Floor Update

So I've decided to totally change the floor to some mediterranean cobblestone so that it fits the overall architectural background better. This way it looks less chunky and gives the place more space.

Lantern

High poly lantern which is gonna be baked down to a low poly. Currently on it ;)

Palazzo Update

Took some screenshots of my environment to show how it looks now. Still got few assets to add and some stuff to redo quickly (cosmetic changes. End of the month is maby a realistic date I will finish it.... hope so. Feel free to crit :)

Stone Blocks

Yet another sculpting practice wich turned out quite nice. Need to work more on the texture and take down the tri count a bit. Will propably use those blocks to form 3-4 different shaped packs to populate the middle ground of my environment.




... and a first version of the floor

Plants

Made 4 fern plants to vegetate the area. The small ones are 320-360 Tris and the big one is 730 Tris. I have also made an animation shader inside UDK so that the plants move on the wind. This involved changing the vertex colors of different part plants so that they move independently. The shader was based on offseting the vertex positions by the vertex color. Will post a screenshot of the shader setup later on.
Here are the plants :)




Just need to adjust some color values to the texture.
This is a really late post. Got more updates and will post them soon.

Just some testing

So I did some Learning this weekend and my main focus was on the vertex blending. I have used my tiles which I made in Zbrush for it. The shader setup took some time but was well worth it. I have setup couple of channels so I could paint moss between cracks without having a huge amount of verts and bumped up the normal so wherever I painted with the alpha channel I made the tiles look more damaged. This gave me alot of variation on the surface.







I realized that it looked a bit flat and too horizontal. Apart from adding alot of geometry to the floor I could build up a quick terrain and make the floor tiles 3 seperate meshes which I could instance around, twist and position however I liked so that I will brake up the tilability and make things more interesting. I blended some materials with the terrain i've created in UDK.





Here is just a visualisation what it would look like. Tho this was done in 5 min to get an overall idea. Those stones are a bit too big and their shapes are not perfect. Got also some alpha problems on the chamfers ^^.



The reason I am doing this is becouse the foliage and roots will have an easier and more believable base to be put on rather than just a flat plane with vertex blending. It will be also easier to fit other roots comming through the ground in random places.

Stone Floor Practice 2

This time It took a little bit longer. Sculpted additional detail and Baked all the maps in Zbrush just for test and learning. Making tilable textures in Zbrush is quite fun and easy. Think I might use it for my main floor in my environment. Here are the results.

Stone Floor Practice

Did some tilable stone floor quick practice.

Tree Final Touches.

So the texturing proces has taken more time then I have expected. Mostly it was learning new techniques, doing and redoing till satisfaction (short term is "Polishing"). The foliage techniques that i've learned helped the overall result. Now I am adding final touches and textures to the serrounding items like vines and Spanish moss which will give the bald middle of the tree some interest.

Here is a screengrab from 3ds Max.