getting pretty tired of modeling buildings now.  This week I spent 13 hours on my general store, which is the major object of this semester's work.  I completed the actual structure of it and I will have to start filling it with random stuff pretty soon.

My normal map is the the most extreme one I've ever used, and at some parts it looks a little too bulgy.  Another problem I have is the lightmap in UDK.  I'm trying to keep them pretty small, but there was a lot of bleeding in the shadows.  Directly under the overhanging roof, there is a bright strip on the wall.  It looks really weird.

In making this building, I tried to practice more UV stacking.  I built half the building and mirrored it over.    There are 7 pieces of textures for the walls, which includes inside and outside.  I still find myself using the same piece of texture more than once in the same texture map.  I think I'm just scared of messy UVs, but I think it could help me on texture space to overlap even more.

I started building a shelf and a nail to put objects on within the store.  I think I am going to try and furnish the whole store with these types of pieces using one single texture map.  Like the shelves, nails, boxes and hooks all sharing UV space.

To finish the major buildings that I currently have, I have to do the bank and the post office, which include insides that can be seen through windows.  I am a little worried that I can't finish those and the inside of the general store by my deadline of November 7.  I will see where I am a little later, but I may change my goal to get the buildings and minor objects done separately from the inside of the general store.  So I might do the wagons, cacti, graveyard and other such objects done by November 7, and fill the store by mid-December.  There are just so many small things in the store and I want it to look legitimate.

Week 5 Update - Hotel and Water Tower Finished

This week I spent 8 hours on the hotel and water tower.  I took the clean Hotel texture and threw it into dDo.  I was really happy with the dust and grime it put onto it, and I used a colored "surface chips" effect to emulate peeled paint.

Before dDo

After dDo

I'm pretty happy with how the hotel turned out.  It is the only painted building in my scene (I think), but it doesn't look too different fundamentally from the other buildings I have right now.

After the hotel, I started on my water tower.  I built 2 of each piece of wood and UVed them, then rotated them 90 degrees for the other side.  The opposite sides of each plank are also overlapped UVs.  This way I could get the appearance of different pieces of wood with less texture space.  I then took the pieces and built the tower plank by plank.  

I took the texture into dDo and dirtied up the wood and metal.  I tried to get an ambient occlusion map so that dDo could work better and add some water stains and rust runoff on the tanks.  Because I had so many overlapping UVs, it was hard for me to eliminate all the extra junk and bake a good map.  It ended up not working, so I just had to deal with it.

After finishing a bigger piece, I like to work on something small to recover.  I have to make the general store pretty soon and fill it with random junk, so I figured I would just do something tiny like that.  I made a super simple bag of rice from a cube.  It is not at all in a final phase; it was more for a vision of what I wanted to do.  I will probably finish it up first thing next week, or restart it.  I would sculpt it a little bit so it conforms to the rest of the pile.