Wednesday 6 June 2012

Medieval construction

Medieval architecture is kinda fun, these buildings were built to be sturdy even with the materials that were('nt) available. But they have that fun idea of settling, that is, they reshape themselves over time depending on their structural integrity and the ground it stands on.

No wonder they medieval cities were so tight, the buildings sure needed their neighbors to hold themselves standing! No but on a serious note though, its quite an important thing to consider, since a medieval building with all straight angles could seem a bit off, unless it just got built. But that's sorta what I've been working a bit with today, building modular pieces for buildings to use in UDK. Also for this I made a new wood texture, yesterday's one didn't quite fit the bill since it looked a bit too worn (that would probably work better as a scaffold piece).
I'm still debating how large modular pieces I should do, 256^2 ones or entire floor sections in varying sizes. Also I'll have to experiment in how to get the settling effect with modular pieces, but settling is easier within the wood bars at least. That's was all I got for today, tomorrow I'll see if I can tackle the roofing.

Tuesday 5 June 2012

Back to the battlements

Yay, finally the theoretic part of my thesis is done. But now I finally can do what I've been longing for, the actual art. Now this project I'm starting work on will be a quasi-medieval/fantasy village or outpost. It's both for the continuation of my thesis work, and will be a nice addittion to my portfolio as assets gets finished.

(As for what this wall-resting construction could be, I guess a merchant stand or maybe some sort of stable.)

Now here we have todays work, at first it started with a sculpt and texturing of a wooden bar, it then evolved into some modular practice. The construction is made from the single model texture and with all the bits and pieces its at about 900 tris, something I think I'll be able to cut down quite a bit if I give it another round of optimizing. But todays biggest timesink I guess was figuring out UDK lightmaps, something I'll have to rework in that model since it could only apply a very basic variant of it.