Chrono Trigger Millenial Fair
interpolator
I started working on this a bit ago as a home project to improve my hand painting skills as well as creating an environment using UE4. Most all textures are diffuse only and I am taking advantage of UE4 mainly for vertex blending as well as some fx work to come. I've gotten to a point that I feel confident in posting and garnering critiques to make it an overall better piece.
I've taken some liberties with the design. Some things that work well in 2d sprites don't translate very well (or can be boring) so I changed some things while trying to keep the overall tone. I flaired the two main stairways to give them more character. I also curved the minor landing stairways as having them straight didn't work well as they felt too small. For this project I am focusing on this main area and leaving out Gato (the robot area) and the caveman area.
Still need to make
I've included a few more prop shots so you can see some of the items up close.
Here's the ref.
I've taken some liberties with the design. Some things that work well in 2d sprites don't translate very well (or can be boring) so I changed some things while trying to keep the overall tone. I flaired the two main stairways to give them more character. I also curved the minor landing stairways as having them straight didn't work well as they felt too small. For this project I am focusing on this main area and leaving out Gato (the robot area) and the caveman area.
Still need to make
- Trees
- Flora
- singularity
- wind/animation for flags, ivy, leaves in wind.
I've included a few more prop shots so you can see some of the items up close.
Here's the ref.
Replies
Are you going to let UE4 do the shadows and some AO for you? Otherwise some handpainted shadow splats beneath those generators for instance would be great.
I can feel a rush of nostalgia coming along already. Looking forward to your progress!
I'm going to mess with the lighting in UE4 a bit and see what I can do. First tests with shadows are coming out way too dark so I've got some tweaking to do. Worst case I can do splat planes but it's something I'd rather not rely on.
Thanks for the support everyone!
I managed to get Apex cloth working. I might tweak it a bit but I'm pretty excited about it. Never really messed with PhysX stuff before. Fixed the trees up a bit and messed with lighting.
Even with such a simple light setup, it really came together
You should probably do something about the grass shading. They really look like cardboard planes now.. Maybe force the normals upwards? If that breaks the SSAO, see if there is some transmission shader you could use.
Crazy idea: put some parallax on the stone textures. Parallax on hand painted isn't that common, but I think it could be cool.
You are off to a great start. My only thoughts at this stage is you are currently lacking the vibrance of the original, particularly in the foliage and the highly saturated balloons and tents.
*subscribed.
I got some more work done tonight on it. Balloons are a bit brighter and I evened out the trees a little bit. I also added a a painted backdrop to the forest that isn't terribly evident in these screeenshots but it stops the sky from bleeding through the trees at low angles and blowing out the brightness. I also realized my opacity map isn't working on the purple stalls...oops. Will fix.
I'd like to test some stuff out with parallax on the cobblestones as suggested but haven't had much luck as of yet. It either didn't work at all or it did but it destroyed my vertex painting so I'm doing something wrong there so far. I've turned off the pixel shading for now but I plan on rendering out two fly throughs at the end so I can show it on. Next up is making some fx so that this looks impressive in real time. I plan on making some leaves that blow off trees with the wind and also the singularity between the teleporters. Let me know what you think!
I'd suggest you remove the cast shadows from your ground foliage completely, your grass texture is really dense and with cast shadows turned on it just looks like cardboard. I'd also echo the point someone else mentioned above that you should point the vertex normals up so that it can look like it's inheriting more of the lighting from the terrain which will help a lot with getting it to shade better.
The same applies to your tree canopies, the leaf planes you've put on it just look like paper cutouts. Turning off shadowing of your canopies would be bad though so your only real option (if you want to address it) is to add more leaf planes. Constructing trees like that really works best when the trees don't self-shadow.
Improving the ambient lighting so that your shadows are not black will help in both those cases though so I'd do that first and decide from there what is necessary.
Changes - Took off shadow from grass planes and edited vertex normals to point up. Also stopped shadows from being cast on the tree leaf planes. Adjusted ambient sky light brightness and color to fill in some of the dark areas away from pure black. Also, not terribly visible in still shots but I've added some leaf particles that blow in the wind. Most the big stuff is more or less done aside from the singularity and some small changes.
As for the pixel filter, I like it but it does somewhat detract from the hand painted textures. When I finally render this out for a fly through, I plan on doing one with and one without to test it.
Yeah, that seems to be a fine line at the moment. Something I've seen said about hand painted environments is that they are low contrast so the characters will stand out from them and now fight for the eye, but how low is too low? I'll have to take a look at this but it may be something I can fix qwith some post processing. We'll see. I've been lazy because of Fallout 4 but I worked on the portal a bit tonight. Not sure if I'm set with this direction, but we'll see. Also, I realize that it doesn't do much without seeing the material in motion since it is animated. Maybe I can do something about that later.