A question about details..

[Lantic]

Hello again,

i have been cruising around on the Challenge posts and i've been wondering how people go about doing there details to buildings.. for instance i noticed people building there geometry and then totally editing the geometry ( cracked walls, holes ....etc) but why go that route (building the geometry then editing it). Couldnt you go by building your geomtry with the details in it already??

I just want to know how some people go about doing there modeling techniques.

P.s. sorry for grammer and spelling...


- Lantic

[epoclaen]

I assume you're referring to something like the artist working on Ghost City: McKormick.

They haven't started deteriorating the buildings yet though so it's hard to say. It's best to ask in the threads you're referring to though since every artist might be using a different technique.

One method I've seen used is to make a crude model of a broken wall and then move the model over to Zbrush to finesse the jagged edges and use the adjustments to create a displacement map which is applied as a texture map over the crude model back in 3DS Max.

[Lantic]

I found a good thread about what i was talking about. Ghost City! Oxhid3-Nicky

Would you just do a "edit poly" and just start cuting,slicing till your desire??

If i has Zbrush then of course i would go that route but since i dont i want to try a different method.

[epoclaen]

Likely a combination of "edit poly" and cutting/slicing. I usually avoid using booleans only because I found them cumbersome to use (in my limited experience with them) compared to simply editing the existing meshes.

One common method of creating such breaks is to use a PArray particle gizmo but that involves use of the particle system so I'm not sure how familiar you are with that. I'm not even sure how viable that is for the example you gave but the broken wall pieces might have been done with a PArray gizmo, only to create a natural-looking resulting bunch of broken wall pieces before baking the results into the scene. (Do a search for "break particle" in the Help Tutorials.)

One benefit of the approach used in the example you showed (building the entire structure before breaking it up) is that he can easily move pieces of shingle, boards from the fencing, etc... to where they might have fallen naturally. Prior thought and planning would negate a need for this but such pieces were likely very easy to add to the roof and fence by modeling just one piece of them and using Tools>>Array... to duplicate instances of them in an evenly spaced sequence. Then all he had to do was to delete some and move others. Breaking apart pieces of the boards and walls might just have been a Boolean object.

These are all just methods I'm describing. Personally, I would have planned the destroyed building's pieces out before even considering modeling the scene rather than do it the way he did but the only way to know for sure why he chose to do it this way is by asking him.