Texture Work

My most useful textures were taken during the Easter break, when I took a trip to Canterbury to photograph the castle and the high street. From the photographs taken there and those I took in Norwich, I made a few tile-able textures that I could use throughout my castle.

One aspect of my textures that I wanted to include was a hand-painted style, whilst making use of the textures I had collected from real places. In the end, I decided to go with a pseudo-Borderlands style, with black borders on the sharp edges and light overlays of painted layers.

After texturing the corner towers, I decided that the archways at the bottoms of them needed more details, and so I added a wooden trellis, as I had considered previously. I also added a similar model to the space in between the bridge duplicates.

With all of the textures completed, it's nearly time to export my model into UDK for rendering and walk around. There were some issued in these following screenshots with some faces appearing without their textures, but Lothar tells me that this is a result of the camera having to look too far, and that fortunately it shouldn't show up in the renders or in UDK.

Originally I had planned to use UDK to create my terrain, but after trying it and finding it difficult to pick up, I decided to just use Maya instead, seeing as I know the program much better. 

Castle WIPs

Moving onto making the final model for my castle, I started with the outer walls and towers. I decided to make the walls of the castle a trapezium shape instead of rectangular, but I still plan on splitting the back wall with a tower, as I did in my initial design. 

When creating the bridge, which I hadn't previously designed in Maya, I decided to make use of a lot of arches, as I hadn't used as many in my castle as I'd have liked, given their importance in Moroccan, Indian, and Tunisian architecture. The bridge itself is one part, mirrored twice (once horizontally and once vertically) so as to take up less texture space.

From inside, I feel like it might need some mode details, and I'm considering adding the small fence model I made to the sides of the bridge, and perhaps a trellis-like screen in the rectangular spaces.

When recreating the tower, I didn't want to make the lower walls complicated, as most of the tower will be obscured behind the outer walls and just be a waste of polys and texture space. On top of the tower are single planes, onto which I plan on texturing a facade with an alpha map, as the details will be so far away from the player that it would be pointless to model them completely.

The tower, like the other parts of the model, is very simple texture-wise, as aside from the dome, it is simply one wall repeated and rotated 6 times.

Adding the inner buildings, I decided on the second of my two options; to make buildings from only one or two sides, much like I did with my large towers. On top of that, I added a smaller duplicate of my hexagonal tower, to add more variety into the centre buildings.

On top of those buildings, I added larger details; these being the arches, whose designs are loosely based on the Red Fort, and the addition of more planes. These are duplicates of the ones of the top of the hexagonal towers, so they won't take up additional texture space.

The final product for now. I'm largely happy with the design, and so the only parts that I'm looking on chancing slightly is the bridge, which is a little lacklustre now the inner buildings have details on their rooves.

Castle Ideas

I began planning for my model with some sketches, trying out ideas and drawing concepts much quicker on paper than I could in Maya, so as to not waste time making models I couldn't use.

Moving on from those sketches, an in an effort to make as much as possible on my final castle modular, I made a few pieces designed to act as a facade to a building, adding detail without increasing the size of the textures a lot. To that effect, the first two are an ornate fence-like barrier, and a battlement idea, both of which could be repeated endlessly with only one set of textures.

My first layout featured a series of towers, and much like the small details, these would just be replicates of each other, scaled and rotated. 

Here, I looked at a larger idea, that of a more detailed wall section, based off of one of my previous sketches. Although some complex geometry is needed to add depth to the wall though, I think that the small indents in the wall are unnecessary, and can likely be achieved to similar effect with simple bump maps and good texturing.

Castle Layout

Beginning on ideas for my Moroccan Castle, I made a rough wall and tower design, practicing making the parts modular and compatible with all the other elements. Originally, I made a four-walled castle, but decided that it looks too boring and so split the back wall in two and added a tower farther back.

For the inside of the castle, I added a variety of buildings and towers, based on my research. One aspect of the inner buildings that I will need to asses in my final model is how modular they are, as in this plan, they are all unique, and whilst that would make for more a more interesting design, they will take up a lot of texture space.

The two possibilities I have for the centre buildings are to either use a similar method that I used on the towers and walls, and make a few models to scale and rotate, duplicating one or two buildings, or to make several unique buildings, with only one or two unique sides each. These sides could then be duplicated, rotated, and sewn together to make different buildings, with few original textures.

Modelling Research

As part of our project brief, Lothar asked us to look into a variety of tools available to us, as well as look into the various techniques used to make high-quality models.

Tileable Textures

Making a tileable texture is not only about making an image which can fit next to itself seamlessly. It also means making textures which don't have any strong defining features, which when tiled, will make the effect obvious. What Doylle suggests is that your photos be taken as a 90 degree angle (or as close as possible), but seeing as I'm going to photograph my textures myself, I shouldn't have an issue with that.

With photograph in hand, I can then use the Offset filter in Photoshop (or do it manually in other programs) to cut the image into 4 pieces, tying each corner to the opposite one on the canvas. Lothar suggested using the clone tool to meld the seams together, which now form a cross in the centre of the photograph. On top of that, however, I found that using the Dodge and Burn tools on a greyscale version of my texture can help to eliminate any extra brightness or darkness which would prevent the texture from tiling seamlessly.

Modular Meshes

A modular mesh is a section of your asset which can be repeated over and over, and is usually coupled with a tileable texture. By making several parts of the asset modular, it reduces the time needed to make the asset, as well as file size if the meshes are to share the same textures. On top of that, if you unwrap the model's UVs before duplicating it, each part will share exactly the same UV map, making texturing much simpler.

The aspects that Thiago Klafke highlight when creating tileable textures are ease of use, composition, shapes and form, and repetition. If the model is too difficult to modularise well, then its likely not suitable. If the composition, shapes or form are too memorable, the model looks lazy. If the repetitions are too obvious, it looks clumsy. When making my Castle, I will keep these aspects in mind, and together will tileable textures, will hopefully make a model I'm happy with, with the aspects I''ve described.

Normal Maps

A normal map is used to make a flat piece of geometry seem high-poly. It uses the RGB channels to give a vector to the plane it is placed on, giving the face fake detail. When viewed from the side, though, the shape and silhouette of the object appears as normal. Lothar suggested using CrazyBump to make normal maps for our models, so I plan to look into the software more. 

Terrain Generation

There are a variety of ways which I could make the terrain for my model. Maya's capabilities include terrain, and I could use the Sculpt Geometry Tool on a flat plane to sculpt mountains and trenches, projecting a texture from above onto the shaped plane. Alternatively, I could also make use of the UDK Terrain generator, which allows for additional effects such as realistic water and simple collision. Online, some recommended tools such as Planetside's Terragen or World Machine, and they look impressive, however they aren't free (or are very limited when free), and so I will most likely experiment in UDK without plugins and Maya to make my terrain.

Spheres of Action and Story Creation

In Sharon's most recent CS session, we covered the concept of 'Spheres of Action,' that being the role which a character in a story can be defined as, if you were to strip away their character and leave them simply as a narrative device. Propp defined them as Villain, Donor, Helper, Princess & Father, Dispatcher, Seeker-Hero/Victim-Hero, and False Hero, and wrote that the in majority of the stories her applied this thinking to, every character could be placed into at least one of his spheres.

We played a game of Exquisite Corpse, and were then asked to write a short story of 500 words about our character, making use of the roles that Propp defined. The character I ended up with is below, which I have assigned the role of helper.

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Once upon a time, there lived a small cat, whose life was plagued by small mishaps. Mishaps like getting locked out of the house whilst her owners were out, or like losing her favourite squeaky toy in the garden. Normally these mishaps were resolved by the cat’s loving owners, who were attentive; opening the door for her when she wanted to come inside, and getting new toys to replace her old ones.

One day, however, the little cat climbed out of a window to get outside, as she always did. What was different about this day was that shortly after it started raining, and when she scratched at the door to return inside, nobody came to get her. After a while of standing in the rain for her owners, the cat ran around the side of the house, hiding under some cardboard that had been left outside. Not wanting to sit in the cold waiting for someone to help her, she closed her eyes, and went to sleep.

What the little cat awoke to was an incredibly tall girl, with swirling black hair, and two cats resting on her chest.

“Are you cold?” asked the girl, who apparently was some kind of spinning top.

The cat looked at her sadly, unable to understand what she was saying. She hoped that the strange girl could help her back inside. Instead, what the girl did was pick the little cat up in her arms, and spin into the sky. This made the cat very dizzy, but also dried her off, the force of the girl’s spin propelling the water from the cat’s fur.

When the two reached high enough to be above the clouds that were raining down, the girl stopped spinning, dropping the cat off on a soft cloud. Opposite the two, stood an old man in a smart suit. He had a small moustache and a balding head. He wore thin-rimmed glasses, and the light they reflected dazzled the small cat. Despite this, the cat immediately recognised the man. To us, he appeared on the television presenting the weather forecast. To the cat, he was the man that made the rain come and go.

“Please, mister,” begged the girl, seeming to understand the cat’s predicament “please make the rain stop so this cat doesn’t have to be cold.”

“But my dear!” explained Michael Fish, “I don’t control the weather! I simply tell everyone what it’s going to be!”

The cat, despite not understanding English, was unsatisfied with the strange weatherman’s response, and so hissed at Michael, showing her teeth.

Although small, Michael Fish was suitably unsettled by the cat’s response (cats, after all, do enjoy eating fish), and decided that, despite his inability to change the weather, he would speak to his higher-ups and resolve the issue.

The girl, happy with the outcome of the exchange, gathered the cat back up in her arms, descending back through the clouds. As the cat fell back to sleep in the girl’s warm embrace, she heard the girl commending her bravery to standing up to the weatherman, despite him being much larger than her. At least she would have, if the cat could understand her.

When the cat awoke, she saw the most brilliant sunshine beaming down from a beautiful clear sky. The sound of a door opening caused her to look at the porch, where she saw her owner beaming down at her, with a few strands of long, curly black hair falling in front of her face.

“Would you like to come in now?” Asked her owner. “I’m sorry we didn’t let you in earlier, we couldn’t hear your scratching over the sound of the rain! I hope you didn’t-“ She stopped mid-sentence, examining the small cat. “Well you’re not wet at all! What a clever kitty, hiding under this card to keep yourself dry! The door’s open if you want to come in!”

 The cat, however, decided that she would stay outside, and bask in the glorious sunshine that she won from the hands of the weatherman in the sky. 

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As I wrote before, my Exquisite Corpse character was the helper in my story, with the cat being the hero and the weatherman being a villain (although unintentionally). In some ways, you could say that the sunshine, or the lack of rain, was the Princess, as that was the cat's reward. Equally, you could match the owners with the sphere of dispatcher, as their negligence led the cat to go on her adventure.

Character Comparisons

For part of our CS work, Sharon asked up to take two different characters and compare their designs with one another, focusing on their base shapes and colour choices.

Centaur Warchief is made up of a combination of both rectangles and triangles. Rectangles make up the base body, giving an image of strength, fortitude, and toughness. On top of that however, he is posed as if he is ready for combat, which makes the triangles that appear on his armour and weapons seem even more daunting, showing that as a character, he is tough and stalwart, but also dangerous. Compacting this is the colour scheme of the character, featuring lots of red and black, two dark colours that can symbolise blood and death.

On the other hand, Queen Anne is made up of almost entirely triangles, from her nose spike, to her gaping maw, to her razor-sharp teeth, and this even carries over to her environment, which features long, pointed grass, further emphasising her danger. Her colour scheme is very different to Centaur Warchief's, however, featuring very bright yellows and reds. The reds still portray an image of blood and anger, however the yellow presents her as a different threat to the Warchief's. Yellow could represent an exoticness about her danger - such as poison or simple unfamiliarity. Alternatively, you could see the yellow as a symbol of putridness, and any of these interpretations adds to the sense of danger she provides.