I have a question regarding making an exterior high poly house.

#1

Hi All,

So I’m making a high poly mansion/estate type house. I’m pretty far into it, but before I go any further I started to wonder what do I do about the main planes that make up the walls of the house.

What happened was that in the end I basically extracted everything into planes because I had to cut arched windows and rectangular windows into a lot of different areas. I guess it was easy to manage that way, than by keeping the main base of the house intact. But now that I’m so far along, I’m starting to wonder what should I do with those planes that make up the main walls/ sides of the house. Wireframe wise they are kind of a mess.

In this instance, would a person doing a high rez exterior mansion, somehow put the sides back together so you can add edge loops and smooth it down. So it doesn’t have the rough jaggered kind of look. Or would a person keep the planes/walls separate and just render it out that way?

#2

Looks like you are going in the wrong direction here.
Please post images of how far you are , maybe we can help you before you have to redo your modeling again.

#3

Ok, here is a few. Let me know what you think.

#4

I’m pretty sure a lot of the little parts like the molding and trim, and all that can stay, but it is just that primary house structure is what I’m worried about. The base if you will.

#5

Just wanted to throw in an update. I took all the planes and sewed everything back up. I’m going to post a few pictures here. Not the prettiest thing, but I didn’t plan on showcasing the wireframe for the base building anyways.

I just wasn’t sure in the beginning. How I was taught was that if something is two parts in real life and you want to do it exact, then it should be two parts in Maya. But I don’t know a lot about carpentry, so I wasn’t sure how it would all be separated especially since walls have a lot of other things on top like wood,cement, plaster that blends everything. As of now, I have it split into 3 meshes, the left, center, and right wing and I’m keeping those separate. At least for now I should be able to bevel most edges and give it a softer and more realistic feel.

#6

I imagine you’re just doing visualization here, and not making permit or architectural plans from this model?

If that is true, don’t bother working on high-poly walls. Don’t worry about bevels anymore - just do that at the shader level! It gives you far more control, to use a Round_Corners shader, and it’s much easier. Saves tons of time. All you really have to worry about is the Normals, which are really easy on walls since they’re almost all just flat planes or simple curved planes at the worst.

I have never worried about wall topology, and never had it be a barrier. Even for interiors, you just use a Round_Corners shader for all the joints. Piece of cake. :slight_smile:

#7

Yea, Im just working on this for my own portfolio.

Thanks for giving me the heads up on the corner shader. I didn’t know about it. That’s definitely going to help!

#8

Yeah, you’re going to want to use Round Corner shaders for a great many things! A huge time saver. Almost any hard surface can be improved from a rendering perspective with this technique.

Left is Round Corners, right is just the mesh render itself. You can specify the radius to be rounded too, generally. In some cases you can tell it to apply a different shader/material to the rounded part too.

In mental ray, it was a shader you would plug into the Bump section in the mia_material_x or _xp.

In Vray, it’s a shape node attribute you add in the Attribute Editor, and the controls are independent of the shader, which is pretty nice.

I don’t know what it would be in Arnold but I imagine they have something similar too!

#9

Nice.

I actually gave it a test run this morning on a normal cube. I read a tutorial that showed used the blinn method, then going through the bump channel. The other way was using a mia material x.

question for you on this though, how will it affect render time if you start doing this on a lot of objects? Should I pick and choose what to do out model wise with bevels and such vs using this strategy sparingly, or just use it all the time.

#10

I ask that part, because i know once you start using materials and shaders from mental ray, some times it can have like exponential effects on the render time lol. Either way though, it might save me before my scene crashes for good. I’m up to about 2.2 million total polys right now. It’s holding together, I just have everything on layers to make it go faster.