W.I.P low-poly arab town

Over the past week I have been working on a small Arab town environment. I started by modeling several building models and UV mapping them in blender. I used textures off of freestocktextures.com, and use the same UV image for all my buildings. I put together the scene using the buildings that I made. Due to school, I had some time constraints for this project. I am thinking about giving my models out for free, since I don't have the time to finish anything right now. I might just find a cool project and donate them exclusively. I'm not really sure atm. Anyways, here it is:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11957743/Arabcity.html

I worked pretty hard to keep the file as small as possible– its currently only 2.1mb

 

It's small i size, but unfortunately, it also doesn't look that good. The lack of detail is just too much. It looks like out of the 90s.
I see that the idea is there, but the textures and models definately need more polish in order to be in any way usable in 2011, other then just a background that's only seen from very, very far away.

 

I'll second that and add that the actual scale of the bricks or almost every texture is not right. The individual stones are way too big and don't look realistic proportionwise.
Yeh, I'd say take what you learnt with this project and apply all the gained knowledge to your next work and improve as an artist. Right now, I don't feel as if this would be well placed in any game environment.
I know making something for nothing is hard, but 1 month from now on, you'll look at these pieces and say "boy did I improve over these"
Keep up the good work and don't be shy to redo stuff, you don't feel a 100%

 

Loking Nice

 

I hate it when people say Arab town when an Arab town is actually very diffferent. The genre Arab Nights is actually based off of Afghanistan at night time and most of Afghanistan's architecture comes from Ancient Indian Architecture so it's more reasonable to say Indian Nights or low-poly indian town.

 

always thought arab towns were 99% stone with a thick plaster coating, making for these awsome smooth looking buildings that reflect heat and keep the people inside cool in the day and warm at night.

The models for this look no more lowpoly than any other bg houses iv seen, kindov hard to make a house like that with less than 60 polys so..... Textures need lots of work, lower the poly the better the texture has to be.

Nice work so far though, might want to add a fps controller to the web player.

 

Thanks for all of the feedback. Its more of a blender learning project, but I've had alot of fun with it. right now I'm adding more detail.

A what?

 

A first person player controller

 

One of the main problems I noticed was how dark some of the building were, I don't know if they were suppose to be fire damaged or what but it made it too hard to see the details.
I know this comment seems a bit negative but as everyone else is saying this would be a good opportunity to improve. One of the main problems was how low poly the textures were, and some aren't scaled right (ie the bricks).
Good luck!

 

It reminds me of that one map in mwf2...you know...that one map anyway I personally think as far as learning goes it's looking alright. Of course I don't have that pro eye. I say keep driving at it, the more you put into it the more you'll get out, cheers!

 

Lol. The reason for the confusion, is that I already have a first person controller.

 

It looks like smoothing errors town to me...

 

Not sure if you plan on using Beast or not, but I think the building darkness is the main issue. I would try tweaking the ambient light to bright out the non-sun-facing sides a little (natural light complexities deal with this in real life). That may have undesirible effects on the ground, so alternatively you could try putting in another light that is exclusive to the buildings, make it less intense and pointing opposite to the main one.

The variety in textures is desirable, but their palettes clash somewhat. You may want to try blending them with a sand texture, combining or splicing them together in various ways to build up common 'themes' within the textures. I'm being pretty vague here, texturing is too vast a subject; but hopefully it might give you some ideas.

I think this looks good so far, just keep at it!

Oh, and check out http://www.cgtextures.com/ if you haven't already, it's a rather fantastic texture resource.

 

Thanks for the link! wow, can I use these in a commercial project?
Also, I would love to use beast, but I need to upgrade my mac before I can get unity 3.
Your tips are fantastic, and leave me thinking "why didn't I think of that?"
Very useful feedback! thank you!

 

Dude, lightmap it and give it some AO. that might help a little.. but yeah, it's a bit TOO low poly.

 

You should use FLAT faces, no smoothing on those buildings, apart that, open your eyes wide on texture sizes.

 

hahaha.

Anyways, personally I liked the little town. Looking great so far! Also might want to add some more light, it was a little bit dark.

 

I believe so, yes!

As regards the smoothing comments, I think (depending on the version of Blender) that smoothing groups can be a bit more awkward in Blender than in Max; but if you're unclear on it, this may help (not used Blender myself so I can't be much more help there):
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Modeling/Meshes/Smoothing

 

I know how to use smoothing– I was going for the slightly rounded look in my models, but looking at it now, I really over did it. Thanks for the tip though.