GONDI DesertTower (many large images)

Microneezia

Hello there,

I've been working on this for about 3 weeks, since my last huge crit from this THREAD! I want to thank everyone but specifically I tried to use the following advice from this forum...

Bitmap's sweet rope tut from the HighPoly sticky
Justin_meisse's stair mapping technique from above thread
EQ's insistence for efficiency!

thanks to everyone else for your crits! I can only hope for more!

The concepts I derived this work from are found HERE! and Here here here by someone named Stephen Cooper. I love his concept work, even the character concepts are good, reminds me of Mobius... and dont think i really did the Gondi enviro justice, but I had to try. Check out his stuff, the environment work says riduculous things at the bottom of each pic, like: "viewed 26 times" and other bullshit low numbers like that. Go look at his work.

so here's my work and texture flats, I wont post the spec, norms ect, or the individual prop textures, but they are on my homepage if you want to see


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renderhjs

you have a very big contrast in detail and geometry dimension/ complexity which looks often odd.
In other words you have many very big walls with alot of mini deco- objects anything between is missing and that's why imo. its looking odd.

mLichy

Ya, it's very interesting, but there's just alot of visual noise and it just makes it hard to really look at any given spot without trying to figure out what your looking at exactly. Also some textures are alot lower rez or stretched than others.

Mark Dygert

I really like the texture work, nice job!

Crits:
- I think the underlying model could use some work.
- There are some big leaps in logic as to what is supporting some pretty big bits.
- It's sometimes hard to factor weight and gravity in a zero-g environment but its critical that we do.
- Some of the damaged and sloped brick areas could use some more geometry. If you scaled up the pyramid details on top, and reduced the overall number of them, I bet you could free up enough polys to do some great damage.
- Dirt, and sand, adding dirt and sand that would collect in corners and along stairs. As well as a few well placed mounds around the base of the structure could help it blend.
- Also check the scale of your stairs, you could probably reduce the overall count by scaling them up. Stairs don't always make perfect sense and can be a bit bigger then the normally would just to save polys. Also make sure to keep the depth of the stairs longer then the height. 2:1 normally works pretty well.

Jeremy Lindstrom

high poly sticky? Ahh, bitmaps post over on cgchain?

Microneezia

Hey there, thanks for the crits! Vig I think you are correct sir. there are some defying gravity pieces. I actually had some more pillars in there holding this stuff up but it was harder to read, imo it looks better without, but ya floating things. maybe i could crash one into the other so they support each other...

I do agree with you and renderhjs. I was thinking of sand piles and bricks laying around actually, so I should do that. I dont think it will be a significant change to repost the images. but i think it will push the piece more.

I animated a camera fly-through and the piece actually reads and feels alot better in motion and once you are inside. the sky and ground pics are strange but I wanted people to understand the sculpture from the pics, some of the views were not intended to be seen... i mean interactively....but these are starting to sound like excuses i guess. Maybe i should render the flythrough actually... 4000 frames... gah.

thanks for the crits!

Dekard, no not CGchain, the tut he put up here,

uhm here!

sorry its not a sticky I was subscribed to it is all..

cholden

The concepts are good, your interpretation is not. The addition of flying butresses for example. They stick out like a sore thumb of style clash. Also, your rope railing infront of carved railing. That's redudant and stands out as silly same as the butress. Everything is inconsistent. Window heights, random walkways, random ropes, random columns, pixel density all over the place.




But what's really going to bite you in the ass is not having a focal point or any real scene composition. In your position, I'd start over focusing completely on recreating this concept.
http://www.plantman.org/gallery/index.php?gallery=Environment%20Concept%20Art2&image=Gondi_Tower.jpg
You can take what you've started, and complete it quite quickly. Set it up a camera, and interpret the concept exactly as possible. If you do it right, you'll have all the standards down to fill out a full game level if that's your intention here. If not, you'll be done and have a piece worth showing.

Microneezia

Im having flashbacks to my remedial 10a math tests being handed back to me!

hah, I believe you are correct tho cholden, I agree with you on almost every point. You are not the only one to mention the randomness and oddity especially concerning the butresses, so I will fix those, and also I think I will change the rope/post config as you mention, give more thought to it and come up with a more realistic reason for them . The pixel density is also easily dealt with, a rookie mistake I guess...

The uneven windows tho, I disagree with you on this matter. The structure isnt an apartment building or anything. I think it looks better in design for this gutted inner crossroads of a tower, rather than just having everything line up. Besides that, I believe it adds a small level of difficulty. I could just texture the window into the brick wall and stamp/flip all around the side. But texturing the windows this way allows the (unappealling I guess) offsetting of the windows and frees the brick texture for other purposes with no window in it. I then used the window texture strip itself for the inner doorway arches as well. I did this to show the efficiency and practicality of the texture. I guess it didnt really come off that way tho.

In all your crits were very good, thanks for the time to take me to school. I also think a total "do-over" would come out great, but wont payback in turn for the time it will take, but I will adjust towards your excellent crits. Thanks again!

Microneezia

Im working still on this environment, I have gutted the interior basically and I think i will go more towards the actual concept inside if I can, more on that after tomorrow. Here is a quick shot of my progress on the outside parts. I have moved the flying buttresses up a level and added additional walls for the buttresses to hold up. This I hope clears up the oddity and clutter on the 2nd / 3rd levels... suggestions? comments on this design decision?

I have tried to address the floating geometry but the level needs that piece of platform as well. I cut most of it off and added a wall to try and hold it up. Not sure if that works.

There are some texture and lighting issues, but those are last in my workflow I guess...

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One more general question. I have a the interior and exterior of this environment as seperate objects, because they are assigned different textures. I imagine that in an engine you cant assign texture by polygon or want to...The problem is that where the windows and doors join up I cannot actually attach these pieces. I am wondering if there is a typical workflow when dealing with seperated pieces that are, to the audience, supposed to be attached. obviously its handy to have the geo/objects share the same pivot point or placement in space, incase of accidental movement, but wondering about other common workflow tips surrounding this....

Mark Dygert

Looking great, the only thing that still bugs me is the cuts through the bricks. There are very few things that would leave a straight cut across bricks, normally the bricks themselves would fall out of place leaving a very jagged stair step look to the broken edges.

Microneezia

Intergalactic laser stone mason rebels!

ya you have a point, ill fix that! thanks a lot, you have been very helpful!

Microneezia

Hello there, So after my total sweep in the T2D contest last month, I thought I would take that success and parlay it into unbridled work towards fixing my temple environment, seen here.

I tried to fix the floating geometry, pixel density issues, rope / railing redundancy, hard slicing lines and the other great suggestions from Vig and Cholden mainly. It would be cool if you guys had time to comment again, but everyone is welcome to comment.

all of this is rendered in 3dsmax. I bought unrealT3 but my pc crashes on startup... im saving up for a new rig... for now you get scanline.

Edit: there are a few more shots on my site, if that helps prime a crit, please view. Also im rendering a flythrough for the next week I guess it will take. Ill post the flythrough link later.

renderhjs

I think it still suffers from the same,- big empty shapes and dense smal objecrts,- the contrast is just to big and so the whole composition falls apart.
It looks to me like you create many of the buildings in radiant, unreal editor ec.t and the details in a propper 3d tool like max.
Break up the boring flat and rough walls with more details,- model some stones and attach those meshes to the wall.

Bump mapping is somewhat to much on some shots,- if you use max try to stay below 0.2 (20%). Some of the saturation in the textures has to much contrast as well making it either very strong green or yellow it does not always harmonize well.

pixel density seems to be already alot better. maybe some last tip for the texures,- draw with some brushes around edges and corners to give the overal texture composition more depth that way it looks like some edges are more worn out as the core shape,- kind of letting it age more. That way you might get also a better feeling of the overal detail in the textures as many of them look still like plain photos or texture sources without beeing edited much.

Microneezia

I get this feeling that Im kinda pushing the details or busy-ness in the textures a lot, and if I jam a bunch of rocks and torches everywhere it might look too packed... and become unreadable in the wider shots. Ill see what it looks like in the flythrough, perhaps you would take time to view that as well...

I see what you mean though, I was trying to stay a little sparse because of how busy the texture is.

hmm, I fear that at the root of what your talking about requires a totally different design completely, and thats more than "a fix".

I will be thinking about this issue for a while though. I see what you mean.

Steve Schulze

I suspect getting some decent lighting going in there would go a long way to making the scene more easily readable and aesthetically pleasing.

Microneezia

Hello again,

I have finalized my work on this environment by

rendering out a flythrough

on my blog

any crits on either are well received.

Thanks!