Reworked a bunch of textures due to the fact I realised I was doing something very dumb from the start. I was trying to UV & texture a curved shape, when texturing it as a rectangle and then curving it later would have been 50x more efficient (scientifically proven, ask the programmers). Since doing that it's been a breeze to texture, if only I realised this earlier !


I took my time making sure the tiles have a good spec map because it really makes things pop. Tomorrow Arianne will be adding her foliage she's been working on and it will be aaaaaaaaaaawwwwsome.

Archway update :

Modelled majority of the arches using modular pieces and then using the bend tool at the end. I'll be working on a good UV layout before I commit to turning them into a single mesh.

Halfway Point

We're 2 weeks in with 2 weeks left. It's going to be modelling/texturing/UVing nonstop when we return on Monday, but I can never wait that long when it comes to 3d stuff so I'm doing what I can in the weekend.

I loaded up toolbench and did a few paintovers to help me visualise the scene better. I didn't do the floor/walls since arianne was working on a texture for that part. The big long bend on the bottom floor of the level looks kinda plain to me, I'm thinking of putting a monster gauntlet in there with more dense foliage to break up the monotony of that segment.

The staircases got a huge overhaul, instead of going straight up to the level, I gave them a more elegant design which gives them a much better visual effect than the last ones. One of the staircases is going to be destroyed, blocking the player's path so they are forced to use the other one. At the bottom of the staircase is a pond with fountain which will have fish and water lilies.

Here's the 3d asset for it. It's about 85% complete. I just need to chop a bunch of polygons out of the railings, add the wall fountain, and it'll be ready for texturing. The boxes in the corners of the pond area are placeholders for 2 mini statuette fountains I'm going to add.

Trees! I made some trunks for our scene after collecting some references, probably going to only go for 3-4 tree models, the rest will be plants/bushes and such. They ended up being between 4-5k triangles after I retopo'd them.




I played around with the UVing of them. Unique UVs look good from a distance, but atrocious nearby, even when the map size was 2k. Tiling textures look good from near and far, but the only problem is it can get to look repetitive, but we can fix  that with decal sheets.

In the image below, the bottom with Unique UVs is a 2k map, the top is using a 512 map, the quality difference is huge with the smaller map giving the better look. The file size difference is just as awesome. 4mb dds file vs a 170kb dds file.