The rest of the compound has been modeled but need texuring then placement into the Bexar model. I decided to model the geometry of the doors rather than just use a texture because they are such a large and prominent feature of the structure. The 12 foot doors are on display inside the Alamo church and modern photos are available. The original building survived until the early 1900s and there are some early photos that were helpful as references along with some drawings by Maverick made in the 1860s. A useful technique for creating an ID mask was found here. The PBR shader for the Blender Cycles render was found here. While one could achieve the same results with tools like Photoshop and Blender, itself, these special purpose tools should increase productivity and quality once I have mastered them. The textures are based on a physically realistic shader model. A single paint stroke can affect color, roughness and height at the same time. These tools allow the creation of textures using a combination of procedural, image and hand painted techniques. I am learning to use new tools for texture creation: Allegorithmic Substance Designer and Painter. The backgound is a placeholder as I have not placed the structures in the larger model yet. This is a work-in-progress of the front of the Veramindi Palace that was on Soledad Street.
Leave a Comment ยป | Alamo, Bexar, Blender, Rendering, Unity, Unreal | Tagged: Alamo, Blender, Unreal, Veramendi | The video above is a first test render of the Veramendi buildings on the un-textured terrain. Some additional details that have been worked include the lighting, animating a camera, and rendering an image sequence that can be turned into a video. So far, I have created a terrain model by making a height map from my Blender mesh and worked out the techniques for porting assets (objects and textures) to work with UE4 materials. I have spent the last few weeks developing a workflow for translating my model to Unreal (a.k.a. At the present time, the consensus seems to favor Unreal for graphical quality so that is what I am concentrating on at the moment. In particular, I have explored Unity and Unreal game engines.
So I am studying the use of more realtime solutions that trade some quality for speed.
Depending on the quality and image size, one frame can take 1 to 3 minutes (or longer!) Since a second of video is 24 frames, it can take hours or days to render a movie of any interesting length. Rendering animations in Blender can be time consuming. Not visible in this render are the other improvements like the complete modeling of Bexar and more realistic landscape around the San Antonio River. This allowed the addition of realistic weather, dirt and damage effects. The stonework textures were created by hand using a workflow involving Photoshop, Inkscape and Substance Painter. Materials were created using Allegorithmic Substance Designer and Painter. For example, the decorations on the doorway. Bump and normal map textures add detail without increased geometry.Also, the texel density is more uniform across objects in the scene. The size of the textures is sufficient for a sharp image of objects that are 1-2 meters from the camera. The new model has a higher level of detail. The rendered result was corrected to improve color balance. This is another important contribution to realistic lighting and background. The lighting source is from an HDRI image ( Hyperfocal Design).Using a physically accurate render engine with global illumination ( Blender Cycles) produces realistic lighting.