28th April Update

It has indeed been a while since I have updated the blog, this is due to my trip to the USA. However Disny World had a massive "Chinese Culture" aria where lost of traditional Chinese Architecture and decorations where housed which I could use for references. However most of it has already been noted in my research. but that does not mean that it was useless to see that i had used my research and resorses correctly.

hear is the work I have accomplished so far. Time is getting tight and I may not be capable of completing the trees that I intended to have and thus I may have to use the default ones provided by Unity and UDK.

I have completed the long unfinished Chinese inspired door. it had to be inspired instead of an exact replica as the references I had where taking too long to edit to make them pleasing to the viewer.

Hear is the updated Wall's and the new Door I have created.

I have also finished creating the Brakket for under the roof and a base of the roof.

another to note is that from now on all models will be manually Light-mapped as the automatic light-mapping tools are for the most part useless in the majority of cases. Models will have to be re-scaled for UDK which should only take a maximum of a minuet.

Mental-Ray Render, which seemingly makes normal-maps look strange, at-lest in this render anyway.

Hear are the UDK renders in the current environment.

April 9th Update

Managed to solve the lighting problem in Unity. For some strange reason the Ambient light was set to unprecedented levels of brightness which was creating the problem. During this time however I have imported all my assets into UDK to compare its lighting capability's to Unity.

hear are some screenshots of the progress i have made so far.

The top priority now is completing meshes and getting them into the game engines.

Hear are some of the UDK Screenshots.

Hear are the Unity Screenshots of the updated lighting with the "sunset stile". Be it noted that the Sunset look will always make scenes look more unique, so a fair judgement cannot be made until both lighting directions and settings are at a simmiler level.

At the moment Unity is having trouble projecting shadows onto the terrain as well as creating shadows on objects (for example, creating a darker aria behind on object that is not in direct contact with the light source. See Banners for example.)

There is also much more noticeable "Bleeding" on textures in the Unity version, this is most likely due to Unity automatically generating the light-mapping UV's and not paying them out properly, even though the light-mapping has been set to a minimum of 4px (pixels) separating the second set of UV's from one another, there still seems to be a problem. Manual Light-mapping may be required as I have done with the UDK file.

The final judgement on the two game engines are hard considering that both have their own perks and disadvantages. At the moment I feel that I have less control over the Unity scene compared to the UDK file. This is mainly because Unity does a lot of options automatically without the ability to edit them. The hard shadows for example look soft, despite them being set to hard shadows. It also has a slight resemblance of a 3 point studio lighting commonly seen in rendering programs such as Keyshot.

Only thing that needs to be done with Unity is to increase the shadows somehow and it will look more like Outdoor lighting rather than interior lighting. (Note: Photon bouncing is set to as low as possible but still makes the shadows hidden)

UDK's lighting on the other hand is largely unchanged from its default. However despite this the results are largely more outdoor and accurate than that of Unity's.

On another note after looking over the roofing yet again, I have decided to work on "Roofing 3.0" which will consist of changing the rounded arias of the roofing with a curved Cylinder instead of trying to simulate it with just pure Normal Maps which will not effectively appear in Shadowed arias.

hear are some screenshots of the prototype so far.

The ends will have a plain on the ends with an opacity/Alpha map on them where a ZBrushed face will be with Dragon patterns on it, and then placed on the ends of the Cylinders with a Normal Map on them.

Update 3rd April

I have been working toward finishing up the main textures of the courtyard. As well as finishing up on the roofing textures. All that needs to be done now for the roofing is to ZBrush the ends of them and normal map "droops" where the tiles "fall off".

I have also been working on using "dDo" for editing my textures to make them more realistic, such as scratches and paint damage.

However despite these accomplishments over the last week and a bit, I have run into a server problem which jeprodises the entire project, this, is the light-mapping. during which the intensity was set to very high extremes as well as the shadows not appearing on Meshes as well as texture Light-Mapping bleeding.

After abandoning the previous unity project and moving to create another one, I have seemingly fixed a small portion of the light-mapping problem. However the other problem is light maps for a mesh with multiple materials on it. seemingly after baking the lights down the mesh with multiple materials on it does now project shadows. As of now it appears that the object I was referring to as being "fixed" has deceived me and so the light mapping has not been created for that mesh.

It is also noted that there is allot of texture bleeding on the objects with automatic light mapping applied to them. This causes allot of frustration as the mesh automatically becomes a blotch of shadow smudges all over it due to UV Light-map bleeding. This may meed that the majority of my 3D meshes may have to be manually UV Light-mapped in order to get closer to the effect I am looking for. Another problem too is that Unity seems to miss out on creating a final gather of the environment, this making everything look "stail" and uninviting as an environment.

Hear are the Screenshots/Renders of this Weeks progress.

Below are the Texture Bleeding problem in Unity, as well as the Final Gather Problem.

There is also a lot of "Light Bleeding" in a scene, even after removing custom materials.

Also some ZBrush Progress from today

I have also Updated the textures on the Banners going across the Courtyard between the pillars to a more traditional look. Including a Coloured Specular map and a Normal Map.

updated Renders of the current scene.