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.