Change of plans

After getting some crit on my environment I've realized that it is a bit boring. In the first stage of planning the environment I wanted to create a huge tree in the middle and make the palazzo sort of a garden. When I was sculpting my assets I was very carefull not to overdo the damage to the architecture. Now I can go all out and create something interesting. A mix of old damaged architecture with foliage where nature and time did their part in destroying something beautiful. I decided to recreate alot of assets and replace some with new ones. It's good that those will be just cosmetic changes and will only involve few swings of a brush in Zbrush. I will have to devide some modular parts so I can create more damage and rubble variations. Here is a quick concept what I have in mind :

Tommorow I will spend most of the day planning out the level again and gathering proper reference for that. Most of the changes will involve also rebaking the maps. I should be starting the changes Soon so that I can start texturing.



Will post some more info soon ! :)

Main square

The main square will be needing some variations of cobblestone. I have been thinking about it quite a bit today and I can't come to a decision on this one yet. A bit overworked with materials I think.... So!... I did a quick paintover and a frew variations of the middle square. I'll come back to it propably tommorow when I will have some fresh ideas.

In this one I used a quick multi sub object materials to devide the cobblestone variations. Each color represents a different cobblestone pattern.

Materials continued ...

I have nearly finished making the tilable walkway floor. Would have finished it yday but Zbrush was being a bitch with its undeveloped Clip Tool. Had to figure out how to cut my floors without loosing the inbetween polys. Finally I managed to pull it off and found a way around it. Took me some time to do that.

Here is the Zbrush render


... and a low poly with the maps baked on and a temporary texture



For this I have created a specific mesh so that I can flip some polygons for less repetition. The whole mesh also works better with lightmapping.

Tilable Floor

Quick blockouts for the walkway tilable floors. This one will go on the walkways first and second floor.

Roof Tiles

This week I have been doing alot of baking. Mainly baked all the maps for all of the modular pieces. I had a week off before that so now I have to speed up a little bit.

Here Is an Material I created today for the roof in my environment. Fully tilable texture created from scratch. Just got basic color and dirt overlay on it. Still need to work on the Diffuse for it a bit and the Specular map. I got couple of more that kind of materials to do mainly for the tilable floors.

That is the Zbrush sculpt


And a render on with the Low poly baked:


This week I want to start texturing all the modular pieces so I have it all textured by the end of the weekend. That way I can start on my planned Hero Assets.

Palazzo - Progress

Past weeks I've been learning some new stuff and trying to apply it to what I am doing now. After that I came back and started continueing on my Palazzo environment project. I had to compleatly rebuild my meshes to fit the exact scale. I also had to create couple of new meshes for the blockout purposes.
The main focus will be an old fountain in the middle of the square. This will be my "Hero Asset". I will also add some foliage to make a contrast between the architecture. I am still going to make it as a swiss guard garrison. Flags and symbols will indicate that. I still have alot to do. I am mostly spending time on polishing stuff so that it looks to a certain standard which I am happy about. Here are some screenshots of how it looks :








I have also created an animated skydome with a dynamic sun. Just need to tweek a few settings to make it work better.



Here are the modular pieces that I have made for all my architecture. I had to make them twice and redo them a couple of times to fit the purpose of "multitasking". First time I made everything too small. Unfortunetly scaling them up did not work becouse they are fited so that each one of them refers to the other and so on....
Anyway those are still need to be retouched and baked. I can say that those are just a W.I.P for now.





Doors and Windows were sculpted in Zbrush and baked down to a low poly in 3ds Max.

Will post some updates soon. Now I got some more sculpting becouse I am creating my own materials for this environment... well Most of them.

Swiss Guard Barracks

For my new Environment project I wanted to create something based on Renaissance architecture. I have gathered alot of reference and brainstormed some ideas. I have based my final architectural design on "Palazzo della sapienza". I have changed some elements to fit my design and purpose. The main idea is to create a square/palazzo inside the training barracks of the swiss guard. Filled with Impressive renaissance architecture, foliage, armory equipement and some point of interests like a fountain or a sculpture. I've sketched quickly some ideas on the layout but at the end I went for a closed version since it would be a part/square in a massive barracks building.




I have blocked out my area quickly in UDK with modular pieces built in 3Ds Max. Took me about 2 days to do it but then I realized how many mistakes I have made. I thought I had the scale right. Here are some screenshots of the blockout.







Now I am working on rebuilding the scale and redoing the modular pieces. Will post some updates soon.