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.