Competition #15 - atahan_zugul

[atahan_zugul]

Hi,

Kinda dove into this as a chance to do something sci-fi and knocked this up, the scenes pretty dirty at the moment - polys are at 11K but im pretty confidant i can knock it down to half that.

As far as my workflow was concerned - didnt do any drawings, kinda just started modelling some interesting shapes that had a similar form language and then used a game level design approach to knock up the scene - so lots of reuse of the same mesh and modularity - which should help cut down on the texture space as well.... i hope.

Im at a loss as to a theme for this scene though - theres no story behind it - at least none ive thought of - and without a backstory its kinda hard to build a centre-piece Grrrrr - So any suggestions are more than welcome. in fact - im begging for some!

[atahan_zugul]

Hey guys,

Just spent the whole night tryin to figure out my normal mapping problems - This is my first foray into normal mapping for environments so testing helps. If it helps anyone else - ill quickly describe it here. I was baking normal maps from my high rez geometry for my bench/bed thing to my lowpoly - but no matter the setting i had i always got these tears in the resulting normal map - i tried fixing the cage, i tried extending the ray casting distance - basically i tried playing with all available buttons in the maya interface with regards to normal mapping - to no avail. Finally GOOGLE - THANK GOD FOR GOOGLE! - after like 2 hours of sporadic lookin around i found one thread and it basically described my problem - and TADDA! - all that was required was to take the uvs for the seam that was occuring and move it away from the rest of the mesh - strange i know - i would have never thought this was the problem; but its well described at this site - and im sure my images show the results!.
Heres the site i finally discovered this really simple but nice piece of info -
Normalmaps for the Technical Game Modeler

Also if anyone could PLZ give me an idea on a workflow where you mirror a symettrical object - which would allow you to use only half as much UV space and make normal maps in maya - plz post here if you know how - coz everytime ive done this, ive suffered flipping issues - as far as i know maya doesnt support a shader that say unreal would automatically recognize and fix - but any suggestions on how you yourself work around this prob would be read great!

[Xoliul]

Holy cow, that article explains A LOT of things i hadn't heard of before. Everybody keeps saying everything has to be smooth group 1, but that doesn't seem to be necessary when you adjust your UV's! Many thanks man, this finally clears up some things I never understood about normalmaps!

[atahan_zugul]

Hey guys,

Gave the normal mapping a break for the moment, decided need to prep for texturing - so started figuring out a fast workflow for this project - havent done any real sorta paintover for environments before - so this was fun. Ended up finding a really fast and pretty fun workflow using Zbrush renders and Photoshop - this image below took about 10 - 15 mins max. It involved next to no painting on my part whatsoever - was more photoshop tricks - so for anyone who dredds this pre-viz process - give this method a shot - you wont be dissapointed. If anyone wants a further explanation of the process i used or the file - im more than pleased to upload it. Im moving onto using the same workflow for the whole environment now that i got my methodology set. Cheers, keep up the great work.

[Tiros]

Dude, you put too many photos in there, makes it all very messy and wierd with all those big details and black spots

Try to keep it clean with subtle details, then add stuff like scratches to the edges etc. The timelimit for this comp isn't that short afterall.. so better do it proper rather than fast

[atahan_zugul]

Totally agree with you there man, texturing is splotchy - however in this case, i was only trying to get a proper workflow down before i paint up the whole scene to give myself some direction - im kinda more strained for time than most - gotta get my reel out and soon - so this is gonna have to be a fast run for me.

[atahan_zugul]

Heres the final paintover before i continue onto the hi-poly models for normal mapping. Any crits would be welcome. The paintover could have been taken further but - i think this gives me enough direction for now. Cheers and hope to see come C&C.

[Meanie]

I can't see any obvious things that i think have to change.
Just make sure that you don't makre your normal maps too rounded or soft.
You have catched a very nice colours scheme and i think your colours are very saturated and vibrand which you don't see very often - it looks very good!

[atahan_zugul]

Heres those tuts ive been talking about - Ive done 2 - one for my custom Matcap workflow and the other centres around the Painover workflow i used to do the pre-viz image of the sci-fi corner.

The file should be about 1.6 megs - both tuts are contained within.

Just click the link below. All crits are welcome - i hope this helps someone out.Cheers.

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