well i'm gonna make this environment to learn some fancy shader and sculpting stuff mostly. hopefully you will all give me tons of your sweet tricks and workflow tips along the way. feel free to throw hard crits at it along the way, I want to make the best of this.


here's the primary reference photo I'm basing this off, with two little concepts below to throw in some of my own ideas.


and here's a handful of lighting and mood shots.


here's a material test I did earlier. just the start of the base wall material. its diffuse/spec/normal. in the first, big reference pic I posted, I'm not quite sure how I'm going to be able to achieve those directional, graffiti clean-up swatches without decals. (i'd really like to have that nice effect where the paint has collected in between bricks, and isn't worn down as much.) i'll worry about that later though

I'll post a rough, not-too-far-along version of the environment later tonight hopefully. In a misguided attempt to stay true to a planned schedule, I'll make my own personal mistake of committing the first step to completing most of the base materials and modeling for the walls, ceiling and floor.

here goes!

Well executed preparation! Looking forward to seeing this!

a few hours later, I have most of the boring, blockout bits done. now I can move onto sculpting and texturing the large surfaces. after rushing it all into unreal, and 1 quick light bake later, here's where i'm leaving it tonight.



as mentioned earlier, next big push will be the rest of the major surfaces. mainly, the corrugated ceiling.



professionally, the engines that I've worked with offered no support for instancing environment assets, so it's definitely a different feeling than what i'm used to. in the image above, the yellow highlighted object (which is a metal frame that runs the entirety of the warehouse) is very long, and won't unwrap for lightmaps very well. now that I give it a bit more thought, (this also isn't very important at the moment, but hey) I'll probably add a few divisions along its length, and manually break the edges so there's not such a horrible waste in resolution.

tomorrows update should be a bit cooler looking.

warehaus? LOL.. you are not german by any chance are you

Looking good so far. bit on the generic side but i dig the brick texture. For this thin metal frames i would probably just use vertex based lightmaps. Get a few subdivisions in there and you should be good.

The time you've taken in planning is already paying off in the blockout. Already a very believable space.

Nice start, the concepts look really good!

This is a good start. Blockout looks good so far.

thanks for the comments guys. :] had to spend a little while away from the pc for a bit, but i'm back on the scene. tonight's update was a bit of a rush, i'll try and share a little more in depth stuff, particularly on weekends when i've more time to spare.
@Stefan: haha yeah man, i'll do my best to make this warehouse very interesting. I haven't shown everything yet. ;] I've some neat set dressing planned to give the whole locale a bit of history.


here's a start on the corrugated ceiling. (textures and paint wear are far from final, placeholder for the moment. going to move onto some other stuff in meantime.) just nailing down colours and how much paint wear will be on each of the three generic, reusable tiles.

whats the point in NOT using decals for paint swatches grafitti etc...this is where they can be really usefull for breaking up tiling...

Originally Posted by SHEPEIRO

whats the point in NOT using decals for paint swatches grafitti etc...this is where they can be really usefull for breaking up tiling...

I was just thinking the same thing. I think it would be a lot cheaper than using say multiple uv channels in a single shader or multiple material ID's on the mesh.

we have a crazy shader here at work that does this kinda stuff but its really expensive, so its used rarely, while decals and overlays are used all over the place.

nice ref collection, itd be great to get the grout looking all squished outta the cracks like the main refs you have, right now its looking a bit sterile/unnaturallly perfect.

naw, you're right. (just for clarification, when I said decal I meant a decal plane that hovers over a surface, never ruled out a blend shader) i've been leaning that way for a few days now. i'd wanted to give some vertex painting stuff a shot, but I can't think of how I'd get the nice directional details you see in the ref.

: ) will definitely discuss it more in-depth when I get to that step. (fairly soon) here's what I'd like to achieve though.

so example one represents a traditional, alpha card decal. i’ve got my wicked mad tag over the brick wall. nice. now what if I wanted to take it a step further and wanted it less opaque in the grout? (eg2) Adding additional information to the decal’s alpha channel would render it useless for reuse, unless it was overtop another identical brick pattern and rotation.

I admittedly don't have a lot of experience with blending/overlaying materials. (throwing another UV channel on a surface, projecting and clamping an alpha overlay) I'd really like to take a look at some shader examples. I'll dig through UDK's documentation to see if I can't figure out the most basic one, and work my way from there when I get to this step. For now, I need to continue getting all the major elements roughed in.

mash: thanks man, i'll tweak that on the first polish pass.

I wouldn't subtract the grout from the graffiti, that's not realistic in my opinion. When you spray graffiti you are less likely to hit the grout, but you'll no doubt still hit it. You will also want a good amount of the texture underneath to show through, but have the color information of your graffiti. Spray paint isn't thick enough to be lathered on to where it appears smooth.

keres: to clarify, my 5 minute image created before lunch is not the level of quality or look that I want to achieve. : ) i'm giving a very exaggerated example of an effect I want to achieve. if you look at the right-hand side of the first reference shot, there's some swatches where water damage has collected in the grout and washed away some of the paint. it's a subtle effect, but when you add all those little touches in, it can really make a shader something special.

i talked with some people at work and have a good idea how I'm going to approach it. in order to maintain focus on what's important at this stage, i'm gonna refrain from any more shader talk until I actually get to that stage. its just diffuse, normal and spec for a while from here on.

done quite a bit of this recently... heres two of my findings

1- you dont really need to use an opacty map that matches the brick...if its a diffuse only decal that takes on all the lighting but modfies the underlying spec

2- if you have one type of brick make the decals for that brick... duplicate and push the geometry and then you can pick where you want them to be...if you need them to be somewhere particular... its a case of offsetting the texture in pS and tweaking the underlying UVs......also if you make the texel density half on the decal means you can cover way more space than your tiling underneath and if its using the lighting from the underlying normals it wont look less detailed

Looking really good!

When you talk about using vertex paint for decal blends do you mean stuff like this: http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/UDK_Adv..._Painting.html
or this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0V6bit8PrZo
Where it takes the bump and underlying texture into account?

I'm not sure how you could use that for paint swatches, typically it uses two tile textures. It would be an interesting trick if you could position a paint swatch anywhere and have it blend...

Shep: Thanks man, good advice. (I was prob overthinking it) What I'm going to try first when I get to the graf stage is just overlaying the diffuse overtop, inheriting the only the bricks' normal information. I'm pretty familiar with using floating decal geo, so if it comes to that, I should be ok. One thing I did find was a decal projector, similar to what used to be in UE2. (though it was a buggy POS in UE2.) http://www.hourences.com/book/tutorialsue3decals.htm I'm gonna give it a shot sometime soon to see how it works.

Vig: thanks much for those links! chris actually sits behind me at work, so I think you just unwittingly signed him up for giving me a hand with this shader stuff. he can deal with it. B) This is actually pretty close to what I'm looking for. I just have to think through in my head how to apply the same principles to applying graffiti. That stage is pretty soon.

more or less finished off the diffuse and normal maps for the corrugated sheets. all that's left to final is their alpha masks, spec maps and shader. I also have to play with their placement so they overlap eachother a bit. they've all got tiny seams atm


also got the diffuse and normal done for the pillars & supports that cover the space. looked up a video on how to apply detail normal maps in UE3 and this is what I ended up with. this the best way of going about it? this method also doesn't offer me control over when the detail map fades in, but the mipping seems to do a good enough job.

next update should include more basic texturing and a first lighting pass. (and a replacement to the unfitting skybox in there right now.)

thanks for the discussion and advice so far, guys. : )

edit: holy moly photobucket butchers image quality. i hope it reacts better to PNG's next time around.

Originally Posted by Uly

naw, you're right. (just for clarification, when I said decal I meant a decal plane that hovers over a surface, never ruled out a blend shader) i've been leaning that way for a few days now. i'd wanted to give some vertex painting stuff a shot, but I can't think of how I'd get the nice directional details you see in the ref.

: ) will definitely discuss it more in-depth when I get to that step. (fairly soon) here's what I'd like to achieve though.

so example one represents a traditional, alpha card decal. i’ve got my wicked mad tag over the brick wall. nice. now what if I wanted to take it a step further and wanted it less opaque in the grout? (eg2) Adding additional information to the decal’s alpha channel would render it useless for reuse, unless it was overtop another identical brick pattern and rotation.

I admittedly don't have a lot of experience with blending/overlaying materials. (throwing another UV channel on a surface, projecting and clamping an alpha overlay) I'd really like to take a look at some shader examples. I'll dig through UDK's documentation to see if I can't figure out the most basic one, and work my way from there when I get to this step. For now, I need to continue getting all the major elements roughed in.

mash: thanks man, i'll tweak that on the first polish pass.

This might get you going. There's a link to the sample file.

Originally Posted by Lamont

Here is how I do decals, colored grunge and debris.. err whatever you want to stick on a building. My whole take on material creation is to examine the scene and come up with a list of materials I'd need. From there I see what materials I can consolidate. And from there I make Master Materials, and anything that needs that material I make an instance and change only a few parameters instead of making whole new nodes.

So here is the wall in Maya, I have two UV sets: One for decals, one for the brick. And I liked the UV sets where map2 is linked to the decal, and map1 is for the diffuse. Don't worry about the alpha.






So in UED after I import all the assets, here is how I set up the node. Notice the "TilingFactor" labeled node. That dictates the amount of tiling.



I changed the "TilingFactor" node to 5, notice things still sync up. I didn't have to paint a new decal to match up with it.

The benefit of this is that I can pop in any decal image, any brick image and it will tile correctly and retail the nice brick/painted on look. And this can be used for the majority of my buildings. Add in an AO map and custom lighting if you need. Take this one more step further with a good parallax map network and tie in the second mask for the decal with the grout of the brick, where the edges around each brick shows more wear and tear on the decal.



Questions that may come up:

Q - So why don't you just have an alpha plane over it?
A - It doesn't really look like it's tied into the wall, like it's a part of it. I'd use alpha planes for things like posters and dynamic things. Or if the engine dictated that I needed to for things like this. Also, lighting, as objects in UED that are alpha'd don't get the nice lighting as the other objects. The only way is to have a 1bit alpha (either white or black, no grey) and you'd loose all the nice blended edges.

You can get crazy with this and have a spec value for the painted images in the alpha channel used by a second UV set. Take this value and add it to the spec of the brick. Also you can combine normal maps in UED, by pulling all the channels apart, then putting them back together. This may be overkill, but the surface variations you can get will look badass.

Download source files (Maya 2009/UED) here: ::LINKY::

hey lamont, very belated thanks for your assistance. it's gonna come in handy soon.

and hey, i've been gone for a while. after working four months in an eastern european salt mine based a satellite state of the former Soviet bloc, I managed to obtain a plane ticket back to canada via their local airlines. in exchange for the flight, I cried on command repeatedly while they demonstrated to their youngest children what a failure of a man looked like. the service completed and my local reputation tarnished, I was no longer of any use as the official salt mine greeter, similar to my previous job at the local Walmart in Vancouver. Hopefully this scene will break me into the games industry.


i made a quick mattress earlier today. polycount on the low is really high cause im gonna be bending it over things, just havent deformed it yet. : ) other exciting bedding will come tomorrow! ill start the proper texturing when the rest is done. playing with clothsim soon. im excited!

Great job... a really good way to show your understanding of the technicalities of creating shaders. It's coming along. There is all kinds of things that you can add to your shader to creat the blending be more random and jittery. As well as ways to add grime to your brick tile to break them up a little. Keep up the good work!

thanks glottis, but that was Lamont there giving me a hand. I've learned quite a bit since then, have yet to implement it en masse in the scene.

well i've been all over the place except for 3d lately, but now I'm back to wrapping this baby up. feeling good for the end of this month, give maybe one week for love & polishing.

fast and informative. You've got a really impressive workflow. I mean this is the kind of thread that shows everything from the ground up. You've been very helpful to many just by going about your day. I find that very admirable I always feel jealous when there's no reccomendations I can think of. damn you......good work.

This is good stuff! Only thing bugging me is the black marks on the floor - dirt? oil? what are they? could do with lightening or some specular detail to bring them into the world a bit more.

I suggest umping the sunlight way up. when your inside, your value range goes from black to white within that shadowy environment, so it would make all area's that receives sunlight, super bright. just like your ref image. Toning the light down like it is now makes it feel.. fake

the paint swathces should be possible with a vertex paint,

check the "The Pit" udk environment on the fourms and you can see vertex paint and a material shader used for sand and damage and the idea could defiantly be adapted. and i dont think it would need detail in the normal maps since it uses the height map of the base of the material to decided how it goes over crevices.

Looks great, and very informative. Learned a lot just by going through this thread.