Arch Bridge and Other Bridges. New: Cable Stayed.
richardandtracy
Posts: 5,641
Just a sneak preview of my freebie bridge inspired by ancient Chinese Arch bridges. Feel I have learnt a lot with modelling this up. I was really pleased to be able to get the straight block texture to curve around the arch given that I only have UVMapper free as my texture mapping package. There are not a lot of facets, I think there are only around 150 or so, but it has been a challenge.
Just a few days more before I can package this up as a freebie.
Regards,
Richard.
Arch Bridge Promo.png
1200 x 800 - 2M
Post edited by richardandtracy on
Comments
Impressive! Most impressive!
Thank you AOBB. I do hope it'll be useful once people can download it.
At the moment the texture files are 2k for the diffuse & 1k for everything else. I think I may offer a 4k diffuse & 2k everything else high res material option. The image above uses the 2k/1k mix. This is the first time I have tried Poly Haven CC0 license textures on a freebie, and they really are very good - much better than my attempts at a seamless texture.
Regards,
Richard.
I like the way it looks. Seems to me this will be an awesome freebie.
As I look at the textures I imagine myself making the UV maps for this bridge in Blender, wherein the curved stones would have to be allinged using that "UV Squares" plugin. Makes me wonder whether that is precisely what you did.
This looks amazing, thank you for offering it!
Looks great! Can't wait to use it.
I admit it was a bit of mental gymnastics to work out how to get the model to UV map properly, especially as my residual anti-virus on my offline Win7 machine prevents me from using Blender or B4Artists (which I prefer on principal as there is a menu option for every function).
It actually sounds harder than it was. The difficult part was thinking how to do it at all. During my first attempt I exported the arch to UV Mapper at the cone stage (missing stage 6), and that led to non-radial block joints, whose angle varied around the arch. That looked totally wrong. Going back and adding stage 6 (and reversing it after tex mapping) meant the joints went radial again.
Until I thought of a way of doing it, I was trying to think of the problems associated with writing a method to do radial tex mapping for my modeller - but fortunately that wasn't needed.
I'd sort-of like to model this bridge near the Leshan Buddha:
But... It would be a heck of a task, and as it's so famous there is a risk of being flamed for 'Cultural Appropriation', even though it'd be more of cultural advertising. And trying to get a reasonable gorge for it - well, I simply can't model anything like that.
Ah well, we can all dream.
Regards,
Richard.
Thank you very much :-)
Osum! Nobody else has that workflow. So I magine part of the fun you have making free models is getting to use the tools you programmed yourself.
That Leshan Buddha bridge sure is fancy and pleasant to look at. Perhaps you could make a simplified version inspired by it.
Looks like the Packhorse Bridge in Carrbridge :)
https://www.scotlandinfo.eu/old-packhorse-bridge-in-carrbridge/
A lot of that bridge has disappeared over the years with high water :)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-scotland-49267605
looks cool _._
@Fishtales : Looks like the river on the edge of my parents farm. Had an annual flood or two like that, coming up over the lane at either end of the bridge.
@ed3D : Hope you find it useful.
Regards,
Richard.
Alrite then , thanx
Very nice Richard. Sure I can find a use for it. Thanks much.
This is a nice bridge. The morphs are particularly handy. I've never seen that on a Daz prop before. I put it in an UltraScene.
I have a couple questions about the surface settings. The road bed and cap stones came out very white and bleached out in my render, while the sides looked great. Is it intended to by that white? Is it just my lighting? While trying to figure out why it was so white, I noticed that all the surfaces have Dual Lobe Specular Weight maps, but the weight is set to 0.00, so those maps won't do anything, will they? I wondered if those maps were intended to go in a different place or whether the specular weight was supposed to be something other than 0.
The thought of trying ultrascene briefly crossed my mind but think I'll wait for a new computer to handle all that.
So I tried the bridge with an image and a plane for some Irish Green Water BUT I am pretty sure I need to work on the lighting or something too.
At any rate, yes the bridge loads with no error messages and the morphs all work :-) Thanks again Richard.
No worries, Richard, I hadn't realized the setting was at zero either ;-)
Yes, I was using sun-sky at 11:30 AM. It is basically the default lighting provided with the UltraScenery product.
If you reevaluate the surface settings, I would suggest dropping the displacement. Iray displacement is not useful on such low resolution mesh. Look closely at renders and see if the displacement is doing what you expect. I think it is not.
Thanks for noting the texture map source and usage rights in the readme.
I modified my scene. The bridge is in much more shadow now. I darkened the base color of the light surfaces and added some dirt overlays. It blends in nicely now.
That looks cozy in the forest :-)
Ooooh, that's a steep bridge.
Ah, steps. That makes sense. It makes a good skateboard ramp without steps, too.
It is a nice bridge. Thanks for sharing it.
The old main road bridge into Inveraray wasn't quite as steep, but close :)
https://www.alamy.com/a-hump-backed-bridge-aopproaching-inveraray-on-loch-fyne-in-argyll-scotland-viewed-from-the-northern-approach-on-the-a83-image455557529.html?imageid=FB9F38B3-2C9E-4DF4-96E2-32DB89A5A3B1&p=189032&pn=1&searchId=9fa6a679d374fca6bcebae9caac7c16e&searchtype=0
or the Clachan Bridge known as the Bridge Over The Atlantic to the island of Seil. Tour buses ground themselves on the top sometimes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clachan_Bridge