An Old House I Found

[gryff]

I made a New Year's resolution to improve my skills with Blender - specifically the Materials Node Editor (AKA Node Editor). So I went looking for some video tutorials, and quite by accident found some tutorials by Michael McCann of the Wayward Art Co. Specifically a couple of tutorials on the creation of an old house. The modelling techniques used for the house are very good - but it was the use of the Node Editor that attracted me. In particular, the "mini-tut" he has in the middle of part 2 of the two part series about using the Node Editor.

Anyway, I was also attracted to the house model and the final result - so I wondered about how it might fit in with BJS. Michael has the model available for download - so I tested it. Here is the first result:

Old Victorian House

The model I got from Michael has 4 textures for the house - diffuse, normal, specular, and shadow. However, each textures is extremely large (5000+ x 5000+) - a massive download. So for this initial test, I'm just using a diffuse texture reduced to 2048 x 2048. I well add the other textures and experiment with sizing them. But I doubt the will ever be mobile friendly

I text chatted with Michael and he gave me permission to use his model. I explained it was all done with babylon.js - he thought it might have been Blend4Web.

Anyway, this is my way of saying thank you to Michael McCann for the info I picked up about using the Blender Node Editor from several of his tutorials.

cheers, gryff

EDIT - yes I know it does not have all the bells and whistles of the Michel Rousseau "Mansion" - but I like it ;-)

EDIT2: Due to changes that DropBox has made as of October 3rd 2016, - I had to change the link above to my GitHub site (Oct 8th 2016). Works fine now.

[Dal]

Nice! I love the model but the textures do look quite low quality.

Looking at the map it's huge because the textures are painted with a 1-1 mapping to the model... every inch of wall has its own inch of texture space:

 

One way you could optimise this is to reuse UV islands... for example where you have 24 different window shutters, you could maybe get away with just 1 big one, and stack the UV islands on top of eachother, so they all use the same one. If you do that with all the shutters, all the steps, all the wood planks etc. you can remove all the extra ones, and that will give you enough space on the texture to make the remaining instances much bigger, and therefore higher resolution without needing a bigger texture to download.

Of course, that does mean you have to do a lot of manual UV mapping work and you will lose all the baked in light mapping.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/70260871/webgl/wayward/House.png

[Dad72]

8 hours ago, gryff said:

EDIT - yes I know it does not have all the bells and whistles of the Michael Rousseau "Mansion" - but I like it ;-)

I think you mean Michel Rousseau and no Michael.

[gryff]

Quote

I think you mean Michel Rousseau

Ahh TY Dad - fixed. It was late in the evening and I had been out for dinner and the theatre

Quote

I love the model but the textures do look quite low quality.

Well I had to start somewhere Dal. The 5000+ textures were huge . I would not have created and packed the textures in the same way. However, as an academic exercise - I found it interesting to consider the relationship between draw calls, texture sizes, meshes and the final results desired - and their impact on BJS.

I will experiment some more

cheers, gryff