Medieval City (UE4)
polycounter lvl 16
So, found some time to work on some personal art the last week, was a long time since I did something modular/not-scifi related, so I started making a fantasy city for fun using placeholder geo, just to see how far I could take it using a relatively simple kit.
Here are some random shots and an older shot of some of the kitpieces I am using.
Here are some random shots and an older shot of some of the kitpieces I am using.
Replies
Just first thing that came to mind is those old school towns and their organic streets and alleys. I wonder if you will be trying to achieve that kind of organic layout as you progress?
Just figured I'd throw that out there.
anuxinamoon/anglorum: The smallest pieces have a gridsnap of 16 I think, but most are 32-256. I use the large scale snapping to build things quickly together and to prove out the kit. Only I start polishing the scene and adding detailmeshes, proper street layout etc, I will take the snapped together houses and start to mess them up a bit so its not so perfect and straight
Look forward to future updates.
I'd be careful with the noise though, since you are going to use those materials everywhere it might be a good idea to tone down the beaten up edges and general contrast, especially on the wooden beams.
Also great job on the kit so far, seems very flexible
StraightDraw84: thanks, its pretty much straight up cgtextures.com + a little bit of tweaking + ndo2, so.. they are actually not very good, its the blending that fools you!
Should those beams on the corners lay on the same horizontal plane? You'd think they'd be in each others way. You could probably just offset them slightly and it would be more believable/interesting.
Cheathem: For this I just made a quick automatic mapping for all the kit pieces, and then a more proper one when Im building the proper one (can be seen in the stream, I unwrap a whole lot of assets there) will post link to youtube video
Personally I don't like the horizontal pieces with the long diagonal beams, especially since they appear relatively often. No idea if you have references for that, but it strikes me as unusual and not really a good method to distribute the weight.
well done man keep up the good work...
Replaced almost all the wall-assets with proper ones now. Moving on to fixing the next set, either some stonework or roofs : )
Also, here's something visually similar to the direction you're going for
Spend some time today making textures and starting to set up the shader for the roofs, tried to make a decent parallax occlusion shader with blending to see if that approach worked, it works ok, but not as well as I would have liked. Might turn into mesh-roofs or atleast one version with it.
But dang, those roof tiles you've got are fantastic!
Oh I didn't mean a "brick" as in just what we think of as a brick, I meant as in the solid, utterly uniform brick patterns we see today, the sort of thing your building seems to be made of. Just more of an "ad hoc" style where the moulds are differing and the building is just put together the best it can be after the fact. EG
Cement/mortar is another one of those things that's a misnomer, it's been around for a very very long time also.
For the hovels he's building here, they'd likely have non-uniform stone because it's cheaper and less labor, and they don't hold up defences. For a manor, that'd probably be more uniform stone blocks.
I think the only issue I'm seeing in his materials is contrast. The timber, daub, and stone all are pretty close in value so they're harder to distinguish. Snef, maybe making the timber a tad darker and the daub lighter might help?
Also, red brick could look pretty rad too! Brick Gothic is totally a real thing!
Can you show your Sculpt of the Wall and the wood panels?
Did you make a tileable Texture out of it?
A little breakdown?
Really inspires me to get over my apprehension about feeling like I'm just using someone elses photo. You really turn it into your own thing, and make something beautiful!
Thank you for sharing the breakdown of the kit.
When you work with such small modular pieces though, don't drawcalls eventually become a problem?
How do you go about optimization?
I am absolutely in love with modular construction and you're nailing it!
What is the size of some of your texture maps? Whatever they are, they look fantastic with the tweaks you made.
Gazy: no sculpt for the walls, just tiling textures. Wood is just a very basic sculpt, with a detailnormal over it.
NomadSoul: drawcalls will become a problem at some point yes, thats when I will start merging together some of the more commonly grouped together assets, will bring the drawcall amount down a lot : )
Andrew: 2k textures mostly, only using a couple of textures for the whole scene sofar, 4 texturesets or something like that right now : )
added another house and some new parts during the stream today:
Can you tell me which technique u used for blending the textures from cgtextures.com together? I mean that one for the Wall O.O