Basic blocking out

Hello everyone,

Now I am going to show you my initial steps towards the construction of Circus Maximus. I started with sectioning the circus in large pieces to be easier to look at. I will follow a modular asset creation workflow because the majority of the shapes and forms were repeating.

Here is a draft of what I mean:



Then each and every piece have their smaller portions that needed to be built. For example for the imperial box is mostly built up with Corinthian pillars, then the arches from voussoirs, keystone, pier, plinth and so on.


Since this building will act as a landmark and will go in a MMOFPS game, I though that I should keep polys under control by having a 1024 x 1024 texture repeating all across the 3D Model so I began by defining a square with the texture on it as being my base unit to build the whole structure. Here is an example:

So here you can see my progress of how I built the stage piece starting with just one square, making the trims, windows, staircases and entrances and then finishing with a piece that has 2,500 polys which is very low poly compared to nowadays standards but considering the multiplayer aspect it might be helpful. This process took me approximately two week as I was also searching for more inspiration and references in the same time.

The main aim is to keep the texel density as even as possible all around the model. Another aspect as important is to not have illegal UV faces and to keep everything inside the 0 to 1 square as this is helping with having beautiful light-maps and not needing to do a second uv unwrap. I have some examples here:

The UV face needed to be overlapping because they could not fit in the square and keep the resolution even at the same time. And I will not bake any normal maps or ambient occlusion for these models otherwise the UV faces needed to be non-overlapping. The process becomes very straightforward once you practice a little bit and you eventually get the hang of it, although is time consuming.

References

Anon., 2016. Prehistory | Open Eyes. [Online]
Available at: https://dana123girl.wordpress.com/tag/prehistory/
[Accessed 2 December 2016].
Cartwright, M., 2013. Circus Maximus, Rome. [Online]
Available at: https://www.ancient.eu/image/1275/
[Accessed 20 November 2016].