Priorities and Workflow

I think it would be a good idea to establish our priorities for this project, especially individually. If we want to get this project anywhere near completion we'll have to decide what we really want to concentrate on.

Things to do:

Exterior

*Terrain

*The mansion itself

*Atmosphere effects (fog, lighting)

*Exterior assets (gates, trees, fences)

Interior

*General lighting

*Room specific assets

*Wallpapers/Paintings

*Specific decals

The mansion itself is FAR too big, especially for such a small project. I put all my assets in the kid's room and it filled maybe 1/4 of it. So in my opinion; we either need to scale down, or prioritise which areas we want to get done. It's difficult to convey everyone's opinions over the blog, so perhaps we can establish another team meeting?

Updates

A few updates. I've revamped the toy box completely to be more innocent, it's not in-keeping with the rest of the deco in the child's room which is what I want. The box and the lid are separate to allow for some sort of creepy event involving it. The clock I've modified again, the specular map on it I think looks quite good, but I've been toying with the idea of scrapping it completely for a while now.

The chandelier has a plain black texture and a rough lightbulb texture. It currently has a specular map on it, which looks inconsistent in UDK as you can see some of the mapping seams for no apparent reason. I'm not sure what else can be done texture wise on it, because it's going to be on the ceiling.

Two styles of generic shelf, they have slightly different wood textures on but if they need to be the same it's a 5 minute job.

The book is a quick experiment, it's not to scale yet but I'm going to have it lying on the bed or the chair. Any suggestions for a front cover would be welcome.

Baking cakes

What you been up to chris? Well been sculpting. Heres what i've actually been doing today (not that this is related to this project). Most of the time's been spent on experimentation. Heres the workflow i've been using.
3dsmax: prepare regtangle 2x2 edge
Mudbox: highpoly sculpt
meshlab: Produce low poly from high
Max: unwrap low poly, bake high poly details onto low polys UV
photoshop: work on the AO bake adding mud/green layers using blending
Crazybump: Produce another normal map - Only if the max one isn't very good

meshlab actually converts the model into triangles - Which isn't a bad thing actually.
Finding more and more that crazybump isn't that great at creating certain normals, Example of this is some highpoly models transfer hard edges best on a baked normal. You would loose this if you just treated the diffuse in crazybump.

Rocking all over the world etc

Reduced the models polycount with Meshlab from 600,000 to 2000. Then UVW wrapped the rock along its hard edges. Projection mapped the normals and a diffuse for shadows from the high poly. Not a bad result overall looks much better than the rocks i had for my FMP. check out the article from Sascha Henrichs at 3dtotal for the actual rocks production process.

Realistic

just needs the right lighting - and no sunlight coming in the empty door

Building the entrance

Doory Doory Door Door.

This is without any gargoyle feature (which will go on the doors 'keystone' at the top), and fence (which I will either model or just make as an opacity mapped texture).

Decals