I Never Want to Look at a Rope Again

After asking several people which route I should take with the rope, a cylinder, parallax occlusion mapping, tessellation and magic, I decided to test out the cylinder.

This was just a really quick bake to see if it would work out, and it held better than I thought it would.

The normals that I got from the bake were ridiculously messy.  I was guessing the waves were from the low poly mesh being too low compared to the high, and the artifacts were from where the cylinders intersect and the cage getting all jumbled up.

So what I decided to to was go in and hand paint over the messy bits.  This is what it look like at the minute, I'll add rope fiber normals after I have done the texture.

The texture was a bit hard to get right at first.  I had to go in and paint red lines over my cleaned up normals to see where the ropes sat.

Well, this is coming along nicely now, I just want it finished and to move onto other assets.  It has taken me a long time to get this far, it's always going to be harder when you first start as you just make so many mistakes.  I'm pretty certain the process will speed up a heck of a lot after I have got my first 3 assets entirely finished.

In regards to the bucket, I'll probably play around with the fibre normals a bit more, get some alpha planes in there for the rope fibers and fill the bucket with some water.  I have been playing around with fluid actors in UDK but I'll have to see if there are any better ways to do it.

Update

Okay so I haven't updated by blog for a while, I've been too busy trying to fix this damn rope!

Well seeing my last post and how my rope looked like a churro, I decided to remodel it.  This time I just made my own splines and path deformed two cylinders to them.  Already, it is looking a lot better, it's just a shame that it's almost 8,000 tris.

Oh and another thing that I had to go in and fix, I had to chamfer all the edges at the top of the bucket as when I brought it into UDK with a point light I could see the that the normals made it look too hard angled and nasty.  So the tri count has gone up a bit again...

Time for an Update!

Okay so I have been messing around with the diffuse on a couple assets, here's me trying to do minor adjustments with the bucket.

This is currently what the bucket looks like with a flat light in UDK.  I've yet to texture the rope. I'm unsure whether I have made the water leaks too dark.  But it's something I can really easily change down the line.

One thing that is annoying me about the bucket it the wood normals, they still look flat.  I think I am going to have to do some more tweaking.

Hmm... rope texturing has hit a wall.  I slapped a quick texture on there to see how the rope twisted.  I've noticed that there is no way this would hold up as a rope, the stands hardly intertwine.  This means I'll have to go back and change the rope geometry, most likely start from scratch!  Just as well I have a lot of incremental saves.

Texturing

Okay so I kind of finished the diffuse on the book, the only issue I'm having it is the saturation of the pages.  I won't be able to see if the colour is too strong until I get it into my lit scene.

I moved onto the bucket and I'm finding it hard to get the rivets looking good.  I might go into max and do a highpoly for them, would make it a whole lot easier.

I really need to get into my UDK scene and put up some lighting so I can check the textures, I will save me a lot of work in the long run!

Texturing

Okay so I have unwrapped my three assets that I plan to carry the whole way though, now I'm doing some texturing.  It's been quite a while!

I'm just playing around with the book at the minute, the image is in UDK with a simple light.  I've been working on it around 2-3hours, it's taking shape really nicely.

I Did it!

I spent an awful long time messing about with the rope...  a seriously awful time.  Having no luck with loft and many tutorials I went and spoke with a friend who game me a few ways that he would go about it.

I gave those a try and none of them were really turning out how I wanted.  They would only look nice when the tri count was through the roof.  I then had a little bright idea of how to model the strands...

I got it to work! And the tri count was... reasonably high.  But looking at games like Shadowfall coming out, and the fact that in my flythtough by camera is going to sweep right past this rope, it didn't bother me too much.

Okay, so here is what I did.

1) 6 sided cylinder
    44 segments
    553mm tall

2) Connect the edges
    -56 offset

3) Connect again
    Drag verts in

4) Twist modifier of 900 odd

5) Turbosmooth

6) Remove every other edge
    BINGO!

Put on a path deform and there we go, a nice organic looking rope.  I'll have to mess around with it a little but the basics are there.  This rope in the bucket is 1,840 tris... yeah, it's high! But again, it's fine as long as I can justify it.  I am going to look at it to see if I can knock it down some more.  I did try this method with lower sided cylinders but it didn't work.

Quite pleased with this though!  I've just got to figure out the unwrap and how to make it tileable, unwrapping it before twisting it may be the answer.

Update

It's been a while since I've posted anything up, so I thought I'd just put up what I'm doing right now.

I've been modelling a few assets on the desk, and I have moved onto doing three assets to a completed level.  So I can get an idea of what exactly I am going for.  I'm going to do this for the stool, a book and the bucket.

I've finished the low poly of the bucket, and I have been playing around with the rope and how to model knots, this may take some time to get right.  After I have this down I'll move onto the high poly.