ArenaNet Art Test finished

Finally finished.  Pushed pretty hard on the last few days to finish this before the year ends.  There's so much more I wanted to do, but that's always the case isn't it? I created everything except for the vegetation and clouds, which were from cryEngine 3.


Textures used (just displaying Diffuse only):

Building:
1. Concrete Brick 256x256
2. Roof 256x256
3. Concrete plain 256x256
4. Wood Generic 256x256
5. Wood baked 256x512
6. Door 512x512
7. Window 512x128





Wall:
1. Wall 01 1024x1024
2. Wall 02 1024x1024



Wireframe:

High Res sculpts:









Wireframes:

ArenaNet Art Test WIP

Been slacking off a bit, whoops :).  Here's an updated WIP shot of the building I'm doing from the ArenaNet art test.  As I mentioned before, I'm just doing this art test for fun and as practice using zBrush to create high poly details and baking it low poly.  This workflow is completely new to me, so it's been quite a learning experience.

Bushes and trees are placeholders (they're from cryEngine3's existing asset list) until I get around to creating my own.  For now, they serve as a good placeholder for me to visualize how I want it all to look further down the road.

Concrete Wall Texture

Just a quick concrete wall texture I created to use for the building.

ArenaNet Building - Brick Wall WIP

After learning a bit about zBrush, xNormal, and Mudbox, I wanted to apply them to a personal project. I decided to use ArenaNet's art test as practice.  However it's probably going to be going outside bounds of their guidelines (3k tris and no texture sheets more than 2 1024s or something like that). The rest of the building is still WIP. 

What I really wanted to try here was to create a brick wall using placing primitive cubes in a row to lay out the brick wall.  Then I would go into zBrush and quickly sculpt in some details.  Finally I would go back into 3ds Max and recreate the low res geometry of the wall and use xNormal to bake the normal maps and ambient occlusion into my textures. 

3ds Max brick wall layout using primitives

zBrush sculpt for one section of the wall

Recreated low poly geometry for the wall, and

using xNormal to bake out my normal + AO maps to apply to it.

I guess it's a decent start, but I may end up going back to a drawing board to find a more efficient way to do all this.  Practice wise, it was a good learning experience for me.  For now, I'll continue on with the rest of the building and see how it goes..

Stone Floor Textured

Recreated the low poly mesh and baked normal and AO map onto it.  Diffuse texture was painted in Mudbox using photo textures.  It was pretty handy to quickly paint it in and know exactly how it's going to look on the mesh.   Lastly, I exported it to cryEngine3 to see it in a game engine.

Stone Floor

 zBrush screen cap

Just practicing sculpting some stone floor slabs.  Started from a base mesh made of primitive cubes:

Decided to do a quick simple baking to a flat plane, and throw in some textures.  Couple of errors to clean up, but this was just a simple baking test for normal and ambient occlusion maps.

3ds Max Viewport screen cap

Simple Stone Wall

Screen taken from 3ds Max's viewport.

This simple stone wall was created from sculpting a single stone/brick in zBrush.  It was then rotated and scaled to create variation:

Afterwards, I projected these stones onto a flat plane to create my normal map and ambient occlusion map. From there I created a diffuse mostly from working off the AO map and some photo reference textures. There were a few normal map errors, and I managed to clean most up by painting in the rgb channels.  I wanted to create a gloss map, but that is something I need to look into some more to understand how it works.

Another rock "sketch"

Just another practice rock sketch in zBrush loosely from photo reference. 

Learning xNormal baking for normal and AO maps

Here I'm getting familiar with xNormal to bake normal maps and ambient occlusion maps from a high poly object.  I used one of the rocks I sculpted in zBrush.  In this workflow, I went from high poly to low poly, so the low poly rock was created using 3ds Max's poly draw tool on top of the high poly rock.  Now that I'm looking at the wireframe again, I realize I could have optimized it a bit cleaner since some of the edges seem weird.

Below are my normal and texture maps baked out in xNormal.  The original AO map seemed too bright for some reason, and didn't capture as much detail as I expected (still trying to figure this out).  Fortunately, I found a tutorial that showed me how to generate 2 cavity  maps to help bring out that missing detail and combine it with the original.  I just did a simple flatten map for the UVs since I wanted to quickly jump to the baking process.

Beginning zBrush...

Some rocks I sculptured while trying to learn how to use zBrush. The brushes are still hard for me to get used to in getting the shapes and forms I want.  Hopefully with time, I get more comfortable with the way the brushes work.

Used trim dynamic, mallet fast, and flatten brushes. Alphas and projection master were used for the finer details.