Meanwhile, Joe is working on...

Almost forgot about the blog, my bad. Lately in our Major project, one of the areas I have been contributing to is the modelling of our environment asset, notably establishing the scale with proxy geometry which are all done in Maya. Scene environment work in progress The general proxy geometries of the steps, floors, doors, windows, etc. were quickly modelled. Then came the railing and the lamp-pillar at the start and end of every flight. Quick concept art of the railings and lamp-pillar that I work from, provided by our concept artist Paris Jones The pillars were first approached, modelled and UV'd. To offer the director a choice, I modelled the pillar in both of rectangular or cylindrical profiles of each individual pillar element so we can mix and match to formulate the final geometry. Using Maya 2015's UV tools felt a little better than previous versions e.g. able select UV shells in the UV texture like you would with faces, edges, etc was nice. Howeve...

The number of vertices in a model NOT to be more that the number of screen pixels that the model will ever be viewed at The resolution of the texture follows about the same lines (NOT to be more that the number of screen pixels that the model will ever be viewed at) Only found out during group project meeting with our supervisor. Lots of models have been done before that, but lots will be done since.

Time to tidy up more models done by others then UV unwrap them, add collision box and scale it according to our scene. Spotted a couple of invisible/needless faces along the way, deleting them so UV unwrapping and texturing will go more smoothly. Going to try do as little modification as possible so I can do as much as I can in the limited time left.

Time for lightmapping the pesky meshes. The guides I'm going for are: 128 maps for the bigger environmental pieces 64 maps for the bigger props, maybe 128 in some 32 maps for the tiny props New set of UV for light map, copying from original texture UV then cutting them up more 2 to 3 pixel padding or spacing between each UV island, I'll go into more detail on how I do this automatically later If neighbouring faces is angled around 60 degrees or more, the UV edge between the faces will be split All islands fit in the UV space from 0 to 1 in U and V axis Video series I used by WorldofLevelDesign for light mapping principles, simple and short. He uses Maya too but I have my own twists on things  My personal, more intuitive setup for the UV grid for 64px lightmap resolution (right click on the UV grid icon) Mainly use edge selection in the UV to cut rather than rumbling about with the mesh trying to cut edges After all the islands are cut...

Got a new model from a team member yesterday, first model from him! Checked it out and looks good at first, nice details on the doors but then, under more scrutiny, I realised it might be unfinished as he did not state the situation on it. I sent him an email to check too, no replies as of yet. There is a mixture of highly detailed mesh, the door, alongside very primitive and simply composed meshes, e.g. doorknob and the pillars next to the doors. Also, it is massive compared to the scene that this asset will be in. If it is the finished asset, looks like I got a bit of work to do. Including UV unwrapping