[UDK]The Batcave
polycounter lvl 12
Ah the Batcave, such a awesome place for a environment because you can just go wild with how you want the layout to be. I wanted to loosely based mine around the design and style of Arkham Asylum.
I felt this would give me a chance to try and push myself as an artist. I know one of my larger weakness is sticking to smaller environments and not enough planning so with this I plan on working on those.
The blockout is almost done. I need to fill it up with more props and create some modular pipes to go around but the base layout is there. Also have my Stalactites done and I think they turned out alright. It is a bit dark right now but I'm still planning where I want all my light sources to be coming from.
So any crits are of course welcome.
I felt this would give me a chance to try and push myself as an artist. I know one of my larger weakness is sticking to smaller environments and not enough planning so with this I plan on working on those.
The blockout is almost done. I need to fill it up with more props and create some modular pipes to go around but the base layout is there. Also have my Stalactites done and I think they turned out alright. It is a bit dark right now but I'm still planning where I want all my light sources to be coming from.
So any crits are of course welcome.
Replies
That said, it's not a bad choice for a scene. It offers organic and hard surfaces and there are a large number of possibilities you could execute with lighting and technical effects, like holograms. Good luck and I look forward to your progress.
On top of that it's a noisy texture because of all its strates lines in. You might want to sculpt a proper rock texture, it might give readability a boost too.
@ParoXum Thanks for pointing that out, but I never intended on that being there for very long. I never did a organic surface like cave walls so I wanted to be sure the unwrap was working properly with no stretching and just threw that on there as a place holder. Just trying not to jump around from texturing and zbrush then back to modeling so the place holder seems like a good idea. I should have stated that in the original post.
Spent a lot of time getting decent lightmap unwraps for most(but not all yet) of the main meshes. Creating some modular pipes to have go about the cave. Just need some more filler props then I can get to lighting and texturing.
Also debating how many more props I should add for it. I want it to look full of stuff that Batman would use but not too crowded.
This will be my first time touching Zbrush so after a few tutorials on the UI, I'll make a few rocks to scatter around the cave walls to give it a better feel(such as around the opening at the top) and create a tiling rock texture to get rid of the Cgtexture rock. Everything has a lightmap unwrap so after a few more props(Chair, umm other bat things) I can start to texture those too.
What I want to finish by today is have everything that will be using the tillable metal texture to be unwrapped, get the pipes textured, and if I can fit it in get the computers textured. Like I said before once the rest of this stuff is done I'll be creating a new rock texture. Just saving the hard part for last since I have never used Zbrush before. Also odd is the red at the bottom, it seems to appear and go away at random.
Poly-example
+ add more detail
Make sure you get the texel-density right because now it's really obvious that it's lower res than the other stuff.
As for the caustics, you can make it so that a spotlight does those things for you. You'd just have panning/rotating caustic-texture materials that you apply to a spotlight.
But yes you're getting the feel right at least
Perhaps I could create some large rocks and just rotate them around the cave to give it a more lumpy feel?
Your approach of pipeshoving individual rock assets into the wall is a good idea, but the wall texture will need to work on selling the effect as well. What I have done in the past is to use my reusable rock assets to make a tiling texture using zBrush's 2.5D canvas trick. that way you get a consistency in the rock formation between the tiling texture and the assets.
When I was doing some LODs for Motorstorm Apocalypse I had to LOD several 30.000-40.000 tris chunks of cliffs down to 3000 tris or less. =P
In closed-spaces like this is not that big of a problem.
Basically, if you want to get bigger and nice overall shapes you can always model from the texture. Doing this in max is awesome considering the preserve UV-functionality. Basically start with a cliff-shape, then look at it in perspective-mode from the front and start cutting out detail that you can spot in the actual rock-texture, then start pushing vertices to get more shapes and detail.
Or yeah, do something nice and tilable in Zbrush. Doesn't really matter if it tiles too much as long as you can hide the tiling well. You can use natural cracks to hide seams, use blends or other objects in the way to hide the tiling.
Edit:Two replies while i wrote that one haha.
@chrisradsby I'll admit I have an issue of having models too low poly. I guess I shouldn't be afrade of pushing the poly budget a bit. Great idea for modeling out over the texture. I'll likely be doing that along with covering bits with the zbrush sculpt I do.
Here is a test of the reusable rock mesh. No sculpt yet just the old rock material. Sculpting shall begin....NOW!
This might be of use to you
I have a tendency to jump around and I don't want to rush my self when it comes to learning something new! Expectantly when it comes to Zbrush, I want to not be distracted.
So I worked on a concrete material, I think I got it down ok but if anything is off let me know.
I'm thinking creating a few large sculpted pieces and using those to create it might be the best way. Like chris said, creating it in chunks could allow me to LOD them as necessary if I so needed to.
I've had this scene on my radar for a while now and I've been wanting to provide you with some feedback as I know your desperate for your break into the industry and I want to help out if I can.
Tonight I finally got some spare time, so I created you a feedback board. Hope you don't mind it in image form, I'm just so used to working this way at work.
Overall the scene is coming on well and its certainly got potential, I haven't said anything about the cave walls because everyone has covered this already, anyway here you go mate. If you've got any questions, feel free to PM me
Keep up the good work!
I will still be incorporating much of Grim's crits into it(waterfall, switch to blue/white lighting etc..) but I'm also going to expand the main areas where batman would walk. No point in having a huge cave if he wont use the bigger space right?
Still not having that great "pop" I want it to though. Not just lighting but just overall. Not sure what it needs to achieve that.
What you want to do is maybe the opposite
have a important pool of light that comes from all your techy bits in the middle and have that light slowly fade to dark in those tunnels. Your reveal just some part of em and let the people imagine what they want in there.
Also see what it looks like if you darken the water surface as it might be fighting for attention too much atm.