Just wanting to show you guys what I’ve been working on the past few weeks (besides the other school related stuff).
Below you can see the end result of my Architecture Course. It’s a monument devoted to the bombardement of Rotterdam.
Interior shots:
A detailed shot of the propellor in the roof symbolizing the unsafeness of your house during the bombardement.
The location (Stroveer, Rotterdam)
Feel free to share if you like!
One Of my final renders
Rendered with Vray 1.4 took about an hour to render
Did some post-processing in Photoshop, tried to keep it nice and subtle!
Currently I’m rebuilding the house. I got annoyed with the fact that the building wasn’t correct (stairs in the wrong place, ceilingheight was wrong etc.). So I decided to rebuild the model and this time export it as FBX file. (say whut?!, yes, the first version was in ASE parts assembled).
For non-UDK users, The first version is made up out of different parts. The problem was that the dimensions where wrong. To fix that I could do two things:
1. continuing hiding the bad sides of the thing
2. Start over and do it good this time.
Well, I’m choosing number 2.
This is the last screenshot Ingame I made. I was trying to recreate a “vintage” look through post processing…
very first sketch of an architecure course
I liked the idea of having a building in constant motion by having the sky as a background.
Too bad I didn’t have a good background image, but the final will be a short movie showing the concept.
Rendered in Vray 1.4… Let me know what you think! 
Made just for fun as a logo for Renzo Gracie Holland. Feel free to use it as you background or something… It’s 1920 x 1080 (Full HD size)
After a long delay, many beers, coffee and school I’m back with part 2.
In This part we will:
- Import our model in 3ds MAX for Baking our texture,
- Learn how to create a collision mesh for UDK
- Fiddle a bit in Photoshop
- Export the bunch, so we can import it in UDK
- In UDK we’ll tweak our material and then we’re done!
Right, So we had our model exported.
Now we’ll go back to 3ds MAX and import our highpoly model.
Now, this happens mostly. When you import you model in zBrush, it’s rotated.
You can chose to set up your Axis-es when you import and export the models around,
I advise you to do so when the model is complicated.
but for a slightly deformed box (pillow), I tend to skip that .
Now we’re going to create a box that exactly matches the outline of our High poly mesh.
- Right click on the box you’ve created and click “convert to editable poly”.
In the following step I chose to Chamfer it.
I Chamfered the box so that it fits even beter around the high poly mesh.
Allright,
Let’s put an unwrap UVW modifier on our lowpoly mesh.
In the picture above I applied the unwrap UVW map modifier. And in the edit window I chosed to just flatten the map (mapping, Flatten, make shure all faces of you mesh are selected).
This leaves you with a bunch of faces that need to be welded together. Now I won’t be going into this subject to much, because there are waaaay beter tutorials out there that explain basic unwrapping of the UVW’s!
Allright, so everything is Unwrapped and ready to go.
Now we’re going to Bake the height information of our high poly mesh on to the texture of the Lowpoly mesh.
To do so:
- Make shure your highpoly mesh isn’t hidden, frozen or isolated. Select your Low poly mesh,
- press ‘zero’ to quickly open your render to texture window.
- A window pups up,
1. on top of this window theres an output section, this is the path where your redered texture will go.
2. then you’ll find a section with Projectionmapping, enable the clickbox and…
3. click on the “pick button” (besides the dropdownlist which says (No Projection Modifier))
4. Now further down there’s an expandible list which says Output.
5. scroll down, Click “add”
6. Select NormalsMap, press add elements
7. scroll down and select the settings mentioned in the image (lazy me , Make sure that the file type is *.TGA this is for UDK)
8. Click Render.
ét voilá Max starts rendering something strange just like displayed on the image. Don’t worry, this is not the actual output rendered in your file.
9. Go to the place where you’ve saved you image. Open the image in Photoshop.
Now, a Very bright person that allready had some experience with rendering textures might have noticed that I didn’t choose to supersample my maps (there is, infact, alaising in our texture). He’s right, I take this step in Photoshop because it saves me a hell of alot of time (rendering with a good supersampler easily multiplies renderingtime 4 times on my slow ass PC).
10. Right, you opened your normalmap in Photoshop. It looks pretty and blueish.
11. At the same time in Photoshop Made a diffuse texture. Basicly I googled for white Cloth and took the first thing that looked like the image in part 1 of this tutorial.
12. Above, The Photoshop window. of my diffuse texture. export this one aswell
13. Now, Because I’m going to use this pillow model in only one scale I decided to make a normalmap of my diffuse texture in Crazybump. Back in the days I wrote the tutorial I worked with CrazyBump. But I recommend using nDo2, simply because it works in Photoshop (CS 4 and 5).
14. Anyway I’m sort of skipping the step of creating a Normalmap out of a diffuse texture (lazy me 
, second time!).
15. Open your rendered normalmap, add the Normalmap you’ve created with CrazyBump or nDo (or the free thingy from nVidia). To add the Diffuse normalmap to the rendered normalmap, simply make sure that your Diffuse normalmap is on top of the rendered one and that the blendingmode is set to overlay.
16. Save texture to something usefull (During the creation of things I had to import lateron I really got better at this So now my diffuse maps I make are actually having a filename that correspondents to the function they have!!! WOW!
17. Great! now, Back to 3ds MAX. don’t forget to save the project. btw 
. Select your Lowpoly mesh and use the option “save selected”. Save it to something usefull .
18. Open the newly saved lowpoly mesh. 
19. Above, Add around the edges of you’re lowpoly mesh, make sure this box hasn’t got any “Segs” exept 1 . name this box UCX_”somethingusefull” -> no spaces, strange comma’s or any of that. This box is our Collision Mesh in UDK. And adding UCX_ in the first letters of a name makes it a collisionmesh.
20. Now we’re done! all we have to do is Exporting it (File->Export->.. export as a .ASE file). I gave it the name Pillow.ase, you can choose to disable functions like export materials, it doesn’t mather that much for our model.
21. Fire up UDK ( and close 3ds MAX, Photoshop or even zBrush )
22. Open the contentbrowser and click import. Now find your .ASE file.
23. set up the lightmap settings in UDK,
24. In the contentbrowser, Rightclick, import, import your textures (the Normalmap, the Diffusemap)
25. In the contentbrowser, Rightclick, select New Material. Add the textures to the material (texturesample), connect it to the right output. You don’t need a specular map, for our Pillow hardly has any specular!
26. Add the material to our mesh, and Behold! our Pillow is a fact!
Well I hope you enjoyed this tutorial!! If you have any questions/ comments/ marriage requests you’re welcome to ask them!
This tutorial is about making a model of a simple pillow/ matras in 3ds MAX 2010 then export it to zBrush. After this tutorial I continue with another one about rendering a Normalmap for it, texturing and exporting it to Unreal Development Kit (UDK).
First, lets start of with a real reference picture for what I’m going to make:
Pillows in the
Now, these are pretty neat and boring pillows, but since I’m remaking Falling Water I want them anyway!
- Let’s start by firing up 3ds MAX.
I made this box pretty high poly. Take note that the vertices are moved a bit to the edges of the box. I did this on purpose, because after it’s mesh-smoothed in zBrush, the corners won’t be too round.
If you have a box like this it’s time to export to Zbrush.
Make sure you export as a *.OBJ file. That’s the one zBrush likes the most.
- Now fire up zBrush (I choose too let MAX sit and run in the background, but you may quit it if you like to save some resources).
voilá
- Important step if you never imported something in zBrush before:
Once you’ve clicked import and have drawn the first object. Immediately click the ‘edit’ buton shown below. If you don’t do this, you can’t edit the object.
after that let’s subdivide!
I highered the ‘res’ until I was at about a million polygons, I tend to do that because if i get any higher 3ds MAX is getting reaaaaly slow. If you have a good way of optimizing in my good ye olde zBrush before exporting, please let me know.
After subdiving I started fixing the mesh by extruding the lines of the pillows cloth out of the mesh.
I did this by getting a really small brush size (about 2) changing the focal shift so the pillow lines would appear a bit more realistic. I also increased the strength of the brush
Then I started deforming the entire shape so it would seem ‘softer’
I did this by getting a large brushsize and putting the focal shift back to 0. I decreased the brush strength to about 3. Then grabbed my Wacom wannabee Trust thingy and started drawing until the pillow seemed right!
Don’t forget to save your document to a zBrush file just in case
now, let export the model so 3ds MAX understands what we’ve done to our beloved box!
I tend to give things a different name each time I save them, just in case aswell I guess.
Anyway if you’ve completed this part you’ve succeded the first of al great tests, namely just starting just kidding. See you in the next tutorial where I will try to explain the render to texture option in 3ds max. So we can make a very low poly version of our 1 million poly mesh!
Bye bye!
Welcome to the Falling Water project page. On this page I show the progress of this project.
The Falling Water project is the complete 3d re-creation of Frank Lloyd Wrights masterpiece villa “Falling Water”.
The creation of a 3d building in itself isn’t special at all these days. But I decided about a year ago that it would be awesome to walk in and around the building. On the 14th of April 2011 I started. I decided it would be a great idea to keep everybody posted!
So, enjoy the blog and the progress!
This is the second video. I uploaded it recently to show everybody the progress of this project.
This video is an ingame footage in Unreal Development Kit (UDK). It provides some vizual feedback by comparing actual photo’s with the game environment. I hope you like de similarities, because I’m planning to get as close to the real thing as possible!
I made this render to show how the design of a new bookcase (left) would manifest itself in the livingroom.
livingroom