Organisation, and the planning before construction of assets

Before I begin to construct the assets I need to create or at least give myself a better understanding on how they will fit together. My lecturer advised me and showed me a model castle that he designed and made for an old War hammer game. He showed me how each piece revolved around fitting into one square segment so that wherever he put it, it would be aligned with the other objects in the scene. With this in mind I plan on trying to keep each piece of the model as close as I can to one segment.

Interiors were also mentioned which I asked about whether I should consider giving them a shot after making the structure work. From this I was given the advice of only creating the exterior/structure of the buildings as filling the interiors with assets would be a waste of time as they were assets not being assessed as part of the modular and the time spent constructing them could be used to construct better buildings.

So to begin I took at a look at my first attempt at a Chinese building 3D model and tried to figure out how I could break it down in order to construct basically a tileable and modular building. Here is a top and side view of the current mock up building structure I made.

And here is my plan with the wooden structure to make it easily modular along the X-axis. By cutting the structure into one section, the designer or myself have more control over how large they want to make the building. Instead of making a building that has to be a power of 2 sections or 4 sections, the level designer can now make small adjustments where necessary.

This design isn't flawless yet at the design is not perfectly ready for duplications and will need some adjustments before the final edition. For example, the building still needs two more columns in the centre in order so that 'rooms' could be built with and to give the design more stability. This will also aid in  the designs for a roof that hangs out over the canopy slightly.

More model preparation will be coming soon, I know it's late but these designs need to be perfect to execute such a complicated modular build with precision.

Design drawings and Scaling

Christmas and holiday season is over, it's time to get back into the swing of things. I've been trying my hardest to complete these drawings and designs within the constraints of the timeline, however I didn't find it personally feasible as they were tricky to make and design. I feel I may of over scoped the designs of each building however, they are now complete and I now have a general idea about proportion and scales of the buildings. Although drawing all these buildings has been rather tiresome, it has also giving me inspiration to now make them in 3D form. These are the buildings as a collective and will be used whilst 3D modelling to guide me.



Building 1
 

Building 2
 

Building 3
 

Building 4
 

Building 5
 

From these I will now start the final asset list and then begin 3D modelling. I know that these are late, but I've been working on these over the last few weeks. These drawing are also not final and can or possibly will be changed.

Asset list and drawings

Hello there world, I have been doing some drawing of the sort of buildings I wish to create within my village and i've found it extremely time consuming and I may of over scoped this part of the time line. Currently I have only one building drawn out in a basic isometric form to build upon the advice given to me to make all blocks and items fit one block. Here below is the drawing I've completed to help guide me into choosing the assets and create the asset list. The asset list may be quite large but a lot more buildings can be built from this kit if they were made.

From the isometric drawing, here is a snippet of all the pieces I would need to create to make this model. This list will most definitely expand as I would like a slight variation in my buildings.

Hopefully I can get the next set of buildings done very soon to add to this list. Although you have to remember that a Chinese house can be made up of many buildings put together so this may seem like a large amount of assets for a building, or maybe I'm not dividing it up enough yet.

Basic map design of village

Based on my research here is a simple top down view of the style of map and layout of the village I would make, although this wont be the final design, it is a taster as to the style of orientation and organisation of the houses I hope to aim for. All the main entrances facing south to keep away from the North winds, tight and close structures with small alleyways. I hope to design a few more in the next two days.

Miscellaneous inspiration of various chinese buildings for top down map

As I am now currently trying to sketch down a few drawings of top down maps of my eventual village layout, I searched on the internet for some images to get me in the right mood or to create a 'mood pallet' to aid my drawing, as this always seems to help me. There were a few images I found very useful and that gave me inspiration. I started by looking at google maps to see if I could see any older districts fo China to get a style of layout of some buildings to give me some foundations but I foudn that China is very secretive about showing off their countrys map to the West.

Here are some of the pictures I found inspiring and helpful whilst drawing down top down maps, although some of the pictures don't have the same features of the Sui-Tang dynasty, they still do have some similar aesthetics.

A man climbs down a ladder after sweeping dust from atop the entrance to his small residence in a "hutong", (or small alley in Chinese) in central Beijing, on April 22, 2011. Doorways leading to "hutongs" and their "siheyuan" (or small courtyard houses in Chinese) once criss-crossed the city, but they are quickly disappearing with Beijing's fast evolution into a modern metropolis. (Reuters/David Gray)

 

Interior view of an earth building located at Chuxi Village, Xiayang town, Yongding county, in east China's Fujian Province. There are about 30,000 earth buildings, dating mostly from the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, in the Fujian Province, southern and eastern China. (Reuters/Kin Cheung)

 

A Chinese man paints the scenery while a villager rows a wooden boat passing by some of the Ming Dynasty's ancient buildings built along a river in Xitang, Jiashan County, Zhejiang Province, on May 16, 2011. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

 

Ethnic Dong minority villagers walk through a covered bridge on their way to a Kam Grand Choir gathering in Tongguan village of Liping county, Guizhou province, on October 17, 2011. (Reuters/Sheng Li)

All these images were found off of a collection of new an old Chinese Architecture blog, the blog can be seen below

Links:

Chinese Architecture Blog
http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/11/chinese-architecture-old-and-new/100409/

Updated Dissertation timeline

Since the project proposal feedback, i've been slipping behind on the timeline and on my workflow progress; this was because I did for see the fact that I would have so much to work on from the feedback and also the time it takes for this extensive research to take place. I now wish to produce a more updated and realistic time line to construct around my time and to produce the best dissertation possible.

Project Timeline:

2nd November - Finish draft and hand in final dissertation proposal before the 4^th of November

25^th November – Complete any touch up research that I receive from the dissertation proposal, so that the following months work is much smoother.

 

9^th December – Research into one dynasty of the Chinese culture and choose the style of village I want to create. Begin to draw top down layout designs on how I would like buildings to look and be orientated.

16th December - Decide on scale and size of the models as well as to construct an asset list of what will need to be modelled. Complete individual drawings of the general look of each model to aid in the construction of the models.

30^th December – Begin to model each asset without unwrapping UVW’s. Test scale and size in UDK where possible. Assemble a basic grey box area of the modular assets to see them all together to test scale an size.

17^th February – Continue modelling if needed and start UVW unwrapping on each asset ready for texturing. (May take longer as not as experienced in UVW unwrapping, although research into quicker uvw mapping will be undertaken over the course of the project.)

10^th March – Experiment with Mudbox/Zbrush and the NvidiaNormal filter in Photoshop in texturing the assets with diffuse specular and Normals.

24^th March – Import and construct the Village within UDK with textures and assets.

7^th April – touch up and add more details to models where needed or where some models issue are found. If no issues are found or are ironed out and total polygon count allows (45k polygons). Create a couple more assets to add a more realistic atmosphere to the scene such as trees, pots and tiles.

 7^th April - 15^th May – Work on finalising dissertation

 17^th May – 16^th May to be the absolute deadline of handing in dissertation.

Tileable textures

To construct my own models I have usually taken textures from royalty free stock image websites and plonked them in Photoshop, and then using manipulation tools on the texture for the asset. This technique has served me well creating individual assets however I've never needed to make a texture that needs to be tileable and seamless for modular assets, this is nearly a necessity when using assets which can touch each other or be very close and still be the same material.

So browsing the internet to find advice on creating seamless/tileable textures and stumbled across a free stock image website for use for artists. www.cgtextures.com I quickly found a variety of desirable and useful textures that suited the materials that Chinese used.

The Chinese use compressed earth to create their non load bearing walls, although the texturing website contained no mud wall textures, I found that the plaster section of the website supplied me with a variety of similar white washed walls that were useful.



White Plaster texture

From the advice I have found on line, it was clear to me that one of the most important features of a tileable texture is to reduce or choose a texture without many obvious features.

Tonal values of the texture need to be consistent along the image, to create this consistency, I was advised to desaturate the image and then add a luminosity layer and change the high pass levels to create a texture with consistent tones.

The patch tool I found was the most useful tool for removing obvious features on the texture, the spot healing bush was also a handy tool and does similar actions, but you lose sharpness quality when it does it's calculations.


Here is the final tileable texture, there is 4 textures there and I find it hard to notice the seams on the edges of the image, which is exactly what I was aiming to produce. I then took this texture and created a makeshift wall plane in 3ds Max to demonstrate the tileable texture on a game object. Below is the textured plane. 



As well as creating a diffuse texture for the plane, I also began exploring the use of normal maps to add more detail to the surface, I have used this technique before and it gave a much more detailed effect with near minimal effort. The Nvidia Normal map filter for Adobe Photoshop was used to create this normal map below, this Is a quick and easy way to produce a detailed normal map, but there are other ways that normal maps can be achieved.

Links

Tileable textures and how to construct them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy2cwSV0Iys