Street Progress

Its been a wile since i last posted but I have still been working on getting the street area finished. 

Road

The road presented a few problems for me as I have been creating the material for it. After grabbing some really nice reference photos from of a bridge on the main road just past the New Walk museum, I still wanted to add some variation as this area will have some long stretches of road. The texture itself does not have any viable tiling but it still needed to be broken up.

Going back to what I had learned from the rooftop project when I used the tutorials from 3Dmotive.com to create the floor I have used a mix map again to add a tillable mask that is mixed with the grunge texture. What this does is allows you to use vertex painting to paint in areas of dirt onto the road with more variation around the edges, creating more variation with just he one texture.

One of the problems I was faced with was how to mix them together but use different specular levels on the grunge texture to the roads surface. The core of the problem was that I hadn't realised that in this case swapping the part of the material network that went into the A or B slots when combining the elements together with a multiply node had an effect on how the two textures were blended together.

After figuring this out this helped me to add other neat little things into the material. I was able to make a tarmac texture for the pavement by creating an instance of this material and setting up the main material with parameters to change things like the colour and spec. As it is an instance and not a complete new material it reduces the memory needed to render the level. Also as I am using the same textures I don't have to increase my texture budget with a separate texture saving even more memory. This was an expanded version of the colour change I had added previously used to create the bus lane. I also used switches in the material so that elements could be turned of in the instance. This is also good for performace as the switches actualy reduce the instructions in the material.

The road texture has worn areas from were it has been constantly drove over by vehicles. This was removed obviously from the pavement instance along with a subtle colour change to the tarmac and dirt.

Tree Bases

As I will be adding trees along the main road that runs along the front of the bank I have been looking out for metal surrounds. I finally found some outside the train station in Leicester.

After some heavy editing (removing lots a cigarette ends) this is the final result. I decided to make a mesh for this element as I wanted to have each quarter uneven to the others to have it look like the roots of the trees had moved them as the tree has grown. This was not possible with bump offsetting, so I just used that on the holes in the grates to make it look more three dimensional.

This last picture shows the other grates I have made that will be scattered along the road. These are decals and not meshes. I don't want to make to many as I cant use instanced materials with decals. I have to create individual materials for each one and as I am using allot of decals for the rest of the road decoration I need to make the least amount as possible. That said I can't think of any other way of doing it.

I've also been working on the police car that will be part of the blockade to prevent the player from leaving the playable area. It's modelled on a Volvo. I like to have something I can work on that is different to the the area I'm currently focusing on as it stops me going insane working on the same things.