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. 

Week 4 Update - Barrels and Hotel

This week I spent a total of 12.5 hours on my project, about 3 of which were on my barrel that I started last week.  I was experimenting with dDo and trying to learn how to use it properly.  I like how the barrel turned out, but I think I need to tweak the color of the metal bands to make them brighter and shinier.  I managed to put them in UDK and have them lit pretty well with a low resolution lightmap.  The barrels are a little under 200 tris each.

I started a hotel but failed to finish it like I wanted to.  I spent a lot of time experimenting with procedural building and UVing.  I don't like the textures right now, but once I normal map it and throw it into dDo I think I can get some good effects with peeled paint and worn wood.  It looks very clean and boring right now.

Next week I will finish the hotel and probably start on a different building.

Week 3 Update - Church and Barrel

I spent about 9 hours on my project this week, mostly on texturing the church.  I was disappointed that it took me so long to create one building, but now that I know more about my schedule and am getting into the groove I'm hoping that I can speed things up.

I got my church into UDK and I think it looks pretty good.  I used nDo for the first time and I'm pleased with the results in my normal map.

These are the finished UVs for the church.  There are a few unused gaps that I feel bad about, but they arose when I moved some shells around after finishing the texturing.

Because this is a static mesh in UDK, I had to make a lightmap for the engine.  I used a lot of overlaps in my normal UV map, so it was a pain to separate each part out and arrange them nicely.

I started on a standard barrel that will be ubiquitous in my Old Western.  It's UV'ed, so now I just have to finish up the details on the textures.  Next week I will finish the barrel and hopefully almost finish another building like the hotel.  I also just realized that I forgot to make a collision mesh for the church, so I'll throw that together.

Week 2 Update - Church modeling

I spent about 8 hours modeling the church for my Old Western and am almost complete.  I just need to add a doorframe and door, and duplicate my windows.

  I have everything UV'ed, but I need to make the walls larger so that they aren't blurry in the game.  I have plenty of space to do that, since I started out with everything pretty small.  I did a lot of overlapping UVs to save on space, but I tried to flip and rotate the shells so that it doesn't seem so repetitive.

I was debating on whether or not to make the windows recede into the walls, but I decided that it didn't use too many triangles and added some real depth.  The actual glass and frame are easy to duplicate and snap around the building.

 In the next week I will be texturing the church, where I will do some experiments with a high-poly model for baking, mainly on the window frames and bell.