Water Desalination Models

[AcapulcoGold20]

Well, I've been secretly toiling away at my insanely ambitious Oil Rig map again for about a month. I haven't had a ton of time to work on it, but I decided that in order to complete my vision I would have to start logging more time in 3DS Max, which isn't a bad thing at all. So I've been doing this sort of water desalination room that's on the rig, and I have to admit to not knowing how the process works at all when I went into this, so I did a litle research and found some diagrams and reference images for machines that I feel would be about the right size for such a rig. This model was a pretty crazy undertaking as I wanted to have catwalks over pipes running to and from said machine, ect. I've finally gotten it to a point where I'd actually want to show it to someone, so here it is.



I just started the texturing today, so it's still very rough and only about half way textured. It obviously needs a lot more leaky water stains as this thing gets a lot of use. I've finally gotten smart enough to start modeling as you would build things in real life, meaning by assembling pieces that are already neatly UV mapped via copy/paste and slicing. I plan on doing some video tutorials as this skill I feel is essential to anyone wanting to get into this sort of modeling. As it stands right now the entire room, including catwalks, beams, pipes, machine, and tanks is at around 7000 polys so I'm starting to push it. Luckily I've designed this model as such that I can cut detail out at specific distances pretty easily once I get to compiling it. Oh, this is a Max render with no shaders or anything, obviously!

Let me know what you think, and I can't wait to show you guys the finished room!

[AcapulcoGold20]

Almost done texturing. Everything is based, just need to add the details to some of the objects.

[coder0xff]

Looking pretty good. Need to fix the smoothing groups on that cylinder towards the center though.

[source-maps]

I liked that orange color on the previous version, everything else looks good tho

[pk_hunter]

I'm finding it really difficult to judge the scale of it. Are those readouts at roughly player height?

[AcapulcoGold20]

Yes. The model is about 96 units high, and is actually only part of a larger system, but I haven't textured it yet as this thing is super detailed. Right now I'm working at 2056, I may scale it down to 1028 but I'd loose a ton of detail. I know I always have a tendency to want to show something off before it's anywhere near done, but as soon as I have the whole system textured I'm going to work on getting this in source. I dropped the yellow orange color as the beams and catwalks in this area are yellow and I didn't think it would mesh well visually.

[Smurftyours]

Can we have a shader render? I can't stand looking at the texture without the normal map and spec maps.

[AcapulcoGold20]

I've just finally finished the base texture lol, shaders may take awhile as I'm going to need to do multiple passes in Shader Map Pro and cut and paste them in photoshop. Oh, and I haven't messed with phong speculars in soooo long so that should be fun relearning that. Heres the 95% complete base texture render.

[AcapulcoGold20]

I've gotten it in game, here's some early shots of it in it's natural habitat. Still some texture and shader work to be done, but it's pretty much complete at this stage.

[AcapulcoGold20]

[ErikKiller]

Please go with dev textures for now. The metal and the floor kind of pull the attention away from the models.

[AcapulcoGold20]

Can't sleep, did some work on the shaders.

[snotball]

Quick! Bake some ambient occlusion on the texture - will make it look so much better

[AcapulcoGold20]

Quick! Bake some ambient occlusion on the texture - will make it look so much better

Lol yeah I saw that thread. I don't see it happening in Valves current shader model. They went a different route with the phong exponent textures. I happen to like them a lot. I've never worked with ambient occlusion but isn't that just more for beefing up the highlights on shadows? Either way the phong is a lot better than the old shader model they used, at least for doing rim lighting. But I will say that I think it should be left to a hardware process and not another texture layer, I'm not sure how Valve would put it on top of their existing shader model. I've dug around looking at some of the portal materials and they actually have a lot of tinting/color-correction that you can do in real time as well. They used it to simulate glow on models a lot. I'm still pretty new to all these processes, but I'm starting to get good results "painting" highlights in Photoshop and running them through Shadermap Pro.

It's a learning process.

To the dude who said stick to the dev textures, I actually used some of their base metals while doing these models

[coder0xff]

A little late, sorry...

Usually you bake the ambient occlusion into the albedo texture - but I suspect it wouldn't work correctly for you since I'm guessing that the texture mapping is not functionally reversible (the same piece of texture is used in multiple locations on the model).