Going to make some Air con units , Drainpipes and Power boxes that we can scatter around the map amd whateverrrrs. I still think this building needs something else on at least one side of the diagnoal modular piece. Maybe some scattering drainpipes like...

Here's the hotel its pretty much done, just need to decide on what we want the name to be and i may add a light above the door in the alleyway. Also when we have the whole street together i shall make an air con unit that we can chuck about seeing as it will be on multiple buildings. Let me know if there is anything else people want or at least think should be added/ taken away.

An update on the el train, just chucked this out quickly. It tiles so we can just modularly instance it straight down the street. I'm getting on with a quick generic building next for the corner.
Here's a quick render of the el train:

The corner shop is modelled, this proved to be a bit of struggle. The problem started when we decided to take the street to a 45 degree angle from the 90 degree angle, destroying our idea of the modular Lego city. We knew the idea was visually more interesting so we stuck to it. The problem was that the front of the shop was a 45 degree angle, this didn't pose too much of a problem as I could just scale the modular pieces to fit a tile. it was more the curves going around in the architecture, for this reason the front and back can only be stacked and not used again, but the side walls are completely modular and can be plotted anywhere.

The building is quite bare at the minute, our current target is to get the major buildings modelled ready for Monday so we have our canvas of a city ready.

So I have done some work in zbrush now and after receiving feedback from both Leavon and Dave I think there is a lot I could do to improve the model. If I attempted to make these changes in zbrush on the high res however the end result would never be as satisfying as if I went back and edited the base mesh and started the high res from square one. It means more work over this week but I think it is defiantly worth it.

The Zbrush work that shall never be seen.

Just finished making the first modular piece for the shop. the wall texture was made by creating a couple of bricks and whipping them through Zbrush, brought them back in to Maya and created a quick wall using them. I then used xnormal to get a normal and AO map out of it. Using the normal map as a base, I created the diffuse map. other details are mainly a quick high poly made in Maya.

the map is 1024 x 1024 but this only uses 512 x 1024, meaning the brick wall texture can be used on other modular pieces and there's room left over for creating details on those parts.


I'm wondering if the other environment artists would mind trying to make some brick textures the same way, it's a quick process and will provide more variety in our environment.
Here is a quick shot of the modular piece repeated 4 times in Maya.
I would like to grunge up the wall texture but I'm thinking this would be better in vertex painting or offsetting overlays so to not look too repeated.

Any comments would be appreciated.

Just chucked together some simple low poly assets that we can use in our scene if needs be. I still need to finish off the high poly models but none of them are far off. Leave some comments at the end of this telling me what you think or anything that needs to be changed in the design......or if you think less polys should be used in certain areas.







I have a vending machine that should be finished shortly, which i am thinking can maybe go down in the subway and either look old and broken or should be selling something "unique." ( like them pollution masks or something along them lines / maybe something more modern. )


Also thought i would chuck up this website so everyone has it easier to hand if we needs it;

http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/3D_Tutorials.html

Inital blockout created for our enviroment:




Revised blockout:

Spent the past week looking into the best way to create the environment and keep management of the team pretty simple, after talking to some people on CGSociety I was directed towards some interests articles on modular level design. spent the weekend researching into this and running it by the team.

 Here's a quick screen of a test ran through UDK to make sure I understood what I was doing, the texture is nabbed off of cgtextures.com just to check if it would cause any texture seams or any other issues. The only issues present appear to just be normals and a couple of issues with the actual mesh, so the test was a success.

Someone needs to get this blog rolling so ill begin by posting the start i made on the base mesh for Mr. Gilligan tonight.