Clarky's university environment art

[clarky003]

Now that I'm done with the second year I thought I'd showcase some of the map work I've been doing on the course using Unreal 3.0, and yes it's been an age since I've showed any of my work. Hope you enjoy : D

Lighting test concept art

http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/4022/pedestalconcept.png

Tower, Light and Geometry

http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/3656/lighttower.th.jpg (http://img36.imageshack.us/my.php?image=lighttower.jpg)

Textured

http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/7826/gametower.th.jpg (http://img13.imageshack.us/my.php?image=gametower.jpg)

Map edge, Light and Geometry

http://img54.imageshack.us/img54/8304/gamelight.th.jpg (http://img54.imageshack.us/my.php?image=gamelight.jpg)

Textured

http://img518.imageshack.us/img518/6595/game1.th.jpg (http://img518.imageshack.us/my.php?image=game1.jpg)

Earlier rendition of the map

http://img170.imageshack.us/img170/5585/dmpedestalpathtotowerwi.th.jpg (http://img170.imageshack.us/my.php?image=dmpedestalpathtotowerwi.jpg)

It took me roughly two months to put the level together, mostof that time was spent creating over two dozen custom assets.

Health spire Zbrush assets

http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/2668/espire.th.jpg (http://img195.imageshack.us/my.php?image=espire.jpg)

Walkway Zbrush assets

http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/4334/walkwaydetail.th.jpg (http://img197.imageshack.us/my.php?image=walkwaydetail.jpg)

Normals render

http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/2825/walkwaygamenormals.jpg

Spike

http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/1728/spike.th.jpg (http://img189.imageshack.us/my.php?image=spike.jpg)

Energy spire

http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/2668/espire.th.jpg (http://img183.imageshack.us/my.php?image=espire.jpg)

Entrance

http://img195.imageshack.us/img195/5475/entrance.th.jpg (http://img195.imageshack.us/my.php?image=entrance.jpg)

If anyone is interested in having a look at the project evaluation document, which gives more indepth information about the creation process and map features, then just PM me. Any feedback appreciated :)

[zombieturtle01]

Cool stuff! Did you work with a group?

[clarky003]

We get to work in development groups in the final year, this project had to be done on our own unfortunately.

[jverne]

cool

i remember doing maps in hammer years ago...a really time consuming process

[Krynn72]

Yay clarky's back! Yeah its been awhile since you last posted stuff :P

I sent you a pm in regards to the document. Interested in seeing your process. Also, your texture/normal maps came out a little weird looking. Like they're lumpy. Did you use zmapper to get the normal maps, or did you bake them some other way? The walkway in specific is pretty wonky looking. The sculpt looks fine (though you have some polygon stretching going on there. Did you reproject your mesh at all?), so its probably something to do with either the app you baked them with, or the uvs.

Anyways, some pretty cool stuff.

[clarky003]

Alot of it was due to resolution, I had alot of practice with poly grouping. I learn't it really depends on what kindof asset your producing. You can get away with a bit of polygon stretching if the asset isn't going to be right in the players face.

It saves on time, where really high normal detail isn't needed, and helps the computer process it all alot faster. Which means I won't get in a situation where it will freeze max up when I'm importing for projection mapping.

Typically my detail assets were over 1 million polygons each and I have 3 gig of memory on my home machine. Max didn't really like me going anywhere near the 2 million mark, so I had to find an optimised resolution to work at. The in game normals get the detail levels across, and in the end that particular model only really required a 1024x1024 texture.

I've emailed it to you Krynn , alot easier : )

[Krynn72]

Sweet. Thanks. I'll take a look at it later today when i get home.

[barbarbarbarbar]

that's awsome

[Krynn72]

I dont have any real work to do today so i checked out your doc. You seem to have a pretty similar workflow with what we do here as far as asset creation (we dont use the UE3 so i cant comment about any of that).

However, you talked a bunch about how your computer couldnt handle baking (or projecting, as you call it) out maps for meshes with more than 1m polygons. You should check out xNormal (http://www.xnormal.net/1.aspx). It is a free app that you can use to bake out several kinds of maps like normal, occlusion, cavity, diffuse, etc. And it is super fast, and super efficient. You never have to bring in the high res mesh into a viewport or anything, so there is no real slowdown until you start generating the maps. On my work pc (quadcore cpu with 4 gigs of slow ass ram) I can render a 1k normal map from a 6 million poly mesh in about 40 seconds, and so far, it give the best looking normal map i have gotten out of any other program.

Of course, that isnt going to help if you get slowdowns in zbrush from having that many polys, but thats not as much of a problem since you can hide geometry. Anyways, just a protip that we use at work here to speed things up a lot.

[clarky003]

Oh no it can handle it but it's just alot slower : P and it just wasn't efficient for me in the amount of time I had to make it all super high detail content either.

I had to figure out howto break even with the detail. Personally for this project I don't see the point in making hyper high detail models other than portfolio source content, with the trade off between detail model and texture resolution to game, you might aswell just keep the models at a lower res.

But I will most definately have a go at improving the workflow when I need the extra detail, even if it means more ram.

Also I youtubed a cinematic from the level

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKUJLky104E

[BHC]

Fantastic work mate