screwing around with architecture

[Matt]

I'm glad to hear it's useful. I haven't really modeled anything for a long, long time, and what I know is somewhat biased towards Terragen. So I have to be careful what I write. I hope others who know more can correct me if I'm giving bad or outdated advice.

Matt

[j meyer]

Perhaps the renderer could automatically generate these patch/chamfer/rounding polygons for you. This is possible. The .......

..... I've thought about offering that as an option. It might work well for organic models but I don't think it's ideal for architecture.

.........., but you still need to be careful about how you model corners in architecture.

Mental Ray has such a feature too - or at least it had some time ago - and it did not
do anything good to my models.You're way better off modeling that in.
Especially for organic things I found it to be pretty unusable.


Glad to hear you are planning to add an auto generate normals feature.
Although the 'use smooth normals' feature one could apply to e.g. ZBrush
models then can be problematic from time to time with hi poly stuff.
Just my 2 cents.

Thanks Matt,for chiming in on normals.

[bobbystahr]

. I will start saving incrementally from now on.

You can set it to do that automatically in the preferences...was one of the first things I set...I simply don't save often enuff is my problem.

[TheBadger]

@kadri,
I believe you said that you found duplicate faces someplace in the model... Two faces right onto of one another... Can you tell me where about you saw that?

[Kadri]

If you mean "Non Planar surfaces" i have to look Michael.
Other then this it was probably my bad English

If it is that what you mean Maya should have an option to show them probably.

[Kadri]

There are 1734 nonplanar surfaces. A picture wouldn't much help.

[TheBadger]

If you mean "Non Planar surfaces" i have to look Michael.
Other then this it was probably my bad English

If it is that what you mean Maya should have an option to show them probably.

Ah ok, well no planer faces don't pose any problems really, they are basically a non issue usually. Double faces an un-welded verts  on the other hand are a problem.

I have some other things I like to do so I had been doing those things, but now I have to get back to this project. I am trying to apply everything related that had been discussed in this and other threads now. Hope that this will look right tonight, so I can proceed.... Still got a tone of modeling to do

TO tell you the truth, I am thinking about stoping with the ruin part, and build all the structures like new. I had want the same image with ruins and one with new building. But it is terribly time consuming to model a ruin compared to a fresh structure.

Think of the temple of athena in athens. #-4 times more work to make as a ruin then a new building.... Ahhh but I would be so happy to have a ruin and a new structure for all my models for this project! Part of me must like suffering... Why else would I go into the arts?

[Kadri]

I haven't tried it but if you have the features in Maya you could go the lazy way (i unfortunately do this all the time).
Make a normal block of rocks and try to fracture it automatically in specific ways.

Or make some broken parts and put them in different ways to smaller blocks for example.

[TheBadger]

Yeah I have a script I bought (fracture ninja, or something) it works well but creates lots of 5 sided faces. or will work in tris. Maybe that won't be a n issue since I am going to TG now rather than Mud... Will have to try that again with just TG in mind.

[TheBadger]

OK, ALL IS FIXED!!

Here is the model with the normals averaged and construction history properly deleted on the entire model (as opposed to most of the model like before )

Here the displacement is positive. And you can see there are issues with the global shading created from averaging normals. (But that is fixed and I will show it in the next post)
[attachimg=1]

[attachimg=2]

[attachimg=3]

[TheBadger]

Now with all the above but the displacement map given negative value. As you ca see the global shading problem is resolved as well as the corners now totally correct.

[attachimg=1]

Next will be the last test. In addition to all the above I turned off "2 sided" in the object node.

[Kadri]

[TheBadger]

And now with 2 sided turned off

[attachimg=1]

[TheBadger]

K now here is the last one quickly post processed.

[attachimg=1]



Thank you to everyone who helped me learn the new stuff (new stuff for me) in this thread and in J's! Feel much better now

Next will be applying texture in TG like fleetwood, I will start a new thread for that since it will have new problems

Cheers!

[TheBadger]

All right. I spoke too soon as usual. Did anyone notice how flat everything got? I can't get a hard shadow to save my life now. I don't know what the hell is going on. Even my scale tester (the guy with the hat) is showing changed render results though I did nothing at all to the object in or out of TG.

I just don't get it, everything just creates a new F-ING problem. No mater where I put the sun everything renders flat. Just compare the images in above posts to previous images.

No shadows at all?