Start Room Completion

I finally managed to take my final two pictures that would eneable me to finish off all the texturing to the start room of the cave area. Below are the final renders of what i have done...

Rendered Images

Below are the renders taken at various parts of the cave area after the lighting had been created.

Enjoy.

Computer Files

Its good practice to have multiple Max Files when you work, these can be saved and renamed at various stages just in case anything drastically goes wrong. Below are my files.

For the textures i have them all in one folder on my computer and also backed up on a flashdrive. Below you can see i have PSD Photoshop files, the actual textures that are used in Max and also all the bump maps that go with these textures.

Overall Images (2)

The renders below are of the whole scene from above, like before but this time it shows how the lights created have effected how the scene looks. The murky dark feel gives the caves that little bit extra from just having dark areas on the textures.

The two well lit rooms are the start and end rooms, these are the closest area to natural light and are far brighter than the cave and dungeon area.

Lighting

On this post i am going to briefly show you how how i lit the cave area. I used alot ALOT of Omni lights and used fairly short attenuation. Most of the lights are cream or brown in colour to just give a more murky look.

For stairs i like to use a directional light - to cast shadows from each step to the next and then a set of omni lights to create the actual lighting for the highlights.


For the hallways i used a set of omni lights with short attenuation and created a set for lighting the floor, then directly above for the rest of the hallway.


Again the hallway set lights can be seen, and in the distance i used the technique for lighting a room. The reason i didnt use one or two lights for lighting the whole room is that i wanted alot of shaded areas and using a various amount of these omnis allowed me to do this.


Finally for the exit room this was quite well lit in the photos so for this i decided to use just a couple of lights.

Faking Shadows

Throughout the cave area i faked shadows and grimey areas by brushing them on in Photoshop on a new layer that is on top of the actual texture. The main reasons for this are...

1) These areas are easily amendable so the shaded areas can become darker or greater.
2) It goes well with the 3DS Max lighting system.
3) It will save greatly on rendering time as the shading from the lights ddoess not have to be calculated as much.

A simple showcase of this is below where i have shaded a wall next to a staircase. The next image is of the texture map of the wall.

Looking on the left hand side we can see that the stairs have shaded areas but not the wall. So to create the darkened area we move back to Photoshop.

The added shade can be seen on the texture below, just using a darkened black brush set at a low opacity setting shadows can be layered up so that they are not too harsh and just basic black.

The render below shows the shaded areas completion and effect it has on the scene, this looks far better than the one previous. This method was good to use especially when 'stitching' various parts of the cave together when it was initially created.

Overall Images

After completing the texturing process i took some renders of the overall scene. Ignoring the bles and yellow parts where i still need to take images so i can texture them the rest of the scene is completed. The good thing about rendering with one sided objects 3DS Max allows renders to "look through" walls so the user can see what a room looks like at a distance.

Below are a few of my renders before the light placement will occur.

Texturing

Now that the model has been complete and the mapping has been issued, texturing is the next step. Using photoshop and images taken in the gallery alongside with other photographs (such as brickwork) i created the textures that will lie on the model.

Below is the texture for one of the rooms in the Galleries of Justice, i named this the exit room, the brickwork took a minute to resize so that it would be the right size once it is seen in 3DS Max.

Below is a render from 3DS Max to show what the texture looks like. Ignoring the doors on the right as they are on another texture map the one created fo the room looks good and nothing is stretched as was the plan.

The next stage was to add some dirt and shadow. Creating shaded areas at this stage will save time later on as the lighting placement and strength will be easier to create and also give the PC less stress when rendering at the end.


Once again the render below is the result of the shaded areas created in the previous stage.

Once this has been established i will also mimic more shading and depth - especially to the brickwork by creating a bump map. The bump map will look for black areas that will create shaded areas and the white area will be the highlighted area so when the final render is created the sence of depth is achieved.


Below is the final render ready for lighting to be placed into the scene. Every single model had its own Unwrap UVW, Texture and bump map. And this took around 80 hours to complete the whole scene -WOW!

Pre Mapping

Before adding the textures to the model i am setting up so UVW maps so that all the models can have textures that can be easily created in Photoshop. Creating UVW UNWRAPS of the models can allow a user to "break up" into sections ready to be textured, in this case i have split the galleries cave model into 45 of these maps.


Using a checker map I can foresee how a texture applied will look like later on. Using a checker map I can see if any squares are stretched or twisted if this is the case the textures applied later on will be the same. To prevent this, vertex points and polygons need to be moved to eventually get a map that has a good checker map such as below.

After this the UVW map needs to be rendered then saved ready for textures to be paced in Photoshop. Below is one section that had ben rendered. This is a flattened image of the actual model section.

In my case because i have alot of maps to go through i need something to help me when im about to texture. I place various colours on polygons and also paint arrows on the map in Photoshop so i know which what and where to place the textures later on. Simple but effective.

For the floor sections i have used a yellow colour to show where the edges meet the walls, this is going to be used for the dirty area where the floor does not get walked on.
I feel when i work this way the more help i give myself in the early stages the better it is later so i can focus on texturing the maps instead of pulling my hair out because the texture - does not look right, or is not where it should be. So this logical process can be a benefit to someone else!

STATS R US Part II

Ok so remember earlier after the inital modelling i had 10,534 vertex points and more importantly i had 7,779 polygons. Since then i had deleted all that were surplus to requirement and have also modelled another stair case and also the final part of the dungeon. With this happening i have still manged to reduce the amount of polygons used by a dramatic amount.

I have now 3,636 vertex points and 4,266 polygons. Not bad at all!

Im blue...

No not the song, but the background colour. As im working with a white scene i create a blue box behind the section that i am working on. Why you ask? Well to connect all the area of the cave system i either weld them together or i cheat by placing the vertex points in a particular way that the polygons cross each other. The blue box behind is used so i can see where there is a slight gap that needs closing.

It's unorthodox, but it works for me!

Losing your way?

Sometimes when you have alot of objects in a scene it is easy to not know what random polygon of there -> belongs to what object, especially for a cave scene. So to combat this i have changed the colours of various objects but my favorite to work with when deleting polys is (Ctrl+A) this selects all the polys on an object so you can clearly see which are not needed in a specific area.