[UDK] The Apex Observatory
polycounter lvl 11
All right, graduating in winter, time to get some portfolio pieces out of the door.
The Apex Observatory is built on a thin needle of a mountain that pokes up above the clouds so the astronomers always have a clear view of the sky. Unfortunately space is rather scarce and with star gazers flocking in from all corners of the world comes the demand for expanded facilities.
A bit of a whimsical environment. The idea is essentially a cluster of towers and buildings huddled together on a tiny peak. It will sort of float in an expansive sea of clouds with a few smaller peaks poking out like islands. Above will be a beautiful star filled sky with all its celestial bodies in clear view.
So far I've just done some quick block-ins in Maya, trying to get a feel for the general shape and composition of the structure. I like the lopsided and angular towers in A, but I find the general layout rather boring. I'm liking the general construction of the structure and the shape of the towers in B, but I feel the layout and negative space in C is a lot more interesting.
I'd like to hear you guy's opinions. Today I will make some more variations and perhaps do some paintovers in photoshop.
The Apex Observatory is built on a thin needle of a mountain that pokes up above the clouds so the astronomers always have a clear view of the sky. Unfortunately space is rather scarce and with star gazers flocking in from all corners of the world comes the demand for expanded facilities.
A bit of a whimsical environment. The idea is essentially a cluster of towers and buildings huddled together on a tiny peak. It will sort of float in an expansive sea of clouds with a few smaller peaks poking out like islands. Above will be a beautiful star filled sky with all its celestial bodies in clear view.
So far I've just done some quick block-ins in Maya, trying to get a feel for the general shape and composition of the structure. I like the lopsided and angular towers in A, but I find the general layout rather boring. I'm liking the general construction of the structure and the shape of the towers in B, but I feel the layout and negative space in C is a lot more interesting.
I'd like to hear you guy's opinions. Today I will make some more variations and perhaps do some paintovers in photoshop.
Replies
I vote C or A, btw.
looks like a fun project!
I moved the platform further out so players arriving on the elevator will get a better view of the building. I'm not sure if it's really working out that well, and I'm not very happy with the mechanism.
Also, this never bodes well when you're looking for reference: XD
Anyway, it looks pretty amazing, and I love the vertical, spindly feel. Reminds me of a cross between Dr. Seuss and the high mountain retreats from Dinotopia, for some reason.
Just some subtle changes to make it look more precarious, and a new design for the elevator mechanism.
And I've decided to not spend too much time on the block-in stage and rather push through and get some stuff into UDK. I feel that it will be easier for me to make desicions once I understand the tool better.
So far just a simple import of the main building to wrap my head around the fbx workflow for UDK, smoothing groups, scale, multiple materials, and collision meshes.
In some initial block-ins (discarded and not posted here) I tried to keep everything very modular and on the grid. I quickly found out that I couldn't really achieve the look I was after with that so I decided to build the scene largely out of unique meshes and instead make heavy use of tiling textures and materials. I think my approach will be to assemble the buildings as layers and then move and rotate the grouped together meshes around so I can get that whimsical lopsided look without running into too many problems with lining up the meshes.
And thanks for the comments everyone, very encouraging.
Also, here is the texture.
Oh yeah, this was just a test. For the proper one I plan on overlaying two textures, one for the main shape and color of the planks and one for the wood grain. That way I can make the two patterns tile at different rates so the repetition is less obvious.
I don't know if that's your issue, but you may have two UV channels, the first one for the texturing, the second one for the lightmass.
Oh that's very clever, I'll give that a go! I think I have an idea how to do that through a material too...
Well it's not too late to do that.
I looked into that initially. The problem was that it wouldn't cast realtime or baked shadows. I made a second channel for lightmaps and that didn't fix the problem, but when I moved some shells that poked outside the 0-1 space into the bounds the realtime shadows suddenly worked again. But now they won't bake with lightmass...
Haha I saw them do this when I played Arkham City, was pretty cool.
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The concept is basically to offset the texture with a Bump Offset node (also known as Parallax), then darkening it with a multiply node, and then adding it underneath the original texture with a Lerp node. It doesn't handle corners that well, so I'm wondering if multiple stacks of Lerp might help with the illusion but I'm worried about the drawcalls. Also, I'm not sure if this is more efficient than just stacking two planes, I'll have to do some testing.
Here is the shader graph if you're curious as to how it works:
ZacD and Fingus are right in this case though I think it depends on
a) how often the planks are used (if they are everywhere then its probably not going to be as efficient as using a shader or double alpha on a flat plane)
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I used instancing in 3DCoat to make the planks tilable. I didn't record the process because I was still working things out, but I will record the next tilable asset I make. I'm thinking a brick texture.
Keep up the good work
Trying to build a set of MultiMesh brushes through this project. It's a bit of a slow process to align all the subtools, but I can see it paying off immensely down the road.
I'm also thinking I need to sit down and figure out an art direction properly. Right now I'm sort of pushing and pulling and trying things out, but I really need to just put together a style sheet and gather some inspiration and reference.
Anyway. When decimating my window mesh I ran across an odd issue.
Some of my objects would end up snapping to the center of the scene, like I applied a Unify deformation to them. A bit of poking around revealed the following:
This error message popped up when I ran the decimation process, so naturally I went to check out the layers.
Turns out my layer was still in recording mode.
Running the decimation process results in this. The subtool is decimated but is unified, and the layers are deleted.
But what if I turn off the layer recording?
Tadaaah! It decimates without problem. It even keeps the Layers, but toggling or adjusting them results in terrible glitches so there is no reason to keep them. I just did Bake All on all my subtools that had layers.
TL;DR. Before decimating your mesh, merge (Bake All) your layers to prevent the process from glitching out and rearraging your tools.
I just did this explanation because I couldn't find an answer with a quick google search. Hopefully this will help someone who runs into the same problem as me.
I have a material set up in UDK that lets me use masks and a second UV channel to combine up to 4 tiling detail textures and colors on with them. I think this should give me quite a lot of mileage from my trim sheets.
Here is a quick test I did yesterday while building the material:
And here is the really simple trim sheet I made out of some photos.
And here is the start of getting stuff built in UDK.