Church (unfinished)

This is a church that Kyle Richards, one of our artists here at WD. He made this great church. we are in the process of mapping it so expect a few bugs!
Yes I know it is very early but its shaping up very nicely!

 

Based on those two screenshots I think your bump maps are inverted.

 

I liked the way they turned out

 

The church looks very cool, but I think that you could build it with less polys:

 

I agree with both tim and Gaston. The Bump Maps should be inverted and the UV Mapping on the roof should be reworked as well, it doesnt look convincing this way in my opinion. While the bump map and UV thing is a matter of taste, the poly-reduction mentioned by Gaston is a neccessary step to take.

I can recommend the book "Game Modelling using Low Polygon Techniques" by Chad Eric Walker, Charles River Media.
It covers the basic approaches to low poly game modelling and texturing. It is a bit outdated but it offers a great amount of basic game dev knowledge.
Making a game is not an easy task and it requires large amounts of knowledge on many many topics. And there are really critical parts in game dev that you cannot learn by doing. You simply need to know them, to do the job right. Saves you a lot of pain.

Frank

 

I looked up the book Alpha-Loup mentioned and it had pretty mixed reviews. One of the reviewers suggested this book instead, though it probably doesn't cover modeling buildings.

 

Thanks guys. We are in the process of making it better. Oh and how do you reverse bumpmaps?

 

I guess, you are using a greyscale image to create the bump maps inside unity. So just take the image into your 2d graphic application, invert the colors and save.

(There usually is an invert function wich does that automatically. You could use the graphic converter from lemke soft for example, wich is shareware and can be downloaded for free.)

Unity will then automatically update your bump maps.

 

HELLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO i am kyle apreciate your comments just tell me how things could be better.

 

Kyle,
one suggestion (for flat surfaces with multiple sides):
if you have a flat surface like one face of a church wall, reduce the triangles to the bare minimum. For example if one face of a wall is just a rectangle with no windows in it, you can reduce that to two triangles with no loss in quality.

The math usually works as follows: (Number of triangles needed) = (Vertices of an n-gon) -2. Every three exposed points needs one triangle. You can remove one point from exposure with each triangle you draw. The last triangle removes three points. Hence a rectangle with 4 points needs two triangles. A pentagon needs three.

if you have an n-gon with an n-gon shaped hole cut out of its middle, the number of triangles needed is equal to the number of total vertices. Example a rectangular window cut out of a rectangular face would require 8 triangles as each n-gon has four vertices.

Disclaimer: I've never studied topology nor do I know much of anything about math. I'm just an amateur designer who has noticed this relationship while trying to keep my triangles to a minimum.

 

I suspect you're using boolean tools, which usually creates more geometry than necessary. That's OK for 3D rendering where the number of polygons doesn't matter that much, but for 3D gaming it's still important. Although it seems like more work, it's sometimes better to do the holes by hand. If you still use the boolean tools, then you should delete all the unnecessary points and fill in the faces again with the minimum number of polygons.

--Eric

 

Don't stress out too much, though. If you can manage a good-sized building in about 500-3000 polygons, you won't have any performance issues with weaker cards except in really large towns.

I've experimented with the polygon count my MacBook Pro can handle, (it's pretty upper-end) and it can go to about 2.5 million polygons on-screen without any noticeable slowdown on fantastic with max resolution.

 

oh hey gargareth, hows wastleland goin?

 

thnx for the tip but i aint smart enuf for all that geometry so i will stick to the polly reducer script yer and well um well i am a youngen i dont have any real you know teachings but i do a pritty good job for what i do

 

Thats true from one point of view.

But if i have a building with 3000 Polys that could have been done with 1000 Polys, i could use those 2000 additional Polys to add really nice detail to the building, without any loss of performance.
So a clean mesh topology is a must for all nice detailed game graphics. And on the other hand... why throw away really precious stuff like higher frame rates or more content?

Frank

 

Not smart enough to count?

Well good luck anyway.