Roofing and general modelling update

Hey everyone, upon designing and making the roof for my models I have discovered something incredible, some genius on the internet has designed and made custom Lego pieces of ancient Chinese roof tiles and are selling them online. It uses very simple pieces which allows a Lego master builder to make any Chinese building roof style they want. The blog post can be found here:

http://thebrickblogger.com/2012/06/custom-lego-roof-tiles-by-bricktw/

This just goes to show how a complex roof system can be split down into small significant chunks, to become even modular of course.

Although this proves that the roof system can be made simply modular, the amount of pieces it would create for the people using my model kit could be quite large in the number of items needed, but it's definitely an option. I also have to point out that the roof style is that of a religious building or even a building of importance, not that of a residential dwelling.

There is also pieces that can be used to make large pagoda like rooftops, these are all well and good and effectively can create a modular system for the Lego building play set, but they don't seem to take into account the complex building structure beneath it, the Dou Gong that I am interested in replicating.

And to finish off, I want to show you my progress towards my own models. Here I have completed the segments of roofing that are required for the large building.

I based the roof structure off of my latest blog post and quick mock up I made in photoshop, he is a small comparison so you can see it quickly: 

Model structure

Model design

Another object I've been working on but forgot to show in my previous blog posts was the walls I've designed for the structures of this size. Here you can see 2 sets of door frames which can go between the middle of two extender sections or in the middle of an extension and an end cap section. There are also basic wall sections for the same sizes and for one other instance of two small sections. I would like to hopefully work on these wall pieces with normal maps as their basic flat texture will look very odd as the player would be running past them all the time.

 Here is a small image of the sort of building I want to be able to achieve at the end of the dissertation with all the different pieces, I hope.

My timeline and why it needs rearrangement

My timeline has become so back dated that it's desperately in need of rearrangement so I plan to now do this as it will help me over the next coming 2 months of this dissertation. It has become so out of date and I've gotten so far behind due to other modules that it is slowing my progress with irrelevant dates and progress milestones. Here below is my current timeline: 

Current Timeline

                                                                                                                                  
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.

I'm currently just over 4 weeks behind on my personal milestones, which isn't good on my half. The yellow line is where I should be at this current point and the green line is where I currently am. I'm still in the process of creating my 3D assets. One one set of buildings are done, i'm hoping I should easily be able to replicate these models and just adjust them to create the rest of the other models on the asset list. But because the timeline is so out of date i'm going to propose a new timeline for myself to keep to as due to the other modules and workload of the 3rd year, I just simply couldn't cope with it all and so it needs to be changed to help manage my time left effectively. This new timeline will be the date in which the object must be completed before.

New Timeline

20th March - Finish all of the models needed for the construction of the buildings.

3rd April - UVW unwrap all models that have been created and get them prepared for diffuse mapping.

17th April - Create and supply all textures with a diffuse texture, Normal maps will need to be made for the roof and if time is spare start creation of Normal maps on the woodwork and walls.

1st May - Import and construct the Village within UDK with textures and assets. Test and arrange houses similar to some of the previous designs.

1st-15th May - I will be keeping this time for any overhanging production for models and objectives. I will also leave this time for myself to create more blog posts as to describe how the dissertation is going and also to organise my models and the final environment, adding in some environment effects and even organise my level pack in a organise manner ready to be shown to people.

Although I am many weeks behind, I still have made a lot of progress overall. Other modules have been getting on top of me especially my Design masterclass, Our group has even volunteered to help my other colleague with Dare to be Digital to help him with his grades although we wont be getting marked on it. I know this is only small amounts of work, but it all seems to add up pretty quickly as I've recently seen.

But as a general catch up to my 3D modelling work state, the first main building is nearing completion, all that is needed to be constructed is the roof and the corner strut to create the corner. When this is complete I can take this structure and simply copy how it's created and apply the same principles to the other models.

Making progress

It's been a while since i've been blog posting, but I have made some progress on a personal scale. I've been confused with the way in which I can model the walls of my structures whilst still keeping the structure architecture fully visible and not covered up by the external walls. I've also been trying to figure out how to keep the models modular whilst minimising or getting rid of all mesh clipping. This is when two planes of a model are on or are very close to the same position and the shader has a hard time choosing which face to render and instead it renders both polys and shows an odd jaggered texture. This isn't good when modelling, especially on a part of the model that can be seen by the player, I needed to avoid this at all costs to have a decent looking final product. Here is an example of mesh clipping.

So for the last few days i've been working on wall that will fit in with the columns, the walls need to be of a variety of size length ways to counter for nearly every situation that the level designer needs to offer. Here you can see different size of wall being used to make up the modular components. It also shows off the structural composition which is a big goal of this dissertation. 

I have also begun work on the end caps for the structure to aid me with my wall construction, they are not at their final stage yet but i'm debating whether to cut them up into separate segments to aid more so with the modularity of the kit.

So this is what i'm currently working on and should be finished with it soon, once these are complete the hard task of UV unwrapping each piece begins, a hard an grueling task, but a task that I look forward to starting so that I can be one step closer to completion of this modular kit and experimenting can then begin.

Breaking the habit

I'm back again to continue the working on my dissertation, but I've had reason as to why I've had so much time off. Over the course of the last 2 months a couple of other projects did arise on my part and have been a burden of work and it has held me back massively. One of the projects is of dare to be digital, which doesn't require that much time however there is another project that I've become a part of that has taken a lot of my time up and that is Design Masterclass. I've been asked to work on an up and coming iOS/Android game and this position is taking up a lot of my spare time to get to my producers requirements. However I do plan to now hit the dissertation hard by the fact my first wave of milestones on the design masterclass are complete. I need to quickly get up to speed with my modelling that I already started in January and finish the modelling process. The reason being for my delay is that I discovered that the blog is actually our dissertation as a whole and I do not have to write a separate one to go along side my assets/artifact, this gives me much more freedom as I did in fact leave time at the end of the dissertation milestone to write my dissertation out which I now realise I no longer have to do.

I will be starting where I left off, at creating the large buildings walls and test if these work, if these do, then the rest of the modelling process will be quick and simple as they are in theory just smaller versions of the larger models.

So thats just my catch up plan, you will see more from me soon.

Presentation - self evaluation

Hey there again guys, time for another blog post, this one however will be short and sweet and judging by the title you can easily guess what its about. Well I had my solo dissertation progress presentation not 3 days ago and I thought it went pretty well, It was quite nerve racking leading up to it. I feel that i presented well, better than my average performance when it comes down to pitches and presentations. I feel that i was nervous as i had a lot of content to share with them, over the Christmas holiday i had worked hard on my design aspects and thus had a fair few slides with my digital drawings. All in all i feel it was a successful presentation, one of the lecturers did have a question about why i split the modular assets where i did. And i explained to him that the bet design wouldn't actually work the way he was suggesting. From this i plan to maybe look at the way Dave was wondering about splitting it up.

Current progress leading up to January 20th presentation

I've been working hard on trying to get some assets modelled that I can show on Monday, and I'm making huge progress. I've begun progress on a large building structure that has 3 sections. A end piece with struts, a middle piece with struts and an end piece to finalise the building. In each of the screen shots the small pink square is the size proportion to the player. All of which are simply the structure and does not include the walls as of yet. But hopefully will do soon.





Large building middle section with strut 3,087 polys





Large building end section with strut - 3,087 polys

Large Building End cap piece without struts - 2,859 polys

These are the 3 pieces I've constructed that fit together to create the one building. I plan on giving the player a variety of walls you use to kit out the building. They would include: a door way, a window, a window with blind or just a plain wall.

 

Here is a small screen shot of them together within UDK.

 

Comparison of old mock model to new pieced together model

Pieces individually

It also shows the comparison and changes made since the mock model, the roof has been raise to get a steeper as now I have put in more research I have found that the buildings had steeper roof structures.

 

I have also constructed another asset list to aid myself in creating the small villages, this can be seen below.

 

 

 

 

The beginning of modelling

I know this is a few weeks late, but the start of modelling has begun. I underestimated the complexity of the designs and research into creating these models, I did not want to rush into the modelling too soon without the comfort of research and clarity. To begin, I need to set up my 3dsmax units so that the units and scaling between both UDK and 3Dsmax are on par with each other. I began by exporting my model as an ASE and quickly found problems. Errors began to pop up notifying me about materials and mapping co ordinates, upon searching online I was quickly able to find the solution and found that it was a simple export selection option whilst exporting the model. I found out quickly that the model I created was about 150 times larger than I actually needed it to be. This was because during the mock up, I did not take scale or units into account, I simply just began to model as quickly as possible.

Unit and set up references

 The units here are taken off a guide video to sync up the units for 3Dsmax and UDK. It also shows you how to make a small cube which is exactly player height in UDK. This came in very useful as I was able to work out that my mock up structure was in fact over 80 times too large. As a rough guess I scaled down the whole model so that it was the approximate size and tested it again in UDK. After some adjustments in 3dsamx, this was the scaling and size of the building from a players perspective.

Mock structure from players point of view

 I also had a brainwave whilst working out the size of the individual netting, in UDK they use a snap to grid option, which I plan to utilise when it comes to building the buildings together, these settings can be changed, however its default is set to 16 and thus if I was to make each segment a factor of 16 squared, then the pieces should go together smoothly (hopefully).

I made a list of all the power I can use to adjust the models. Here are the numbers I will use for reference when modelling (16, 32, 48, 64, 80, 96, 112, 128, 144, 160, 176, 192, 208, 224, 240, 256.)

Testing character scale within the mock structure

Here I tested the units, by creating a 256x256 x512 box and exporting it, I placed it over the default box in UDK and from the overlapping, I can tell that it's perfect size, it's time to being modelling.

Overlapping of perfectly aligned pixels