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.