[WIP - crits please] Road to Stonebridge from Dungeon Siege
polycounter lvl 13
Starting point from the original game -
Rough concept, before I decided to include the bridge and signpost. The statue is from later on, near the Crypts, but I feel like it'll help tie the scene to this chapter of the game better (the statue is one of the objects that stood out most in my mind when I thought about this early stretch).
Where I am so far...
Things I know aren't up to par.
- Tree is too red, although I want to keep the redwood bark look, so I'll shoot for halfway between that and the screenshot trees
- edging shrubs suck right now, don't match the palette, and look way too planar
- 3D grass is looking too noisy. Would love advice how how to make the shadowing on that less harsh, and get more light bleed-through on the blades. I have a transmissive map on it right now but it doesn't seem to be doing everything I hoped it would
- threshold blend on the grass edge needs fixing.
- Dirt texture isn't final, will be darker to match original game
- Would like to get more definition on the stone slopes, may go back into zbrush for that. Can't use a displacement because the tex samples on that material are topped out.
Left to do:
Bridge
Signpost
Branches on trees (and other trees)
Redo the dumb shrubs to match the more tangled vine look from the original game
Maybe the statue (if I have time)
Lay it on me.
Rough concept, before I decided to include the bridge and signpost. The statue is from later on, near the Crypts, but I feel like it'll help tie the scene to this chapter of the game better (the statue is one of the objects that stood out most in my mind when I thought about this early stretch).
Where I am so far...
Things I know aren't up to par.
- Tree is too red, although I want to keep the redwood bark look, so I'll shoot for halfway between that and the screenshot trees
- edging shrubs suck right now, don't match the palette, and look way too planar
- 3D grass is looking too noisy. Would love advice how how to make the shadowing on that less harsh, and get more light bleed-through on the blades. I have a transmissive map on it right now but it doesn't seem to be doing everything I hoped it would
- threshold blend on the grass edge needs fixing.
- Dirt texture isn't final, will be darker to match original game
- Would like to get more definition on the stone slopes, may go back into zbrush for that. Can't use a displacement because the tex samples on that material are topped out.
Left to do:
Bridge
Signpost
Branches on trees (and other trees)
Redo the dumb shrubs to match the more tangled vine look from the original game
Maybe the statue (if I have time)
Lay it on me.
Replies
Now with more bridge! Whole bridge not included.
Dialed back red tree bark
Improved rock faces with more craggly contours
Shrubs still suck
Also, seriously struggling with getting the foliage shader to behave the way I want / need it to. I originally set it up with both a rim light that was a fresnel term masked to only highlight upwards (so no rimlight on shadowed down-facing planes), and a transmissive that was masked to only a translucent glow through the leaves and 3D grass that are facing away from a light source. The transmissive is giving me fits and screwing up the grass and shrubs.
Lots of under-the-hood attempts to get the foliage shader up to snuff, big shout out to fellow Polycounter Chris C for all his help and advice. Still can't get the 3D grass to behave.
Discovered this morning when the sun rose that my tree branches don't match the ref in my yard (damn). Way too much droop, they actually need to point upwards, not down, and the sides of the boughs need to sag a lot more.
Tried following some of the threads about transmissive lighting for light bleedthrough on leaves (especially this thread: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=121397), not getting great results. Any tips are REALLY appreciated.
Yup, the grass / bark transition isn't too awesome right now. I'm going to flare out the very bottom of the trunk to make the angle between it and the ground smoother, and cover up a lot of that seam with some grass and maybe flowers.
In the original game, lots of the bigger trees either had gnarled roots or flared out to be perfectly level and had an alpha map at the bottom of the trunk to blend them into the ground. Still debating whether to try and go that road with these, my hunch is to just pack stuff in over the seam to hide it. Pretty common in nature as well for redwoods.
The statue, if I have time to do it (it's lowest priority, sadly) will be right around the inner apex of the curve in the path.
The ground texture transitions are controlled by a threshold mask that I'm going to tune up still. Right now it's tiled too much and too blotchy, giving the speckled look. Aiming for something a bit more smooth.
Thanks for the feedback, folks!
I'm especially happy with the trees. 100% handpainted textures and it's one of the rare times I totally love how something I made turned out.
Tore out the old bushes, created some new ones that feel a lot closer to the original undergrowth type bushes of the original game that were used to break up terrain edges and seams.
Lot of work went into the trees, the branches got redone several times until I finally got the profiles and volumes I wanted.
3D grass is back. If I could make it work, I'd project the UV3 from the terrain out onto the grass and use the terrain lightmaps on the grass to make them feather right in, but that's dark shader magic beyond what I can get out of UDK. Most of it is looking okay right now, although some parts I'm going to retouch.
Signpost is in. Text is getting done with decals because the materials are reused from the bridge. Going back and forth a little on making the wood for the sign darker. It's kind of getting lost in the background from some angles.
Still to do -
- Threshold blend texture cleanup, it's still speckle-y
- Tweak the new shrub colors to match the other vegetation greens better, they're too blue right now
- Needs a few weeds and pebbles to break up some of the larger open spots, thinking a dandelion, wildflower, and a small broadleaf weed, along with two or three pebbles and pebble clusters. Maybe one big half-buried rock, saw that a lot in the original.
- Statue? Probably not but still thinking about it a little
Lighting is also not what I originally envisioned - closer, but still not all the way there. I'm not a lighting expert though, so not sure how much improvement I'll be able to wring out of it. I boosted the intensity of my main light by 3x-4x and it helped a lot, brought my rim and fill up some too. The rim is a pretty saturated red-orange and the fill is flat-out purple like the spotlight in the original game screenshot, I may need to experiment with those a bit. I've been aiming for a saturated, heavy, late-afternoon-sun-through-mountain-forests look with the sun coming kind of over the shoulder of the big central tree. Any tips there are massively appreciated.
Still working on the lighting. May tweak the grass some more.
Not 100% sure though, having played the game like 10 years ago but If I remember correctly the bridge was Burned down.
But the rocks are way too smooth, it looks like a polished rock surface more than real rocks.