WatchTower Project

For this project, I was tasked with creating both a high and low poly model for a watchtower from Age of Empires. The low poly model also had to be textured and baked. The low-poly model had a maximum limit of 1,200 polys. The high-poly model had a minimum limit of 12,000 polys.

I chose to recreate on of the Indian watchtowers.

The process to create it was simple. Create a cube, extrude, edit the edges/vertices, repeat.

For the parts that needed to be symmetrical (such as the walls with windows, I just created one side, and, when done with it, duplicated it, rotated it 90 degrees, merged the vertices of the two wall corners, and then repeated the process to create the main structure.

I focused on the low-poly model first since it was the base for the whole project. Conserving the amount of polygons I needed to use was difficult, and I had to sacrifice modeling out a few details here and there as a sacrifice.

In the end I ended up with this:

with only 1186 polys

The high-poly model was a matter of dividing faces, insetting those faces that needed to be bricks (or boards in the watchtower's upper floor) , and then extruding those faces. Other features were simpler to make, since buildings are very geometric and angular.

the high-poly model at almost 70,000 polygons

I didn't worry too much about overlapping faces here and there, since this model was going to be used mainly for baking.

After finishing the high-poly model, I went into unwrapping. This was one of the more difficult things to do. Even though it was low-poly, the windows (and figuring how to unwrap them properly), gave me the most trouble. 

After many hours, I settled with using the cylindrical wrapping for them and the other walls. It seemed to work at first, at least until I realized that Maya hates overlapping UVs during the baking process.

In the end I just separated them and used the unfold tool:

Unwrapping this was a long process of relearning what I had forgotten from the pluralsight tutorials.

Later, I would find out that keeping different meshes separate allowed for UV overlapping in the texture maps. When I found that out, I separated the model into 3 groups: the roof, the midsection, and the bottom.

Baking was a whole different story. I followed the procedures I learned from making the well and the treasure chest, but corruption after corruption kept occuring within the texture files.

As it turns out, Maya REALLY hates overlapping UVs.

Also, in order for the texture to appear properly on meshes, you need to convert the object's normals into soft edges. I'm not sure why this is, but it's what Maya wants.

Baking took up most of my time, and, until I discovered the two thing above, I almost gave up on it. It wasn't until the early hours of Monday morning that I figured everything out.

the strange corruption for the bottom piece. this was solved by making all normals soft edged.

the better normal map after fixing it

Though some texture corruption still occured during baking, the results were far better (and any mistake can be fixed in photoshop)

The strange original corruption of the upper balcony's normal maps

the newer one, having been edited in photoshop

With UV mapping and baking done, it was time to create the diffuse files! 

As I mentioned earlier, I found it easier to separate different parts of the model. Thus, different diffuse maps were made for all the models:

the bottom and middle sections

upper floor

the roof.

Creating the roof was both easy and extremely fun to do!

In the end, this is what I made:

And here are some renders in Maya

aaaand here are some of the ambient and specular textures as well, to show that I did use them:

ambient for the roof. the errors were fixed in photoshop

ambient for the front entrance

ambient for middle section

the spec for the bottom portion. Since it's mostly bricks, most of the model is not shiny.