Need Some experts here! - creating complex stone walls etc etc for game

Technical Support Modeling
1

Hi all

I really need some advice/help.

I am working on a game project and i need to get to a point with my modelling knowledge where, given enough time and patience, i can create decent, professional environments.

Our game project’s first level is a dungeon. and i want to use this thread to build a great looking dungeon level fit for a game. so i can be confident in what approach to take, just to make sure im on the right track.

Here are the areas im struggling in so far.

  1. Modelling/Sculpting a Rocky/stony wall face like the picture below.

1.a) I had limited success by sculpting out the wall, and creating a normal map for the low-poly version, it kind of worked but as its one of my first attempts at sculpting it wasn’t great. I still have alot to learn about how to make this transition via normal maps look good. any tutorials that touch on something like this?

1.b) How would i, using sculpting, normal maps, and low poly versions, create a convincing tileable stone wall face?

1.c) I tried the Nvidia Photoshop normal map tools but it really didnt work very well with the images i used. any advice about this?

Attachments

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pcgh01 (1).jpg1280×800 410 KB

2

did you try the stone script and also the wall script which can help make stones

and you can sculpt to add large details or use 2 displacement textures to give some interesting effets
and then bake it to normal map

salutations

3

ok, so here is a sculpted wall.

I like the idea of using images as a displacement and then baking that result onto a normal map. i had not thought of that.

So im ok with this wall, although my sculpting skills need drastic practice im happy with this wall.

now i want a wall for a game that is as close to that in detail as possible.

if i just used a basic primitive it would not look very good right? i have to retopologize? whats the best way to go about this?

This wont be a outer wall of a dungeon, but rather a free standing structure, i want this to be a place-able wall structure i can use whereever

Also, that little orange light is just to simulate a rough torch that i will place on the wall

Attachments

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4

you can add it to a plane then extrude a lttle i guess!

salutations

5

So i have been experimenting with some of these techniques, i realised i did not have the ‘normal map’ button in the ‘image sampling’ section ticked which makes a big difference, as i guess i was just bump mapping otherwise. (not sure what the technical difference is, my current thinking is one is used for small details?)

so i have, using a simple plane, managed to take a plane, sculpt some stuff on it. and bake that on a normal map and get it on a single low poly plane, and the normal map is totally working fine.

so now i have that process down, i can experiment and practice to get the right look.

i also did a test by using a texture as a displacement map for a high poly plane, this also worked in pretty much the same way. except that i had no control over the displacement, if i wanted to use a texture as a displacement map, but smooth out the results where i wanted it how would i best go about constructing a good displacementmap for a stone wall with a stone wall texture? what would i be shooting for? a greyscale image i imagine?

6

A two layer uv texture map. 1 map for diffuse, the other for displacement. Displacement maps need a greyscale colored texture.

7

Cool, thanks for the tip, i can turn the image into Greyscale in photoshop, then i guess just smooth out areas i dont want so affected. thanks

8

Heya,
Most tip’s I have are already given,
But if you are still looking for a good quality program to bake your normal/bump/height/AO- maps with I recommend Xnormal.
It works perfectly.
some tips on texturing your wall:

  1. use sizes with the power of 2: 16/32/64/128/256/512/(1024)
  2. use a baked AO-map with a ‘multiply’ overlay in photoshop to darken the spots between the bricks/stones.
  3. To make a good asset I recommend you use at least a defuse, spec, and a normal map.

4*) I cannot say if this is true for the Blender-engine but Cry performs best if you save your textures as Tanga 16bit (with transparency 32bit)

Good luck!

Cheers

9

When I sculpt walls with bricks in them I like to use a technique similar to the one in vertex magazine pg204
http://www.artbypapercut.com/

Where you build the wall out of individual bricks, join them together, and bake your maps to your low poly from that.

10

Do you mean the masonry script or is their a separate stone script. I cant seem to find a real stone script