The Architecture 3: Painting Texture & Physics

I found I was being so stupid to paint the textures using just Photoshop based on the exported uv “blindly” before, it was so slow and painstaking and there were quite a lot flaws because of the non-contiguous seams. And I learned from the Night Cafe Project that he used Mudbox to paint the bitmap directly and turns out nice so I am considering to get one too.

But I used Blender’s texture painting this time for the new building. It’s much easier than use only Photoshop although the hardness of the brush is unchangeable and it turns out the vague edges which is quite unpleasant.

I also tried the unlit shader as used in the Night Cafe which creates an amazing painting-styled environment. It’s kind of a 2D-like 3D, but I have to say at this stage the flat colour is not really compatible with others and everything needs to be changed if I wanted them to fit. I’m going to change the skybox, but I have no idea if I can manage the terrain and plant. Also the style of Bosch is more realistic and not like Van Gogh’s, and there’ll still be reflective materials like glass and metal so, I’m not sure now but maybe it’s not suitable for mine. But it’s good to know this technique.

Anyway I’ve just finished the second big building and I tried more with the joint physics which was used on the hanged red ball on the above pink building.

This time I tried to make the branches waves so I gave it a try to separate them into pieces and add joint physics. So as how people make rope physics, the tip one is the child of the former one which is again the child of the one before it… But if I still use hinge joint then they’ll collapse like a hinge will do and a branch is not gonna be soft as that. So I tried fixed joint. It turned out nice to wave like a branch but the problem was it would soon stop even though I turned of the drag coefficient. And then my solution is to tie something transparent as hinge or add some constant force to the top ones, as well as add their mass.

For those grow upwards I unchecked the “use gravity”, just use hinge joints and add an upwards constant force to the top one, so it moves like a balloon – maybe they seem a bit too much “enchanting” for a branch though.. Just because fixed joints don’t wave so much and would stop soon even if I added force. There might be some solution to the fixed one though….

Hopefully it wouldn’t seem “so much” after the other moving elements (creatures) are added later.

The Project 3D Night Cafe

The Night Cafe

Today I came across a project on Made With Unity about a 3D restoration of Van Gogh’s Night Cafe by Mac Cauley. It was just surprisingly great to see that really somebody is also doing the same kind of thing at the moment, and has quite already achieved the kind of sense that the 3D restoration of a painting should be like in my very initial imagination.

For The Night Cafe, I wanted the viewer to experience the feeling of stepping into this back alley cafe the way Van Gogh might have. I also wanted to express that feeling of wonder when you see his paintings, of being swept up by his exuberant colors where every brush stroke feels imbued with his lust for life as much as with his inner struggles.

I’m also so thankful that the artist talked detailedly about the methods in this project which is of course very useful and inspiring to me dying for the shading and texturing! Although it’s like hey it’s impossible that no one is thinking to make something as you do, I now feel there’s the motivation again and the visible aim I can head towards. Anyway, people are fond of Van Gogh who has been getting all kinds of creative tributes, but not the other genius of painting!

The Architectures 2: Start with the Giant Building

Finally finished something again to post a blog! I was making one of the most complex buildings (I hope it will be the most, but…huh), and the texturing, occlusion / all kinds of maps of the complexity drove me even crazier than modelling, placing and the combination, which seems just alright from this not really perspective view of speciosity, while it did become like impossible when it came into 3D… and also don’t ever forget the terrain and humans to see if they will be able to fit in.

Anyway this completely pink squid building has now appeared in my scene. Seems I’m getting more familiar with drawing textures baking lightmaps setting materials things but, this is only one of the five equivalent complexities… so good luck and hurry up I can’t afford to spend as long as this for them…

There is one thing special I’ve done to this building. I just took the attempt to search for the rope physics and there are plenty of tutorials so this became something a bit more interesting in this scene so far… I hope the tree can wave too but I don’t want to bother with the tree system now and there is nothing in my assets looks similar to this.

Some other small things before I started with this pink building:

 

For things with decorative elements of multiple materials, I duplicate the model, make it just a little bigger and give it another fade / transparent shader or rendering mode, with a height map. Like the bump circles in the left pic and some metallic rust in the right. There is a subtle difference in reflections when you move around which looks quite nice.

And these are just simple rigid bodies so that the berries are rolling around, and when you walk there to kick them away.

The Architectures / Artefacts

(Now my plan is to use a third person controller in a nude human’s shape to go through this place. I haven’t made it and I’m just using the default one at the moment.)

This post is about the architectures or artefacts – not really sure what I should call them – that I have done so far.

The working process is I create everyone in Blender, export UV, paint in Photoshop according to how they look in the painting (not edit the painting to fit the UVs), and make a suitable material in Unity. Sometimes it would need to go back to Photoshop, change the patterns and reapply them again and again to reach the satisfactory effect.

There are always times that I hope I can write my own shaders when I find it difficult to get the effect I want, especially for the cutout/reflective things. Actually I don’t know well about those so many kinds of maps in the shader’s parameters so the learning process has been numerous experiments (well I think I should find some tutorials to go through these systematically). But so far things turn out not bad.

I didn’t want to bother with the plant branches and vines so I used cutout/fade shaders on some planes rotated to all angles to make sure they can be seen from everywhere. I hope they can wave like grass, but terrain grass waves like the whole thing moves (the root should be fixed) so I gave it up. The planes don’t seem as good as the real models though.

The glass ball has some cracks. But I didn’t find a proper setting for both the semitransparent  and the solid crack, so I duplicated the ball and allocated them two different shaders to compose like a single object.

And the orange stele, with the ball on it, has 400 pearls placed manually… A single texture would not have different materials, and the cutout texture would not look solid and reflective even with height map. I think there must be a better professional way to do it, and it’s like I just forced it very stupidly. It’s like a manually made luxury, isn’t it..

The Environment

Haven’t posted anything for quite a long time because I have been dealing with the scene’s setting and the progress is rather subtle compared with the former models and animations that can be counted.

I created a height map to set the terrain of the whole world. It is an easier way than using Unity terrain brush when you have already got a blueprint of what the world is going to be like, especially for dealing with the scale/position things corresponding to the original painting, while I feel the brush tools are quite hard to control because it is not very smooth, either a big gentle slope or a sharp angle, or a perfect shape for the pool, and it takes great calculation all the time.

One tricky thing about height map is that if you paint it as you can see it, it would turn out to be a dramatically variant terrain. So everytime I just adjusted it to blindly black after I felt it had been done. (Suddenly found maybe I should have changed the terrain height parameter in Unity instead of turning the map like this?!)

Then I used the brush tools to adjust the details in Unity, to ensure that the ground can fit the things put on it, like nothing of the models is underneath and also they are not floating or seemingly unsteady – some models, like the orange stele and the stones behind it on the right front of the painting, are even constructed with the terrain. I would also be careful about the height around the central pool – those humans are going to ride around the pool, so while they are animated themselves without the position/transform’s change, and will have the script to make them move and rotate facing the way they go, it would be very hard to detect the ground’s shape so I should just flatten the path as the identical height for them.

The next is the plants on the terrain. I would like they are low poly flat shaded (I mean the leaves, but not as low poly as that a tree is composed by several balls and a truck) or I cannot reach the level to be very much realistic. But it is not that easy to find free suitable resources. Trees and bushes have much more complicated structure and things like how they would wave with the wind, than the grass which I can just paint by myself, and at this stage I am not going to learn how the tree system works and make my own trees.

(Carefully chose colours, sizes and species to make them fit together and fit with the whole scene. I feel it quite similar to flower arrangement and it is a pleasant work.) I also used some tiny terrain pieces, put them on the models, adjust them as the slope of models and put grass on them, because grass on the terrain can be animated with wind. Should be careful the grass does not penetrate the models.

I put some effort on the lighting and camera effect. Everything seems very plain and the environment is not attractive at all. But so far the effect has not been satisfied since the environment effect should be of course one of the last things to do, with the skybox and mountains canvas pieces.

Now I have just done things in the front part and I am mainly doing the architectural things and putting them into the scene. So I will add the plants around everytime when I put a model in case I would have to remove them and re-paint.

A Useful Website

http://www.esotericbosch.com/

The Esoteric Bosch
Commentaries on the esoteric meanings in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch

Found an excellent resource of the explanations of the painting. Detailed, academic and quite comprehensive. In the slides the writer explains the painting in every small part and that is exactly what I was thinking to make interactions to my project: when you come to a place, see something and trigger the explanations or something.

I’m afraid I can’t quote this materials directly or maybe I should contact the writer for permission. I keep it now and will see how I could use it later when I start to do the interactions. I’ll definitely need something though and will keep looking for other materials as well.

The Riding Circuit

All those with quite special poses are done and I’m starting to set the first scene in Unity tomorrow for them.

I found I might have made big mistakes to sculp hair in really tiny messy faces topology which could result in great computing and that should actually be the work of texture and height map things… because of my lack of experience in modelling. And I still don’t know yet what I will be faced with when I do the texturing later…