This is a project I am working on in one of my classes.

Ref for the house:



Ok right now my house is at 27,000 tris. I haven't optimized it at all so far, and I'm going to leave the poly count a little high for it since I'm building it modularly and going to import it into unreal 3. I'm shooting for about 25,000 tris when its completed. Does that sound decent?



The texture I have on it is just a place holder, its a 1024 and really rough right now. The hearse is at 6900 tris, but I'm pretty sure I'll be able to cut it down to around 5500-6000.


I just wanted to show how I was building the house, I'm pretty new to building things modularly, so if you have any suggestions/tips/critiques I'd be happy to hear them.

Looks sweet to me. I think unreal only supports about 50,000 total visible [not sure]. So if it's just for that scene it should work, but sort of high for a game.

50,000 visibile in ue3? are you smoking crack? I think 500,000 onscreen is more realistic than that. 25,000 for an important, large building is should be well within reason. That being said you could probabbly simplify and optimise this to use a LOT less, but that might take away a bit of its charm.

My only suggest is this: when building a complicated object like this, try and plan out your uvs a bit before you start, really for this type of object you would probabbly want to use a couple large(204 textures that have all the seperate materials for each peice. That way you dont end up having to have 20+ unique materials for the thing, which will hurt performance WAYYYY more than 25,000 polys.

Originally Posted by Cody

Looks sweet to me. I think unreal only supports about 50,000 total visible [not sure]. So if it's just for that scene it should work, but sort of high for a game.

I almost snorted milk out of my nose when I read this. And I'm not drinking any milk. Always wonder where people get this sort of info...

Originally Posted by EarthQuake

My only suggest is this: when building a complicated object like this, try and plan out your uvs a bit before you start, really for this type of object you would probabbly want to use a couple large(204 textures that have all the seperate materials for each peice. That way you dont end up having to have 20+ unique materials for the thing, which will hurt performance WAYYYY more than 25,000 polys.

Thats a really good idea, I didn't even think about how much texture space some of the pieces would take up, hopefully I'll be able to share most of the texture space, do you think 3 2048s would be too much?

I'm going to make some place holder textures and see what I can do with it.

Thanks!

for this kind of structure you could use tiling textures in a lot of places, for example if you make a 512x1024 sheet containing a 512x512 tiling roof slate texture and a 512x512 tiling wooden wall texture, then you've already covered at least 50% of the surface area.
Then you can use another unique texture for stuff like the windows, doors and various trims/supports.
It always helps to "analyse" the building before you start, like EQ said, try and work out which bits are repeating/re-usable detail and which bits NEED to be unique. That way you can make something which looks just as good, for a lot less effort and texture space.

I like where this is going, the ref pic is really interesting and fairly unique, so if you get it up to that quality in the end, it'll be great.

I made some progress on the house, I set up the textures basically just like MoP said.
I'm putting the house into Unreal now:



I would appreciate comments/critiques on anything.

I'm having a problem with the hanging plant baskets, and I believe it is in the way I am making the material for them:



I only know how to make alpha maps work 2 ways, and both ways involve plugging the diffuse texture into emissive, which makes the textures all glowy. I've been looking for other alpha map tutorials but haven't come up with anything yet, would anybody know a way to make an alpha that wouldn't make my plants glow?

that shouldnt be the case all you need to do is put your opacity mask into your alpha channel of the diffuse )make sure the opacity is one bit too if your using opacity mask) and plug the alpha channel into the opacity mask channel. then make sure the material is opaque not masked

awesome. has a cool feel to it.

Originally Posted by EarthQuake

use a couple large ( 2048 ) textures that have all the seperate materials for each peice.

from my experience 2k maps in U3 are a no no, as they are so heavy compressed that you could better use 1 1024 map with the same look... splitting it up into more 1k maps would be wiser, with material instancing it should be pretty cheap as the shader is the same, you only have to switch the textures...

on the right the intial texture, in the middle what makes unreal when saving a package, on the right 1k map... tried all texture options, no big changes, it's the old UT Build though, might have changed till the latest build
http://polyphobia.de/nonpublic/airborn/pixelcrap.jpg

Originally Posted by NanaD

I made some progress on the house, I set up the textures basically just like MoP said.
I'm putting the house into Unreal now:



I would appreciate comments/critiques on anything.

I'm having a problem with the hanging plant baskets, and I believe it is in the way I am making the material for them:



I only know how to make alpha maps work 2 ways, and both ways involve plugging the diffuse texture into emissive, which makes the textures all glowy. I've been looking for other alpha map tutorials but haven't come up with anything yet, would anybody know a way to make an alpha that wouldn't make my plants glow?

All you need to do for that is plug your diffuse into diffuse, opmask into opmask and make sure blend mode is on masked. It SHOULD work for you. dont play with any of the other settings in your material ...that might be the problem. Hope that helps

Originally Posted by Ott

I almost snorted milk out of my nose when I read this. And I'm not drinking any milk. Always wonder where people get this sort of info...

lol made my mornin. thx donald

Thanks so much for helping me fix my plant material, I must not have had the blend mode on masked when I was trying to plug the diffuse into diffuse.

I'm going to comment more on the structure space and go ahead and say that the 3d house and the picture have proportional comparison difference issues. For example, The deck is not the same proportionately to the rest of the house and vise verse. I think you need to rethink the sizes of the pieces relative to the photo.

Unless your not trying tpo match exact then disregard the previous comment and ,...WOW good job. Looking like a good start in right direction.

If you want to get a slight different look out of your plant try plugging the colour texture into Transmission Mask and colour(maybe put a multiply on that)

It's the crappy fake translucency, so when you stick some light in there the under side wont be so dark

Ok, scrap that material ball and go back to photoshop.

It's always best to save space, so you should put your additional maps (opacity) inside your diffuse on the alpha channel

Save it out as a 32bit TGA to preserve alpha data. (NOTE: Photoshop 7 does NOT support 32bit TGAs unless you have a patch, Reccommend Photoshop CS2 or better)

import diffuse and normal. create material ball. Tie the diffuses color channel into the diffuse slot on the Material box. Tie the normals color channel into the normals slot on the material box. Tie the diffuses ALPHA channel into the opacity map slot on the material box.

That should do it.

Here is a screenshot to illustrate what you should see, using some random crap textures i made real quick.

Thanks so much for that little tutorial Arctura000.



TA-DA!
My plant doesn't look all funky anymore.

I'm going to try the fake translucency like Murdoc suggested, because I'm getting some pretty ugly shadows on the basket right now.

It looks good so far. You probably haven’t had much time to mess with the lighting but right now it’s not doing your piece any justice. It looks like you have environment fog turned on and its set to brown which kind of kills your silhouette. I’m not sure what type of setting you’re going for in your final image but at the moment it’s leaning towards spooky house at night. Just be careful about having a black background. Make sure you pop that silhouette out and give just enough light to see the texture detail but still keep the mood. I don’t know what your experience level is with Unreal 3 but here’s a couple of links to tutorials that might help bend it to your will.

Here’s a link to a tutorial on fog in Unreal it might help you get a better effect that will work for your scene.
http://www.hourences.com/book/tutorialsue3fog.htm

I think a skybox/dome would help but it looks like the process for that has changed quite a bit since UT2K4. Here’s a link to the Unreal wiki that might help.
http://wiki.beyondunreal.com/Legacy:...T3_Fake_Skybox

Hopefully those help. Good luck, I’m looking forward to seeing how your final images come out.

(( ive been thinking about what you said RE; shadows on the plant basket.

Transmission masks only give objects a bit of a semi-transluscent look when you have a light source behind them.

(in the same way the skin between your fingers glows red when you put it on a flashlight, or how a leaf shows its 'veins' when you put a light behind it).


To achieve better shadows for your basket Id just Bake/burn them in with a Render-to-texture pass in Max.

If you dont know Mental ray Amb-Occ material, there is a REALLY easy workaround in max.

Take your basket, apply a light-grey material to it, set the material to 50% self illumination.

isolate the basket so nothing else exists in the scene.

Now you have to setup some lights all around your object.

it takes a bit, but Id reccomend Omni's. (The following can be achieved with a Skylight, however that takes approx 1000 years to render. Omni's can do it in a fraction of the time with relatively similar results, and also Omni's can be customized and placed where you want the shadows most)

Make one Omni, enable shadows and set the illumination intensity to like 0.05.
Now make a sphere of them around your object (make sure they are set as 'Instance' when you duplicate them. That way when you modify the light parameters of one, they will all change.

Do a test render, If it washes everything out and your object appears Vibrant white, the lights are too bright. We want a nice soft glow from all sides here, the object should appear relatively light-ish grey with soft shadows in all the tight spots.

It depends on how many lights you have surrounding your object. Tweak the illumination values by fractions of percents until it looks right, not too dark, not too bright.

Once youve achieved this, try a render to texture, and in the Output area, click ADD and choose 'Complete Map'.

Try a few trial runs, if the shadows look sharp and strange (like multiple spotlights instead of a nice soft Ambient shadowing,) modify your Omni to be 'Shadow Map' instead of 'Raytraced' or 'Advanced Raytraced'. Shadow maps tend to be much softer depending on the parameters in the Shadow Map parameters box on the omni.

Once you have all that done, take the Complete Map it generates and throw it on top of your Diffuse, with a Multiply layer blend in Photoshop.

if you want more shadows coming down vertically, move more of the omnis on top of your object and re-render-to-texture it and see how it goes.


This is my way of Baking in shadows. It takes time and care, but in the end it can look awesome and doesnt require 10000 hour rendering times like Mental Ray ambient occlusions, or Skylights.

Practice makes perfect!


With baked in shadows you shouldnt need to worry about how your object looks when lit in engine, just tone down its lighting properties so it is not a dynamic-lit object. (elsewise it eats ram and youll see sharp shadows on it)..

if you want subtle shadows in ut3 just play with the lighting parameters (i know its confusing at first), and try to let your Ambient Occlusion shadow map you just added do most of the work for you.

Did that make any sense? hehe

Take care,

-KC