Weekly Modeling Comp: Dungeon Room Tile
Community Forums/Graphic Chat/Weekly Modeling Comp: Dungeon Room Tile
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| The idea here is a tileable dungeon (or space station or demonically possessed off-world laboratory) room piece, with precise proportions, and designed to be viewed from eye level or above (assume the game may be an FPS or third person, or both -- as in many rpgs these days). E.g. the ceiling could be designed to disappear when viewed from above. Total size 16 x 16 x 4 (high) units, with walls encroaching halfway in, but the floor being at precisely zero. Think of a "unit" as a metre, so doorways (if any) should be 1 x 2 (high) or larger and centred (or otherwise positioned) precisely (so it will match up with other tiles of the same set). Room components may extend above and below bounds (e.g. imagine a well ... or conversation pit) but NOT horizontally (i.e. into adjacent rooms). You are limited to at most four 256 x 256 textures. Finally, you can assume that pieces of the room can be "toggleable" (e.g. imagine that a wall can be switched ON/OFF as can a doorway, as can individual bits of decor). If so, show your room in several of its possible guises. Polycount limit is 1000 total, but with 500 being typical for a plausible configuration. (E.g. if your room has 4 walls and 4 walls with doorways, it may have 900 polys, but it should only have around 500 polys when three walls and one doorway are visible.) |
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| Total size 16 x 16 x 4 is room size, right? Can the room be smaller than this? |
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| The room has to tile on a 16 x 16 x 4 grid -- its interior will probably be smaller than this (its walls and ceiling will presumably stick into the area somewhat), but a passageway leading out of it (and presumably to an adjoining room) would need to end at the edge. The floor needs to be at zero level at the edges for similar reasons. |
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| Ho-hum... 1000 polygons? That's 83 cubes. Too strict limit IMO... I know that this is meant to be "low-poly" modeling compo(s) but as any 3D-card draws 2000 polygons *just as fast* as 1000 polygons it seems useless to let the card idle because you're feeding too small batches to it. And doing nice corridor (etc) tile-sets takes much more polygons than 1000, especially if it is meant to be viewed as FPS. RTS games might get away with smaller polycounts, but I find that texture limits are also quite strict - this would lead to tiling textures and with just few of them the look would be repetitive and dull? |
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| My effort so far is only 100 pollygons. I will post some shots of it when its finished. |
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| 1000 polys seems a liitle steep just for a section of dungeon to me. If the section's designed to tile, shouldn't it be lower...? |
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Hmmm... allrighty, here's a shot (well 4...):    These are all together 6800 polygons (tri's) and they have even bevels... and as you can see there are several tiles that form a corridor section, like straight ones, 4-way and curved "tile". I doubt that I have time to re-texture these using low-res maps though because these are now textured using one huge tiling texture that has areas for walls, ceiling and floor. ...And who said that it should be a DUNGEON? :) ...And yes, I do like "Aliens"! :P  |
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| The room tile needs to be 500 polygons in a typical configuration; 1000 for all its possible bits and pieces. |
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| Are you planning to render these meshes by hand? Like, with a pencil, in real-time? |
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| Who? Me or Mustang? :) |
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| Something done quite some time ago for testing B3d pipline light export. Scifi baldurs gate dark alliance style game. Different type of game so it doesn't fir your specs. Tiles are pretty nice to work with for this type of game as you can instance same tiles all over your level, and only the tiles visible get drawn. [img  |
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| I duno but those dont look like what I think he means. I might be wrong though.. I thought he meant like an actualy tile, (think floor tile) and the room or part of room I was thinking that he was talking about like HeroQuest or something like that. Would I be right in saying that your talking about building up a list of prefab tile/board sections that you aim to then just use in a map editor to construct your levels ? let us know .. |
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| Evak's stuff is definitely the kind of thing I'm talking about. Would you like me to post an example? |
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| Yes! Post an example, it might help. |
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OK try this This picture shows a modular room with four (identical) wall parts and four (identical) doorway parts, and a typical configuration (showing only one doorway and one wall). Note that the ceiling is invisible viewed from above (allowing third person play). This is a trivial example of a room design and its polygon count reflects this. |
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we modeled ours so that you had large 4m chunks that could be further subdivided down to 1m for detail, so long as you stick to the same grid you can fill in the floor and build custom geometry for areas of interest and detail.  A few chunks, the easiest way to create levels in max was to turn object snaps on and just SHIFT drag them by a vertex to clone/instance them around snapping to another adjacent vertex on a neighbouring tile. since the whole thing has pretty simple lighting wise it can be a good idea to use quite a high polycount so that your blitz vertex style DX lighting is well defined. |
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| Nice submission Evak -- exactly the kind of thing I'm thinking of... let's see some textures ;) |
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| yeah thats what I was meaning evak, nice looking models there. I second the texture comment. |
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| exactly what i thought he was thinking of. i would enter, but they look just like that but a bit planer, so ill leave it. |
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| looking nice evak. reminds me of unreal tournament |
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| reminds me of StarCraft. |
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| What's the polygon count for a typical room Evak? |
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hey, not part of the contest, but i just thought that this might be of interest...  from the 3dgs board, a 3dgs noob's (or so he says he is, i have my doubts) attempt at a corridor... ... not bad, huh... --Mike |
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| hard tosay about polycount as the graphics weren't displayed per room being a top down isometric style view you might have parts of 3 rooms visible at any time. The target was to have 60k or less visible at any one time including monsters etc. |
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| Well I've obviously failed to create a suitable challenge. As Evak is the only person to even come close to submitting a compliant entry, I nominate Evak the winner by default. Your turn to come up with a modeling subject. |
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| Well, I for one like Evaks solution a bunch. Is there a way to get these building blocks? |
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| Hey Dirk, I'm the other half of Leadfoot Productions you haven't talked to in person :) The tile based system works better for some engines than others and the way I did it is generally better for a top down view in blitz due to blitz not being very keen on huge numbers of entities or surfaces. Can probably get around many of blitz problems using some simple bounding box occlusion for each room, or triggers for doors that also allow the next room to be drawn. |
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Not sure they 100% match your requirements but here are some shots of my Space Hulk levels - made up of tiling blocks. Couple of detail meshes in there too.  Obviously the lighting is a *bit* more dramatic than it would be in-engine. Evak, I love your tiles - those are class. M |
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| That Blitz Space hulk sure does look nice - I remember playing the Amiga version of that game - it made me jettison my trousers quite a lot. |
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| yeah... those are great looking levels... --Mike |
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| The space hulk stuff is nice but it wasn't in time. I thought the idea of these weekly challenges was to do something original for the comp, not to dig out stuff you had lying around though (not that Evak claims to have modelled his stuff for the comp -- no-one submitted a compliant entry). |
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| I thought the idea of these weekly challenges was to do something original for the comp, not to dig out stuff you had lying around Basically yes - but if you don't have time to do new stuff and have something old already why not use that? Ideally everyone would do their stuff from scratch, but one week is not that long time if you have a full-time job, wife and a small baby - for me it means that I don't have time to do ANYTHING weekdays/evenings/nights, and weekends are also often fully booked ("quality time" and all that crap like relatives :)). IMO even if ppl use older stuff they have it might give other ppl fresh ideas how to do (compo related) things? |
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| perhaps we should have a compo and themed showcase on the same subject to get the best of both worlds. the compo seems like a good opportunity to discuss techniques, and quite a few people are pretty experienced and have usefull info to pass on. Don't know<shrug> something worth discussing. |
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| sounds good to me... i could certainly pick up a few tips from the makers of some of the stuff i've seen... --Mike |
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