Howdy

So just a little update. I was doing a lot of tests lately with maya and mental ray. Quite interesting improvements in mental ray. In any case I've been looking for a good seamless texture generator but nothing too amazing so far. The only good plugin that I found is PixPlant but it crashed photoshop alot and its unstable...

Anyway here is almost finished building for another part of map.

Loads of polys and work, gotta add some dirt and so on effects to make it more believable as well as damages...

It is worth noticing that 1st and 3rd images are viewport screen shots which looks pretty good!

I just started to learn GLSL for Vray.


1 world or maybe 3 worlds...


OMG AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WTFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF.

Yup, that pretty much sums it all.
Thanks bye.

I mean, we got GPU and graphic for nearly 20 years+ now how come those damn engineers geeks did not create a visual editor to create shaders? :/ Srsly I fell like we are still in stone age ! :(

Heya

Little update, Cryengine 3.4 got just released! Pretty wicked stuff specially with glass and real time reflections- I wonder if they are really real time 1 depth trace reflection(I guess)or just cube map for each object that has an reflection parameter enabled humhhh...

Tools of fun !

Just thought I drop a line on my workflow. From few months now I was re-creating my working space and assets. I came to point where I have just hundreds of gigs of textures and models but all if in a "mess" state. Also I need to create a server or some creative way of sharing my assets acros all my computers. My main workstation just died and I had to work on my laptop workstation (quite surprised how well it works wow !) and since workstation is dead I have no access to textures. In which case I was very lucky to have my NAS server backing up all so now I can access my assets via NAS...

In any case enought of that, I will come back to storing project at later date... Lets talk about the tools !

Since I come to point where I have a curtain working patch I decided that I can help myself with a bit of scripting and creating shor cuts.. At that point I've decided to script my own Dariusz Makowski Tools which help me with my workflow ! It has the main control units in it that I use mostly...

1st of all my bad scripting. It has pretty much all of my most used modiffier, materials, few short cuts and so on, pretty handy.

A light select render element. Basically Vray can output out of render a render layer for each light that u has in it. Thanks to that I can tune up my lightint in photoshop afterwards as much as I want

 Find bad polys = show me bad polygons in my mesh, tri,quads,ngon etc etc...

 A project manager = best save times EVER. No need to go to computer explorer to find my textures and so on ! I cant live without it atm...

 Smooth manager - tweaking it for all or selected objects... pretty handy when I have 600 objects with TS on them...

Hey

Another little update.

I've been puting my new textures to use and test. They look quite good, maybe a little bit too saturated but that can be asily corrected. In any case have a look. Few screenshots from work I did so far on building...

I did some creative UVW maping as u can see(failed hehe...) and at the end the displacement has some light leaks when rendered with GI there fore im asking Vray devs as to how to deal with them... Not sure why they are there- and I'm pretty sure they dont pop up in RT engine..

Here u can see some light leaks...bleeee

 And here some close ups render of building

I'm starting to be bit worried about the fact that I use displacement so adding a decals and dirt to random parts can be very tricky ! I'm also not using a proper UVW mapping so I might have to work on shaders that would allow me to add an  extra layer of adaptive dirt on top of my shader and displacements... Hard cookie to crack ! Gotta do a lot tests and probably spend a week doing so ehhh..

Right so here how it actually works the universal template.


1. First step is to set up a universal scene. I set up my camera, plane and dummy brick where all bricks will be positioned. I also set up render to give me zdepth, normal and ambient oclusion for later work. For purpose of this render I set up my camera to have very high lens which result was 10000.0 MM thanks to that the view looks to be nearly orthographic. I also used camera zdepth clipping options (red cross square on image) that sets the zdepth for all my bricks it is crucial to keep it identical on all of the images so that they all have right height for displacement.

2. Then I model the brick, and create 5-6 different variations. Its quite simple to do in 3D since I can just apply displace modifier and using different procedural textures I get different results...

3. Then I use Photoshop Bridge to load images in pair of 3 so that each brick has all the elements that are needed to create texture, displacement, normal and so on

4. Loading all textures in to groups making sure all is in right place and order

5. Blow u can see one of patterns I made, this is just an example of what can be done, now I can rearrange them in as many different textures as I want

6. Since all my textures so far are 32 bit for purposes of accuracy, I convert them 16 bits for diffuse, reflection and glossines texture

7. With a bit of tweaking using normal map and adding extra details I have a texture of brick. I've noticed that one brick is repeating quite a lot which made me thinking that next time I arrange my bricks I should number them so I know how oftern I repeat 1 brick. Its quite difficult to tell that by just looking at normal map.

8. RT CPU mode rendering - looking pretty good so far.

And that would be all. Now I'm off to make few more tilable paterns to work in my scene and its time to put them all in works.

The workflow of putting those shaders in scene is pretty simple. All I have to do is to import a shader and apply it to a simple plane surface - the 1 thing to remember is to keep track off tiling and UVW mapping since they do have to match the ratio of original texture so that it wont get stretch...

K. First things firts. Lets create some assets and get them looking nice !

I'm a fan of making stuff out of nothing so I'll try to minimize the need of textures and so on.

Anyway here comes my workflow on creating a simple assets that I will use to populate the area...

1. Modeling the wall

 Ive vreated a tiled patern

 2. Addint details and different moddifiers - I've used few scripts to hel me out with it

 3. Setting up camera and render to render zdepth- which is going to be Displacement map, normal map, ambient oclusion map

 4. I've render at 4.5 k in order to get a 4k res texture. Unfortunately it didnt work and I end up with 3.6k texture, In cany case I loaded rendered 32 bit layers to photoshop, crop to my patern, fixed tilling.

 5. Based on rendered layers I created diffuse, reflection and glossinss map.

 6. Finished shader rendered in 3ds max. It works in both RT cpu and RT GPU mode including displacement.

Conclusion - this is quire long and hard process, it require to render high res image which will be even longer once I start creating a 5k+ textures.

I've thought about it for a while and I decided that instead of tilling, and modeling in max I will create individual bricks. For examle, I will make 20cm x 50cm brick. I will apply a different stone patern on it. I will then render for each of those bricks a nornal, displacement, ambient oclusion pass. I will end up with 10 separated bricks that then I can load in photoshop and tile as I am pleased - a lot quicker workflow which also allowed me to be more cretative inside photoshop in terms ofcreating different paterns...

Right lets get it done !

BA last project has just begin ...