UT3 Urban Alleyway

I failed my class last month with that western thing so I get the opportunity to start anew. This month we're doing a north eastern urban style that's somewhat rundown or just.. used haha.

I'm basing my project off of an alleyway thing back home.



but... yea. I've just been playing with getting the actual structure stuff done. When this stuff is done I'll start on the decorative things (like the pipes, AC units, power boxes and such)

Right now all this stuff is still in Maya, haven't bothered setting it all up in UT3 yet 'cause... that's not important right now.

This isn't intended for interesting gameplay at all, just to try to be pretty.

July 13th

Right now it's all just kinda.... fairly straight. I haven't gone through and broken much up yet... but yea.

Also, I wait to put a base texture on the model before I start tearing into it to break up shapes for bricks and such along the edge of the wall, or along the edge of windows or something.

July 15th

Ya know we have an unreal section....

I'm liking it so far. Can we get a wireframe? I'm not interested in the polycount so much as seeing your polyflow so I can learn.

D: how did you fail! Western was awesome :(

^ apparently it wasn't good enough. Thanks though.

Anyhow... slow progress on this... My mom is visiting right now so... yea lol.

Finally put it all in UT3. Some shadows are still fugly 'cause of bad/temp UVs on some things... but it's getting there.

i want to see sum nurmalz!

Your trash bins look... bad.

Check your refs again.

Everything else looks great though.

The wire is all chaotic 'cause well... it's all chaotic haha.



I hard shaded the edges on the top for now so that you can see they're there. I'm not sure what you think looks bad on it really, other than it being perfect (as in not broken) If there's anything that really jumps out at you please let me know.

I basically just fixed most of the UVs so that it's a lot more efficient now and so shadows fall better on them too :)

Finally done UVing everything... put some more stuff in there... got more stuff... and... yea. *opens Photoshop*

Photoshop is going to be getting some rather heavy use over the next few days.

posted this one in the quick crit thread a while ago, rather than here. Gunna toss it in here now too though for a somewhat more consistent progression



As for actual new stuff...





I'm gunna upres that building on the left's texture.... and actually finish it haha.

I'll be updating this thread like mad throughout the day probably. It's crunch time.

Is the other side just nothing? Just curious.

Yep, it's basically just a showcase piece, so... yea :/ Kinda lame, I know... but that's what he (teacher) wants.

Looks good man. Maybe you could make a MP version of something later on.

:saddowns:
I can't rep you.

Base texture on the big building on the left, redid the main building there, textured a bunch of little decorative things.

You should add a few bricks sticking out a few inches off the walls here and there. Don't go over board, just to add a more realistic feel.

Edit: Also, start taking pics with AA please!

Yea, I'm not sure how to enable AA in the UT3 editor. *shrug* If anyone knows how let me know, but... *shrug*

I did that already for the shed thing in the corner, I haven't gotten around to it for the other buildings yet. I wait until the texture is complete to do it then just cut out a brick and extrude it forward a little bit.

Killed that gutter, made a sky, changed around a few background buildings (stuff on the right that you'll never see was bothering me haha) and I changed the ground a bit, can't really tell yet, but soon :P

I'm currently adding more shape to the ground piece then onto texturing it.

I still have to do decals, a few particle effects, texture that cute little grill haha, and finish up my blue building's texture and the big building on the left's texture. There's some spots that still need lovin.

And normals lol

May a suggest a bit of a darker sky? maybe stormy? Something about the bright blue just threw the whole thing away for me. Although that's just my opinion. A twilight kind of look would look neat.

For the ground... maybe a pallet or two? Crates? Tin cans? I don't know, something to bring a little life to the ground. If it's possible some paper laying aroudn would look neat too. I'm not sure if you're still going exactly for what was in your picture, but if you do put in a parking lot, I suggest some cracks with weeds coming out of it... Some foliage here and there would look decent. But no bright greens.

Lol, just adding my 2 cents. You can take it or leave it. : ) Looks good though.

Hyar?

72K tris btw.

I have about seven hours left thanks to the deadline being pushed back a bit. I'm going to redo the ground texture because of how low res it is, going to add in some decals and particle effects, and play with a post process volume.

In this update I added normal/spec maps. Well... the specs were generated in Ut3... so yea... but... yar.

put some color maps on those bricks!

don't paint the grunge you've got under the windows on the texture itself, you can even see the weird brighter holed where there should be windows, but there aren't. it are bad!

just add an extra UV channel to each of your houses, and blend a small texture over it just for the grunge and color differences.
it'll let you make every single house look unique, which is something you would want.
right now your images are... bricks, and some green stuff.
it's as unimaginative as turok was.. which was gray and green, nothing more. everywhere.
colourmap yer stuffz!

edit: gaah! res up that ground texture!
look at the 3rd picture, it's eye-killing.
you'd probably be better off using that map you've got there as a colourmap, and blend it over some proper concrete/dirt textures or something.

if i were you, i'd also invest an hour or somethign into making some kind of backdrop. right now, it's houses in the middle of a city, and then BANG, clear blue sky.

How would you texture the windows? I can't figure out a good way to do it so I just kinda tossed that stuff on there and... yar.

As for making everything unique, my big wall on the left is all on one texture :/ I can copy that static around and all the statics will be the same of course, but it's not terrible or anything.

http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/1345/tmainleftd.jpg

(It's normally a 2048X2048) I painted the black dirt stuff under the window sills 'cause.... my teacher likes to see that haha. He specifically asked for that so I went nuts with it.

what i ment was, you also did it in a place where there are no windows :/ (bottom right of your texture)

i guess that if this were just for showcasing it wouldn't be so terrible, but if it were for a game, and you put all of it on one texture like that... weeeelll let's just say it's not the most efficient thing you could have done :/

you would have made the bricks a tiling texture, the trim a tiling texture both of which wouldn't have to be more than a 512, and you put a colourmap over them.

you'd get double, if not quadruple the texeldensity on your meshes, for maybe half or even a quarter of the total texturespace, which would be a big deal if it were for a console.

one more comment i'd like to make is that you've got all your stuff piled up in a corner of the scene, and the rest of the scene is pretty much empty. is this intended, or do you already have a camera position for your final shot or something? if it's not just 1 shot, but the whole scene that gets judged, i'd make sure you've got a bit more consistent density of crap thrown around, so to speak.

It's intentional to only really care about having that one corner loaded with stuff because that's where the shot is going to be taken.

I brought up that idea of layering a texture ontop of a tiling texture like that to the teacher on the first day of class and he said not to do it, that he'd rather have it all on one big map :/ I know, I scoffed too.

I put it in places where there used to be windows. If you look at that area, there used to be windows there but they were removed and bricks were placed in their spot. The wall would still be stained after the patch job.



While I'm at it.... do you know how to make decals able to accept light and have an alpha to em?

Looks good. But the ground looks super low res... what's the deal with that?

if the ground is chocolate pudding, I like it.

Also, will there be any bloom or anything in this? It just is looking like a watered down UT3 piece. It's kind of making me sad. But then again I don't know what the requirements for your project is.

yeah but adding a post process volume takes all of five seconds <_<

That's what I turned in yesterday. Then I came home, took those pictures and passed out before being able to post em haha.

Definitely needs more specular and detail bump maps. For the ground especially.

Didn't turn out too bad. I kind of like it. Some things look low res still though, like the ground and what not. But that's ok. I think it turned out pretty good.

Did you import your texutres in as a typical texture or did you set it as a skybox texture.
Unreal scales down all textures that aren't skyboxes/HDRs down to 1024x1024.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Disaster

Did you import your texutres in as a typical texture or did you set it as a skybox texture.
Unreal scales down all textures that aren't skyboxes/HDRs down to 1024x1024.

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wat.

I've never heard that before... *opens unreal to see if my texture says it's 1024*... 'cause that's beyond retarded.

It says they're 2048 but when I switch it to skybox it gets a shitton crisper. That's fucking retarded.

It also helps if you give your textures a detail normal. Add me on AIM

disaster4194

I figured out decals.

The key is to not give them an alpha. Put the alpha into the RGB as just pure white. Plug the RGB box into both the diffuse and emissive, and set the blend mode to BLEND_Modulate and lightingModel to MLM_Unlit.

:o

Awesome. Thanks. I've always wondered how to get decals to work properly.

I figured I'd update this thread now instead of tossing shit all over the quick crit thread.

I'm working on this piece again to try to get it up to demo reel quality so that I can use this as an asset in my reel that I'm putting together.







I was trying to play with the bricks in the building in the corner there with the stairs to try to make them a different color so that it'd be less OMG SAME BRICK EVERYWHERE type thing.

I wanna make some more trash deco to toss around... maybe even something as simple as just a sheet of paper or something like that lol.

Anyhow... back to work.

It seems...boring. Put in some trash bins, some shopping carts, hell, put in a homeless guy. It's just that as it is, it seems empty and uninteresting.

overlay a colourmap to differentiate it, and get rid of that terrible post processing, don't make everything blueish.

I've been hard at work, I promise. :P

I'm gunna be redoing those bricks now, they finally bother me enough to actually get around to it.

I'm gunna be taking this scene into the UDK soon to take advantage of the better lighting stuff. Yay global illumination and AO! haha.

love the stains around where the windows were bricked up

Quote:

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Originally Posted by rossmum

love the stains around where the windows were bricked up

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Yeah how did you do that? With a decal or something?

Nah, with terrible practicies lol.

it's one massive texture :/

http://img268.imageshack.us/img268/1345/tmainleftd.jpg

normal res is 2048x2048

That's an old version btw.

:ugh:

Seems a like a inefficient use of texture space. You would be better off with a tile and then decals to make variations.

gotta say it still looks fucking sweet though