clearing on 16/2/2009 at 17:52
Good work, Judith!
Beleg Cúthalion on 16/2/2009 at 20:00
You're off the hook if accidentally every Art Deco railing looks like this. :p Nice work, though.
In general, I've got the luck of always being hindered by something when trying to copy things from photos. So it's just an inspiration.
Renzatic on 16/2/2009 at 23:41
I'd say those shots, the gate in particular, are closer to Art Nouveau than Deco. Deco always seems to be more patterned and sharply defined, whereas Nouveau has more of a natural, unsymmetrical flow going on.
Also, I decided to try my hand at making that gate. Everyone hates a braggart, I know. But it's such a neat thing, I had to give it a go. (
http://users.chartertn.net/greymatt/arty.jpg) Here's what I've got so far. Not bad for a half hour worth of work. I'm amazed I could even do it.
str8g8 on 17/2/2009 at 12:25
Are you remaking bioshock? Seriously, I love all that deco\nouveau stuff.
Incidentally, if you were to make a nouveau railing like those shots I would do it with an textures and an opacity map mapped onto a quad (with a 3d hand rail and post etc.) Some engines - I'm guessing urneal 3 - allow you to create a shader with opacity, colour and normal maps, which can look surprisingly good.
But it's very hard to source a good photo for this - as you can see in the google image search, all the pics are perspective shots etc, and even when they are not there is a lot of clean up work.
A good work flow I have used before is to model in high detail (like Renzatic's fine example) then use this to generate the colour and alpha map (just by rendering and cropping it). You can even generate the normal maps from the mesh (but this is a bit more tricky so its often easier to just use the textures). The best thing about this technique is the opacity map and colour always match up perfectly.
Judith on 17/2/2009 at 14:42
Quote Posted by str8g8
Are you remaking bioshock? Seriously, I love all that deco\nouveau stuff.
I'm recreating some of it's meshes, yes, and using an art nouveau album for reference as well. I'm planning to focus on props modelling for some time. I need some decorations for a hotel interior. After that I'll try to make some small death match map for UT3 or Gears of War (more interesting option, I guess).
I thought about reusing those assets in Thief FM in the future but there's this problem with shadow casting. Even if I'm not touching the UVs, every model done in something different that 3ds 5.1 just won't cast shadows.
Ziemanskye on 17/2/2009 at 18:50
Mine are usually Max7 and cast shadows - are you remembering to re-weld all your vertices together when you import? (if you import by 3ds, they come unstitched, which means it's not a solid object by the shadow casting)
Judith on 17/2/2009 at 20:24
Never did that, thanks for the info. What should I do, precisely?
Quote Posted by Ziemanskye
Mine are usually Max7 and cast shadows - are you remembering to re-weld all your vertices together when you import? (if you import by 3ds, they come unstitched, which means it's not a solid object by the shadow casting)
