Update March 25th

At the moment I am currently blocking out the roofing, which is, as expected, the most difficult part. The challenge is scaling and topology, while maintaining the traditional shape of the Chinese roof. The main difficulty is the shape. The shame is very much unlike that of western roofing where it is mainly just an angle for slates to be placed on with ease. Chinese roofing is curved, simply because when it rains the roofs curve can "Flick" the rain water away from the interior architecture where weaker, but more decorative, wood is used. This couses multiple problems for creative modular peace's for the roofing. Not only are the tiles complicated to model but so is the Bracketing under the roof where there consists of lots of wooden poles which can be clustered and add to hundreds in just one section of the environment. Instancing is the obvious answer for this, however to keep the peace's in a mathematically even separation from each other they will have to be grouped together, which in turn can, unfortunately take the demand to a higher level. separating the faces from a larger poly version of the base roofing will be required to achieve this.

The other problem is the corners where the roofing changes direction at a 90 degree angle. trying to create the geometry to go round such an aria will require it to be higher demanding than useral. At the moment I am planning on creating a hight map for the Roofing so that the geometry does not have to me created, however the hight-map will take up memory, maybe more memory. For the time being I am sticking to the smoothing edges in Maya and adding a Normal map to the top to simulate high geometry, the problem is that the character will me mostly looking up at the roofing, so I will most likely create small sections of geometry and then have the ends of the roofs higher poly and instanced along the roofing with a normal-map plane with detail placed in front of them.

Screenshots/ Renders below.

So fare after working of Roofing 1.0, I have moved onto Roofing 2.0 where I am reconstructing the geometry and splitting up sections of the model to instance, and so safe on memory.

Things to work on is overlapping poles and then applying textures to the model.

Update March 17th

Managed to put some of the models into the Unity Game engine. the only problem is getting the modular pieces to work properly, so there has been a-lot of trial and error with this method as I am trying to avoid the models and textures overlapping which not only distorts the textures but also causes a flickering when looking at the texture while moving.

at the moment I am also fleshing out some rendering in Maya's Mental Ray so I can have a better idea of what the lighting will hopefully be like once the lights are Baked in Unity.

Also this Unity Screenshot

So far on light-mapping the Unity project comes up with multiple errors which in turn produces week results (unvibrent and unsaturated. almost no change other than shadows). might be the lack of original terrain but I'm not 100% shore that it the problem.

Rendering Update 6th

As Unity is not currently installed on the computer I am using I decided to try and make the textures better. however Maya s default rendering engine is not exactly astonishing and hides some of the detail which the textures are using. programs like V-Ray or Mental-Ray can enhance the scene to show off the textures true forms. But Maya's real time rendering is not "up to scratch", this I suspect is due to Maya not "Baking" the textures to properly reflect objects with specular maps and light directions.

I took my model into a program called "KeyShot" which renders out the scene in real-time (using the processor and RAM but uses up lots of memory in the process).

using this program I was capable of looking at the colours that I am using and managed to see how they worked in the world. I was also capable of changing the master material in the KeyShot software (master colour over the main texture). So far in the main file for the colour material is too "pinkish" on the bannister and the pillars; and the glossiness of the pillars need to be lowered so that the painted wood texture can show through more effectively and not look unnatural.

here are my renders.

The Detail on the wooden planks as well as the colour are so far to my liking and no more changed will me made to them for the time being.

Texture Fixes

So-far today its been some texture fixes and reviews.

Fixed the top pillar decoration banner textures to be more fluent with the overall texture.

I have also been editing the Specular-Maps but they will still need more editing.

In this I have also smoothed out the pillars. however a usable texture has yet to be found. And the specular map will also need looked into to make them more "Glossy".

Update on Pancake day

had a small setback and had to regain speed and ground. Decided to go straight into texturing and creating the objects at the same time. at the moment I had a small "snag" at texturing and had to make some adjustments. In particular creating wood texture for the bannister took up a considerable amount of time. however the specular map seemed sufficient to create the detail I needed to make the object more suitable to the result I needed.

Here are some renders and textures of today's progress.

Defuse and Specular map for the pillar decoration. Specular dose not seem to show up effectively on the Maya file, but the idea is for the parts with gold in the scene to shine brightly, can be easily decreased if the unity file shows it as too bright.

For the wooden Floor I downloaded a texture wood back from a Deviant-art user called "Nobiax" and changed them to "Red" wooden planks rather than standers bright yellow planks. I might change these to be more smoother and glossy but for the time being I decided to go with the current flow so that i could see the detail coming together in the scene.

All textures are tillable.