Medieval Scene Finishing Touches

Hello,

Just thought I’d put up few screen shots of how the final year 3D project turned out. Between the last blog post and this one, I just added what I felt were the little touches needed to give the scene character. The project was handed in and graded a few weeks ago, and achieved a high grade. All university work has been completed now and I’m just waiting for results day to roll around. I’ll put another blog post up later with some details of how my team project turned out, as well as a number of images of work I contributed to that (award winning!) project, more on that later! For now, have a click on the thumbnails below to browse a gallery of images.

 

Medieval Scene Progress

Evening.

Thought I’d put a new blog post up, showing the progress I’ve made on the medieval scene I’m working on. It’s coming along nicely, with just a few weeks to go til’ it needs to be finished. All of the meshes and textures you see below were produced by myself. The only thing I can’t claim credit for is the foliage on 2 of the trees, I’ll be replacing that with something custom soon. Feel free to drop me any comments or criticism you may have.

I’ll be producing a few final assets for the scene in the coming weeks, smaller items, the sort of stuff that brings a scene to life.

I now write for Godisageek.com!

Hooray for me! God is a Geek is a video games news and reviews site. I will be regularly chipping in with game reviews and some juicy news stories, and you can see all of the articles I have posted up to date by clicking on the picture below!

Build me a house to live in

Build a house you say? A mediaeval house? Today? Oh, OK!

It’s been a while coming because other projects have been eating up all of my time (dissertation, ugh!). This is about the fifth revision of the house I am working on, its been mouldy, light, dark, brick and orange (yep, you heard me, orange). It obviously needs a bit more work to get it up to scratch, but here are the results of my labours so far. I’m working towards keeping all the assets for this medieval house game ready, so the models need to be at the lower end of the poly-crazy scale. For now I’ll just show you some pretty pictures, and save the technical stuff for later.

Lantern fun!

As part of my mission to create and populate a medieval street scene for my final year 3D module, I decided that people in medieval times probably needed light at night time…so I made a lantern.

I did some research into the types of lanterns people from this time period would have used, and I quite liked the look of the lanterns that were attached to the walls of peoples houses, by the front door, that sort of thing. Check out the images below to see what I came up with. This model gave me a chance to have a play with Alpha maps in UDK as well, which is something I hadn’t done before, the results were surprisingly good.

Clocking in at 300 polys - texture size 512x512 - Diffuse, Normal and Alpha channels

 

Top right - Alpha map, Right middle - Normal map, Bottom right - Diffuse map

 

Medieval Market Stand

I wanted to make a market stand for my medieval street scene, and I wanted to keep it low poly as I plan to populate the scene with several of these and fill them with the sort of stuff you would expect to find at a medieval market (answers on a postcard for that one…)

It came out at just over 300 polys, the texture sheet being 512×512 in size + Normal map. It turned out pretty well, take a look at the pictures below! In my next blog post I’ll show you the house I’m working on.

Medieval Market Stand

 

Do a barrel roll!

For my 3D module this year, I plan on creating all the assets needed for a small medieval scene for use in the Unreal engine. The idea being that when its all done, you will be able to take a stroll down the street I have created and have a good look around.

The first asset I made for this scene, was a ye’olde style wooden barrel – a cliché in of itself, surely everyone has made one of these? Well here is mine.

Barrel for in game use - texture size 512 x 512 - 800 triangles

Brick by brick….

Hello again

Recently I was asked by my 3D design tutor to go and produce a brick, a strange request I thought, this is my final year, surely I will be making spaceships and monsters and…grizzly bears! But no, he wanted a brick. It all made sense really, he wanted to see who had gained a grasp of the basics, who could produce a brick (within strict poly and texture size constraint) fit for purpose in a modern video game.

So I set about work, firstly doing the basic model of the brick (a wire-frame of which can be seen below), the constraint here was that the model had to be less than 200 triangles in complexity (100 polys), this wasn’t difficult to manage as it was not a complex shape I was trying to replicate.

Next came the tricky part, making the texture. Normally this would be a piece of cake, as I would expect to use a texture sheet of 512×512 in size, but in this instance we were told we were on a data budget, and that 256×256 was the maximum. Tricky.

So getting the normal map right becomes doubly important, because if I got it wrong, the surface detail would appear blurry and a bit of a mess – using good normal maps allows us to get away with lower res diffuse maps and maintain a realist look when we render our work out. I took a couple of photos of a ‘fletton’ brick, seperated the bits I wanted in photoshop, and applied it to a standard texture sheet. As you can see, due to size constraints, I am reusing the same surface for the sides and ends of the brick. I then used NVidia normal map plug-in for photoshop to paint in the bump detail that I wanted. The texture sheet used for the final brick can be seen below.

And that was that, all that remained for me to do was add some lights to my max scene and do a couple of sample renders, given the poly budget and texture size constraints, I think the brick turned out well. Ideally in the future I’ll be working with slightly larger data budgets, but this example shows what can be achieved with small texture sizes.

Low poly brick, texture size 256x256

Now I’m just getting started on my four project for my final year at Uni. My team project, for which a team of ten will be making a (as yet undecided) game, for my Advanced 3D module I have decided to create all the assets needed to form a medieval street that I will put together in the unreal engine. For my dissertation module (very important!) I will be focusing on game level design, but I am yet to finalise a project title (when I have I’ll stick it on here).

So, lots to be getting on with, and I’ll update this feed regularly with pictures of what I’ve been making. So check back often.

Jonny.

1st Blog Post!

Hello you.

This blog is just getting started, I will be slowly filling this blog with lots of lovely posts about the work that I am doing, and keeping you updated on my progress.

So for now why don’t you head over to one of the pages linked too at the top of the page, and check out some of my completed work, What you will see there is just the start, over the coming months things will really hot up and what appears in those pages might just blow you away.

You will be able to get a preview of what will eventually appear in those pages on this blog, as I will be using it as sort of documentation of my “work in progress”, so stay tuned.

Enjoy

Jonny.