Journey PT 2

PAUSEE

Break. How is it all going?

I'm so tired.. I can barely function. Everyone else has gone to sleep a lot earlier than I am, I'm going to turn the machine off soon so I don't cause too much noise, + my machine makes a lot of noise.

And sarah is scary when she's tired.

This is the floor with the colour texture, the bump map, the specular map, and the displacement map. Now, at this particular shot, you can't really see much reflectivity amongst the surface of the brick floor, however you can see that the detail has been raised. Now, since this screen-shot, I have reworked the texture of the floor, tweaking attributes and also making the floor texture generally looking more realistic.

Upon asking the group, it resulted in a 3-3 tie. Flipping the coin made the decision to stick with the top one. Later on in the development process, I did re-import the other floor texture, and to be honest, it didn't look as nice.

Democracy wins I guess. :P
Now. Although this image looks better in terms of reflectivity and matches the mood better (the feel of this area is a run-down, post trading day London, just after the rain has come. It does look really nice though. As I said before, the textures and the lighting I optimized for high resolution, so hopefully it doesn't look too bad if we end up not rendering in high resolution.

I was actually going to put some light rain in, but after multiple particle failed tests, I decided not to.

The tutorial I followed pretty much just involved creating an emitter, applying gravity, adjusting fade length and some other controls. Again, it looked okay, but I thought it wasn't necessary, as well as the fact that putting it in added QUITE A BIT of render time.
And this is it with the bump, and displacement applied.

This is what it looked like without a UV map, (hence the scaling issues) with just a specular map and colour texture applied...
Displacement map ^ This is probably my new method for texturing. ;D
NOW. The interesting part. ^ Specular map

Colour texture - Texture of the actual object

Bump map - Definition of the raises in the object

Specular map - What parts of your texture are going to reflect light

Displacement map - Raises the geometry of your texture.

Now, this is pretty much all the information I gathered by messing about with maya, as well as informational tutorials on line. By using these four maps, and obviously controls, I was able to create a decent looking floor.

SO. For example..
As I didn't want the entire thing to be the same colour, a simple colour gradient was applied. This was to create variation in the colour of the brick pattern.
Now, as said before, this is the compilation of textures used. Well. Simply the texture used was a photograph of the floor in rochester, taken by sarah / lily. Now, obviously the photograph didn't come EXACTLY like this.

All that I did was take the photograph, warp it a little bit so that the image looked like it was flat on the ground. Then using the clone tool / other photoshop methods, cloned a square tile, re-arranged to have a much bigger texture.

All the textures that I'm using / want to use I want it to be high res, so 5k+.

At this early stage, the image above is what the floor ended up looking like, with a basic blinn texture.
In terms of the lighting, the image below is KIND of what I wanted in comparison to this sort of feel. Unfortunately, with my lack of knowledge in lighting, I don't know how I'm going to sort this out... YET..
This is just a render of the street with two basic lights on. Just to give me an idea of generally how it would look. Pretty from this point on was a constant battle to find a nice decent lighting source. Best of the best will be shown here. In terms of what I felt would match the scene the most.

This image here pretty much gives a great example of generally what I was expecting. However, due to the fact that there was no general light (just default black and white lighting) I added a light to it to see what it would look like. Well, I added two lights. (shown in the next image)
Shot of the street from above. Purposes? Deciding where to position the light to get the best shadows.
Houses removed, what are you left with? Can you guess? :O Yes, that's right, the floor.

Right, enough about the modelling of the houses. At this stage, not all of the houses are done to a finished modelled standard. But I felt it necessary at this point in time to put everything on a plane, and organize it roughly to how I'd want the road to be.

Of course, the initial layout of this was based off of the victoria street shown below (google maps) with a slight curvature at the end of the path. Doing this allowed me to generally get a grasp
Windows of my twin house. Done by Lily. I can't remember exactly why she did this, I think she was waiting for me to do something for her.. O_o Anyways, it does conform to what we had researched about arched windows. The details that we can put on will all be in the textures.
Geromes house. Looks quite decent. This house was based directly off of one of the reference images that sarah and lily took. Am I pleased with this? Heck yes! Going to be awesome when I texture it. Hopefully, I haven't textured yet, and know absolutely nothing about texturing as of yet.
It was at this point, that other peoples houses started being complete. Well the model anyway. Lily has finished her house, as well as geromes (far left). At this stage, only Dominique's, Sarah's, and Oly's house is let.
Like I've said before, began to work in the detail on the main house. This is pretty much going to be the end result in terms of what's already been applied. The same decoration will pretty much be applied on the front, back, and the other side. As I've said before, this is going to be the main house so this house needs to look the best, otherwise it'll defeat the purpose. Obviously that's all going to be down to texturing.
And then we move on to this. What is this specifically? Just more detail. Specifically the house focused on the centre of the camera. The frames and decoration of the house has been applied. Looks okay for the style we're going for.

How do I feel about it? Quite pleased. Although very basic, this is pretty much the first time I've ever modelled anything from scratch.

Infact, to be completely honest with you, this is pretty much my first time modelling, texturing, and lighting.

Moving on up!
Just another shot of the camera, showing the current stage of the houses in development so far.
Next up on the menu, a tall house. Random tall house? No. This is going to be the model for the main house. The house in which the rat decides to climb up to fetch his food. The reason why it's tall is purely for the fact that it can gather a nice look of the view as it climbs. Easily, you can tell that the model is based on the same basic shapes and designs as the other, with slight geometry modification.

Here is a little highlight of one of the buildings. As it's geometry obviously differs from the previous image. Added a couple frames, in terms of wood decoration to the model, and the chimney. The house now looks like a house, sort of.. :P

Before I moved on, in terms of working in a tiny bit of detail, I began to make the roofs. This was done simply by adding subdivisions to the faces of the roofs, and extruding faces out, then rotating them. Was this necessary? Well. One could debate that the roofs will very likely never be seen, but for the sake of this model and future potential I tried to make the roofs as accurate to buildings from the 1350's as accurate as possible. Clay tiles, slanted.

Right. NEXT STEP