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EGCB - City Airport (Barton Aerodrome, Manchester UK)

BattleMetalChris

BattleMetalChris

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First steps. That staircase is by far the hardest thing I have ever had to model.

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may you post a screenshot with the wireframe overlay of the tower? :)

do you model the tower as 1 completle connected object or is the staircase a loose part?
Most of the time the complexity decrease if you make the objects in different parts.

There can even be 2 approaches for this.

2 or more Blender objects or
1 Blender object with different parts in edit mode which are not connected to each other.

btw this tower is very cool! :)
 
BattleMetalChris said:
Nope. The textures are just taken from photos, with a normal map generated from a greyscale version of the same texture that I've edited a bit.
Click to expand...
Nice. I never tried to generate a normal map from a greyscale version. I'll take a look at it, since i do have lots of 4k plain textures.
 
I start with the colour texture, then greyscale it make a heightmap, changing any parts I need to (for example on the below I negative-ised* the bricks to make the mortar lower in the heightmap). I then use this site to turn the heightmap into a normal map.

*totally a word

topPart.png
topPart_bump.png
topPart_norm.png
 
I've also heard good things about Materialize which does a similar thing but with an organised workflow and a bit more finesse, and is free,

 
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BattleMetalChris said:
I've also heard good things about Materialize which does a similar thing but with an organised workflow and a bit more finesse, and is free,

Click to expand...
Yea...forgot about it. Materialize is really nice if you need to create maps asap.
If you need Roughness/Metal workflow. just be sure to get a smothness map (and invert it)
 
I'm REALLY enjoying using Materialize for the textures. The fact that FS2020 has roughness, metallic and AO maps makes it hard to visualise how they all work together and Materialize is perfect for that.

1603592821389.png
 
Really nice.
Are you making your Textures sheets based off your Baked AO map? or just a generic one to later use on Blender??
 
I make my texture sheets by hand and then move the UVs in Blender to fit them.

I'm not baking anything at the moment. I'll see how the sim handles the SSAO and if it doesn't look good then I'll look at baking the AO in using Blender. I'm not convinced about getting blender to process low-res textures because any time it resizes them it'll blur them slightly.
 
@Tangerine I've had a play with baking AO, it looks really promising. One thing, I had to unwrap to a new set of UVs to do it - is there any way to get FS to use these UVs for the AO, but use the original UVs for all the other parts? I have my objects unwrapped so that a lot of the texture is used in more than one place, to keep the texture sizes down. If I have to use a new unwrap then it's going to mess all that up.

I can see this being hard to do as FS wraps up the AO into the roughness and metallic map too, so presumably they'd all have to use the same UVs, even if the diffuse is able to use a different set.
 
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