dinsdag 7 december 2010

Here we go

Hello,

Allow me to start by introducing myself, and telling you a bit about my background. My name is Bram Borremans, currently 26 years old, and a geek in many different ways. Here's my history.

Growing up as a gamer, I've always had an intrest for 3d environments, and the technology behind it. So around my 15th started leveldesigning for Half-life, and went on from there, into 3d max, and more recently into Maya.  I never took any classes, and learned the little knowledge I have now thanks to the wonderfull world of the internet, until recently that is. I started a 5 month Maya course earlier this year, because I wanted to know more then just 3ds max, and a course was the perfect way to keep me motivated throughout the learning curve.

On this blog you'll find mostly work in progress, and lots of text explaining the difficulties I encountered. Maybe I'll even do some tutorials for the stuff I had a hard time learning, and couldn't find a decent tutorial about. This won't be a strictly maya blog, but Chances are in some cases I'll diverge into 3ds max, Z-brush, Photoshop, Hammer, UnrealEd, and who knows what else.

As a sidenote, a few years ago I also started drawing in evening classes at the local art academy, so you might see some old fashioned pencil and paper work appear here too.

Anyhow, back to the now!

Currently, as part of the course I'm in,  this is my assignment
Requirements:
-Outdoor Scene
-Contains Central structure (Building whatever)
-Some foilage and other outdoor decoration

So, as a any decent first step, I made up my mind on what to make. As this would be a learning experience, I wanted to give myself a challenge. I chose a Victorian house, and started collecting reference. Out of this reference I distilled the most typical victorian features and started sketching up my own creation.

This design would be the bases of my scene. So started the modeling, and this is how my basic model looks like now: 


As you can see, I ended up with a single object model of about 40k tris. I opted to create one smooth object as to make sure I got used to Maya's polygon tools, so I chose the hard route to get lots of practice sewing and welding (Or merging as Maya calls it).

Time to move on to the UV layout:

This took me a tremendous amount of time. I basicly just applied the automatic mapping, moved everything to the top left quadrant, and started sewing and stiching, moving complete parts to the top right quadrant. Most of this work was done on my Mac, that seems to have some performance issues with this. Selecting and moving UV's way a painstakingly slow process. Without a doubt, the most boring part I encountered so far.

After that, I mocked up a placeholder texture, gradualy detailing more and more, creating bumpmaps for the roof, wood, etc ...
There is simply no way I could create a decent Bumpmap for the stone slate roof tiles based on the color map. It kept turning out as a brick bumpmap instead of the gradient ramps I would require. Putting this on hold for now. Might try and do it with normal maps later on.

My texture dimensions are at 8192x8192 pixels, rather large and memory intensive to work on. I baked my ambient occlusion map last weekend, and this took well over 4 hours at 256 samples. 


Yet this made a huge difference when placing it on top of my color map, and rendering out the results. 

Other then that, the terrain shape has been created, some minor foilage (low poly background stuff), render settings, skydome etc have been created, only requiring some minor tweaking here and there.

Left to do: 
-Figure out a way how to realistically create grass
-Fix Roof bumps (normal maps)
-Fiddle with material for pillars to also overlay the ambient occlusion. 
-Finish up Texture
-Finish up Bump maps
-Create high poly tree for foreground (current ones are placeholders)

Future posts will probably be more detailed, this post feels like a quick recap of the last 2 months.

Here's a very basic WIP render, half-done textures, whatnot. Mainly to give you an idea of the Scene's setup.








1 opmerking:

  1. Thanks for this wonderful post. I loved the post quality of your website. All the pics are very nice...Thanks for sharing with us.

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