Week Two - Mid Week

Mid Week Two - Update

After creating the first terrain texture, I added two more self made textures. One texture hand painted entirely, the second texture was air brushed on photoshop. The image was taken off google image, simplified to match my art style and then offset it to make it my own. It hardly resembles the original image not only to avoid copyright. (I'm sure this image is royalty free) but also to make it so i feel as if the project is mine, otherwise that defeats the purpose of creating my own environment. 

I found a landscape material blueprint from my previous projects and tweaked it to fit this one. I needed to change a few variables otherwise it doesn't work with my terrain size or with the custom made cel-shader. 

This is a snip from my in game build. The blueprint allows for layer blending between two + terrain textures. Currently I have 6 custom terrain skins in mind to blend or be separate. Ideally i would want the cobblestone texture not blending with the wood chip however when its not the texture contrast is too much and looks un-aesthetically pleasing. 

I wanted to add a height mask/dirt shade to allow for variance in the very obvious repeating textures. This will be added later if its required. 

I've tried applying a normal map to the terrain textures. Even adding a multiplier variable to increase the normal intensity but either terrain normal's aren't very effective or its not working within my blue print. This will need to be fixed at a later date. If i was to re-texture a terrain in the future I would start by checking my textures fitted the shade model first. I got lucky in the fact it does fit the cartoony lighting but next time I'm sure it wont be the same and will cost me precious time. 







(fig 2.) The terrain texture blueprint.










After I created the textures for the terrain I then went straight to modelling. Starting with a simple terrace walkway structure in the style of authentic Chinese culture. This was my first model in recreating their historic buildings. Over all the build went well. Managing to keep it fairly low poly. The only problem is that it slightly looks more Greek than Tibetan. This is mostly because the roof is pointed and not curved. To do this I would need to remodel however there where technical problems with my model so I'm scared to dabber with this model again. The technical problems where from exporting OBJ's, re-importing them into max until it eventually got corrupted and all the normals flipped. This was fixed by adding a normal modifier to the model and resetting all the normals which is a useful tool to know for later on. 














More critical reflection - Optimisation is key in my project. Its going to be incredibly high polygon which will take a toll on the FPS. So the first optimisation problem I occurred that i could of solved is that there is a lot of polygons within these two models in the picture above that could of been taken out because they simply cant be seen from the access the character has within the map. Within my next models before UV mapping (I mapped these before I had the thought so i couldn't re-edit them without doubling my time spent on the models)  I will remove these unnecessary polygons.