The lowpoly came in at 1676. Everything is processed but I'm tweaking the heightmap and lightmap before release of the assets.
On the above comparison shot you can see where max is getting confused about the mirrored cap section
on the top. The reason for this is due to max's normal support being flaky, this flaw would not appear in the
UE3 engine. In UE3, the cap at the top would appear like the cap at the bottom without the flaws.
You may be able to see from the low poly at the far right that the smoothing groups are pretty forced on the poles vclamps.
This is deliberate.
Low poly was best though of as a rigid hard form in previous engines, now
its best though of as putty and the softer it is and the more areas are on 1 smoothing group, the more ably
it will be able to grab all the hi poly information.
It may look bad in the preview window of max, but in-game it will just look like it should. It's because of this
that I chamfered the cap sections to make sure they were able to support the single smoothing group and
process better and also so that the object is self capping.
As for the damage looking more extra on the central section and then there being nothing on the poles, this
is because I'd hoped for a texture artist to pick up on my cue to demonstrate blast damage and burned
metal areas here. Also, I hope for a texture artist to further articulate the level of detail here and overlay
the softer dents with harder Photoshop generated impact crater marks and scoring.
The poles are plain because not everything needs to be articulated in 3d as that would be a poor use of time,
particularly on a smaller less prominent shape such as the poles where the texture guy can damage them up.
As to their lack of deformation in 3d, again it is counter productive to warp the hi poly then unwrap to a
warped low poly when I can treat it much like we would a ponytail on a character and keep it straight to
start with for a cleaner unwrap later to be followed by deformation in 3d once the texture is final.
In this case I have unwrapped every key area neatly into tiling squares so thatall the main sections of the
center body, pipes, clamps and bases are all capped and can be deformed through the 'Deform to Path'
function or recombined in different orders.
The end result of this would be that although I spent probably a full 5 days modelling, zbrushing, low
polying, unwrapping and processing, I will be able to get a dozen reuseable assets out of the set minimum.
The spec here is comparable to an average piece in UT2k7 and Gears of War. It all depends of course.
Recently I've been able to spend about 4x2048 normal/diffuse/spec maps and about 12k polys on a
single building for Gears. However, that's because its a singleplayer game and makes use of our streaming
technology more than UT7 where the spec is more optimized as there won't necessarily always be the
streaming tech to rely on in tight indoor levels.
It's also worth pointing out that the Building sections collectively, thanks to making things modular and
liberal use of path deforming, help to produce about 60-80 assets ingame and can also be the base sections
for later works.
I hope that helps to answer people’s questions.
Environments take a lot more time when articulating to hi poly level so we try to make the most of that
time by planning ahead to make everything modular, its really important to do this now and repetition is
the cornerstone of good environment design anyway so its all good!
r.
. Very informative! I can't wait to make levels for Unreal 2007. hehe
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