Stacks Hub Building Construction : Part II

Today I cut out the windows with the boolean feature of blender.

Man I hate that thing but sometimes it is the lesser of 2 evils. It made a total mess out of the mesh. It took me over an hour to fix faces and vertexes. Here is the result:

Added some window detail.

I added the chimney, ridges along the roof and headers to some of the windows:

I slid the chimney down to be along the the right exterior wall, removed the circular window from the right exterior wall, added a floor and interior wall for the top floor and welded the chimney onto the roof. I hid a few faces so you could see the interior.

I spent a few hours improving the arched windows to extend properly into the room. These arched windows are a total pain in the a$$.

I found this reference image for how to deal with them on the inside:

Here is the result:

Ignore the crappy texture mapping. That was me trying to figure out how to show inverted normals. It turns out there is a "backface culling" check box I somehow unchecked.

I fixed the fireplace interior, added a door to the right side for the second patio and added more detail to the lower windows.

I added a railing and window panes this morning

I added the upper windows, the lower "garden level" window and door headers. The interior of the first floor was messed up so I had to fix that too...

It's starting to feel like a real building. Still lots to add...

I improved the right entrance and added hand rails to the left entrance:

I started work on the right balcony. It is lower than the left one so I added a few step down onto it. Since I'm also working on a "perfect" version of the building I opted for wood planks versus haphazard sections of wood for the railing.

I added more to the right balcony.

I worked on the awning a bit this afternoon. It looks a bit weird because normal back-sides are not being rendered.

I added the table and barrels and took it into UE4:

Objects on table complete. Getting close...

I decided to enhance the detail of the light to make it a paper lantern:

"The Stacks" new hub building construction

Humble beginnings but you gotta start somewhere...

I've extended the walls up and are preparing to join the vertexes above the doors.
The cube on the right is the doorway size. I need it to be consistent.

 
This will need to be exported to UE4 and viewed in the Rift constantly. The proportions of the building are tight. This will likely need to be deeper like a lego modular building. The original cg artist's primary goal was to replicate the look of the building. Heights of the doors were inconsistent among other things.

I wanted my steps to be realistic so I read up on how to build real stairs and created a spreadsheet calculator to build them. I realize there must be a plugin for this but it was a good exercise to understand how it is done.

Here are the finished entry steps:

With the spreadsheet it took about 2 minutes to build the top 2 steps.

I finished the steps, added an interior wall and floor for the left entrance. Now to add collision and bring it into UE4 for scale assessment.

Here is the collision. 13 collision meshes so far...

Well, getting this bugger into UE4 was a total suck fest. I learned a few things:
1. You need to create a UV map. I think you also need a light map. I did both at the same time. If you don't the object is black.
2. The new fbx binary export does not support multiple collision meshes. Totally annoying. You have to use "fbx 6.1 ascii".

I've got to figure out a better workflow. There seems to be a dozen new hurdles getting meshes from blender into UE4.

So, here is the building with collision in UE4:

I added it to the sample map and added a door. I like the proportion of the door but it is too short. I scaled it to fit the door opening and then scale the building along the X axis until the opening matched the door:

I now know the correct scaling for the openings is 1.140137 (they need to be that much wider).

Ignore the crappy look of the material. I have not properly UV mapped the mesh. I just wanted to get a sense of scale.

Here is what it looks like in the rift:

UE4 does not do a good job with a lot of things when you view it in stereo. Normals looks weird, reflections are bad, anti-aliasing is nasty, lens flare is annoying. I had to turn that stuff off and find a material with minimal reflections so it looked good.

...

I've decided the left portion of the building is a staircase. I've built 1 flight of stairs. I fought with the scale until it felt right. The doors are way too big but the space and the stairs feels good.

I wasn't happy with the building. It was just too tall.
1. I shortened the height
2. I removed a step from the staircase and shrunk the height of all steps.
3. I made the stair landings equal size

Once I'm happy with it I will add the rails. Something like this:

I figured out how to drop the height by 2 more steps. I added 2 more stories of steps to visualize the total building height. The height will be driven by the stairs.
first flight = 14 steps + 3 outside
second & third flights = 16 steps

Designing objects for VR is very hard because it has to have the perfect proportions inside the rift. In real life, 8 steps comes to eye level. I've got it doing the exact same thing in the rift so the steps are perfect. At the same time I have to make the building look like the artwork as much as possible. The building was never designed to be used so it is quite challenging.

Just having a little fun before I add the windows and top floors...

Add added the second floor and some windows. I tried my best to pick the best window proportions that matched the art and would work with the interior. I had to move the first floor window close to the door to work with the staircase. I flipped the staircase along the x axis to allow a window to work along the side.

Third floor basics in place:

I added the balcony, floors, stairwell walls and doorways for the 2nd and 3rd floors. That actually took a while...

I added the roof and created an arched window cut out. The cut out is positioned to cut the first window from the roof.

View from within UE4:

View from within Rift:

That's enough for tonight.

Inspiration

I'm going to do a bit of work on the UE4 Stacks this weekend.

I browsed the crap out of Pintrest and put together some images that inspire me. Every image I look at I ask the question: How cool would this be in the rift?

I think these 6 images would make great Rift experiences:

Building a seamless texture

I thought I'd take one of the images I found on pintrest and make it tile.

Creating great looking seamless textures is no easy matter.

original

step 1: remove dark & red patches

I have to be very careful to not lose any of the wonderful detail of this texture. 

If you aren't careful, cloning can quickly destroy a texture.

I want to minimal adjustments to the image to get it to tile nicely

step 2 : even out color and remove more red/dark patches

If I want this thing to tile I needed to remove the yellow and red patches.
I create copies of the image and flip them vertically & horizontally to create more variation.
I am always cloning 100% hard. Soft edges can also ruin a texture.

That last adjustment make the image too noisy.
I will need to remove some of the bumps and ridges

Step 3 : rework to remove noise

I chose a square portion of this texture, used the offset filter and went to

work on making it seamless.

final texture

texture in UE4

tile example

As you can see, there is still room for improvement.
Even though the seams are gone, the pattern of repetition is too obvious.

 final tile texture

final tile texture example

I think I removed enough repetitious elements to make the tile look better.

Drawn Textures Are Awesome

I just spent the last hour "binging" on drawn textures and artwork on Pininterest:
http://www.pinterest.com/seanrforeman/textures/

Here is a sample texture:

From this URL:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=105322

Just for fun I brought it into crazy bump:

I then imported the resulting crazy bump images into UE4 and built a quick material.

Material Preview in UE4:

Here is the result in-game:

That looks really great.

Amazing 3D architecture : my next project

Pininterest : Anthorax : Environment

I stumbled on this site yesterday and it blew my mind:
http://www.pinterest.com/Anthorax/environment/

I wanted my new version of the stacks to be floating on islands. I was going to start working on rebuilding Tuscany until I saw this building yesterday. It is created by Tove Bergqvist.

Here is the mesh:

Here is the original art by Charléne Le Scanff:

It comes from this post:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=122775

I've dabbled in drawing and I lean towards the cartoonish style that this building uses.

I am building that instead of Tuscany. What I would like to do is make it so the building can age based on a parameter. I could have a variety of looks for it from pristine to even worse than this image.

I also picked up this month's 3d creative and it has amazing article on game material creation using photoshop:

I'm a long time Photoshop user and I need to better leverage my skills there. I used to teach small classes on it for a local photography group.

I'm going to finish my blog entry on multi-texture materials, replicate the 3d creative tutorial and then start work on the building. I'd love to have it ready for the Oculus conference (if I get an invite) along with a rebuild of one of the parts of the stacks floating above it.

The Stacks t-shirt

I thought I'd make a t-shirt for my game "The Stacks".

Here is a preview of it:

You can find it here:
http://www.zazzle.com/oculus_rift_the_stacks_game_t_shirt-235035424055673749


Here are the images I used: