Our fourth project was a house with a high (2000 tris) and a lowpoly (500 tris) mesh and a 512x1024 texture with normalmap. Other than that, we didn't have any restrictions. I first had this house as inspiration.
But while modelling, it quickly transformed into a very modern design. At first I had another, smaller house on the roof, but that didn't quite fit, so I thought about some things that would be cool. And what could possible be nicer than a swimming pool in the roof?
I didn't invest as much time as I could have, so it probably could have looked a lot better, but my top priority were the animations for our end-project.
As for the texture the ivy was the most work but a lot less as expected. Since I needed a tiled texture and there was none to be found that would fit, I had to make my own. And of course I needed one with an alpha canal, since I wanted to use my own wall texture. Here are the steps I took:
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| Original Texture |
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| Tiled Texture |
If you look closely you can see that I worked with the smudge tool to get rid of the edges. It worked amazingly finde, though now that I look at it again after that time, I have to say that I thought it was better. Maybe should have used liquify instead, but for the use I needed it, it was perfectly fine.
Still there was the wall in the background. I had hoped it would simply work with a layer blending option, but sadly that didn't work out and I had to clean it by hand. I played around with the select clolour range tool, deleted and then polished. Time consuming work that in my opinion payed off in the end. Just the wall texture would have been pretty boring, I needed something to bring in detail and fill that space.
After adding the tiled texture to the colourmap, I still had shading to do for a more three-dimensional look, also I erased bits of the ivy texture on the edges for a more realistic and less generic look.
The rest of the texture was pretty basic stuff, for the windows I first wanted to enable a look inside, but without modelling it the result could look relly bad depending on the perspective. So I decided to apply a darkend reflective coating. (Sadly it only really works in renderings, which I didn't have for turning in, so I have to hope that our lecturer will try that out too).
For the normalmap I used Crazybump.
Here are the final results of colour., specular- and normal map:
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| Colourmap | |
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| Normalmap |
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| Specularmap |
Whats more, since I do have transparency I had weird graphic bugs in the workspace, rendering the house completely transparent, depending on the view (only with transperency in the texture). Maya is as maya does...
There are some weird facebugs in there I couldn't really fix, but well, here are some renderings (high/low). Note that normally you wouldn't see the house from that close, it's more for use of strategy games, like Sim City or Anno for example.
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| highpoly |
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| lowpoly |
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| highpoly |
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| lowpoly |
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| highpoly |
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| lowpoly |
