Diablo III Gem Mine (next gen)

praetus

So I was needing to model an environment for portfolio stuff and I decided on something from Diablo III concept art. I wanted to go with a more realistic approach for the area. I added grass to the area because it seemed a little bit too open. I think it pulls it together but maybe you guys think otherwise? Any crits are much appreciated as long as they're helpful. I still need to get shadows on this guy and I'm missing a bush I have yet to model. Rip this thing apart. I need this looking good for my portfolio. Rendered in UE3

http://mikebarrington.com/images/Boards/DiabloConcept.jpg

conte

does it have some spec or normal maps?

Art-Machine

I gotta say that's not looking next gen at all so far. If you have normal maps they're not showing much in those shots in fact it looks completely unlit. I can't really make constructive criticism since I can't tell what the problem is (no normal maps? No spec? No lighting? too many lights?). All I'll say is the way it is right now, it's not next gen.

Looking at your site, you do seem to use normal maps, But they mostly never show in your final shots. 2 things make normal maps pop - 1 hard light source with few other lights, and specular maps. The lack of both makes normal maps all but useless. Also a good trick for intensifying normals, duplicate the layer in photoshop and put it on 'overlay'. That pretty much doubles its intensity.

Mcejn

Not too bad man! Keep in mind though that as far as the base of the tree goes, the concept mainly has grass on the surface with dirt on the sides coming down, which is where some of the roots are sticking out. It's pretty tough to make something like this feel like it's out of Diablo when there are no painted textures.

Also you will want to go into the wood textures (big pylons/entrance to mine ones) and add some grime or something to liven them up, they stick out the most to me. Way too clean I think, show a bit of wear and tear. Same goes for the metal bits bolting them together, too clean.

Hope this helps.

turpedo

I'm not sure if you're using one already or not, but it feels like your stuff isn't utilizing any sort of ambient occlusion.

Jeremy Lindstrom

texture sizes look all over the place.

praetus

Thanks for the comments guys. iPhone post so can't get to into this until tonight. There are spec and normal maps but no ao. Lighting in unreal needs some work. Not sure why my shadows are non-existant... I have a skylight as well as one spot light in the scene currently. I'll try to rework the lighting to show off normal maps better.

CounterSeal

Regarding the lack of shadows, try to enable lightmapping on all major meshes. Go to the static mesh editor for each of the meshes and input a number for lightmap resolution, but don't go too high with it, there's no need. Then go into each instance of the mesh and scroll all the way down in their properties and uncheck "override lightmap resolution". Hope that helps.

Foxious

Unreal Skylight? Did you edit the brightness to be some number less than 1.0? If not, it's probably why everything feels unlit.

praetus

Still working on those normals but here's hoping the lighting improvement helps sort things out a bit. I went back into Max and had to map 2nd UV channels for lighting info in unreal. Shadows seemed to pull things together a bit better I think. I also messed with the light coloring and setup so the details are not as washed out as before. I still need to get those specular maps to pop out the normals.

Dekard: What maps seem especially bad to you for texture sizes. I'm noticing the ground especially but what else?

Art-Machine: Thanks for the info about light setups. I think that helped quite a bit and I still have some tweaking to do.

Here's what I have thus far:

s0id3

I think you still need to bake out AO maps in your textures

praetus

s0id3 wrote: »

I think you still need to bake out AO maps in your textures

Very true. The good news there is that now that I have a second UV set I can bake them and throw them into an Unreal Mat. God bless you Eat3D dvds.

Snight

praetus wrote: »

Very true. The good news there is that now that I have a second UV set I can bake them and throw them into an Unreal Mat. God bless you Eat3D dvds.

While this is probably passable for a personal project, doing this would be an invalid solution in actual development. It would be way too expensive. In my opinion you should learn the correct way of implementing your AO pass into your textures, and use the second UV set for light maps on your larger objects.

praetus

By that do you mean setting them to multiply in photoshop for base textures or something else? I know of those two methods and that's about it unfortunately.

turpedo

Yup that what Snight is talking about, or you can overlay it. See what looks betters.

Art-Machine

It's definitely looking miles better. Eventually the lighting will need a fill light to hit the dark side of the scene. As for the color, imagine what the sky color would be at that time of day and that should work.

Good job not giving up, with so much stuff to look into and criticism from multiple angles. That's definitely a good sign that you'll get somewhere in this biz and keep improving.

Looks like you have a lot of lighters in here that can help you with the technical details. What i said to you so far has just been from the experience of a guy that does a lot of work with normals.

Neox

Snight wrote: »

While this is probably passable for a personal project, doing this would be an invalid solution in actual development. It would be way too expensive. In my opinion you should learn the correct way of implementing your AO pass into your textures, and use the second UV set for light maps on your larger objects.

well he could combine the AO with the lightmap, totally depends where he bales the lightmap

However, i don't want to sound rude, but i'm missing two things here, it doesn't feel very diablo3ish and also doesn't feel nextgen to me.
It is more like a gothic/oblivion kinda generic fantasy game asset.

Shogun3d

I think you're foliage transition from the grass to the dirt needs some blending and work, I would also be careful with clipping items such as the rocks and the roots from the ground as they can cause a harsh texture pop as well.

G3L

Could we see some wireframes shots if possible?

praetus

Here's some screen grabs from Max for wire frames.

rawrsie

the transition between the grass and the dirt and grass isn't helped by the fact that where your grass planes meet the ground, they stop being seperate blades of grass and just a flat plane of colour with no transparency to seperate the blades of grass. this is making it look like just a plane and making it impossible to hide that look and blend it out better. Also all your textures seem to just look like photos wrapped on them with no care to make them blend or fit into the same scene. There is also texture density issues, especially with the mound of dirt and grass where it gets very blurry. The tree trunk texture looks very nice, but the lower roots are a lot lighter and when they come out of the dirt the transition between the two looks very unnatural. That's where baking some ao in or handpainting that fake shadow would help tremendously. also maybe try making the ground plane all one object and use a layered shader to blend between the different textures and you'd get less abrupt transitions.

hope this didn't come across as mean, I just thought i'd address most of the issues i see as bluntly as i could. keep working on it, every piece you push further is a great learning experience

fast1

i think rawrsie brought up some really good points, you should take note.

torontoanimator

i definitely like the progress youve made, but i dunno that id call it a diablo gem mine, like what makes it diablo you know? the grass is pretty nice, but the tree, it just feels a bit stiff to me, id definitely try to make the tree more twisted and tapered. Good work otherwise!

Dakkon

I think what's the most off putting thing to me is that your texture scale is all over the place. Usually you can get away with some of this, but here, it's really really obvious. I'd also try to find some reference lighting in a photo to use for inspiration, and try to emulate that.

praetus

Rawrsie - haha, no, being mean would be saying, "this is poop" and giving nothing past that. I see what you mean with the grass textures. I'll have to rework some of the alpha and see if I can get it looking less like a plane. I'll go through the textures and try to color match them a bit better as well.

As far as the ground shader I'm thinking of this - Making tileable dirt and grass textures and making a LERP as a single alpha channel between them. I hear this is expensive to do though. Any thoughts on this?

Torontoanimator - I'm thinking on reworking the tree a bit. I've been looking through the screenshots of the game and trying to see what I can do to emulate the style more. Trees and rocks in the game don't show as much micro detail in the textures as I have here. I may test it out on some objects.

Dakkon - Good idea with the lighting setup. The mound and ground planes look pretty off for texture sizes. I think most the props tend to fit together as far as details and style but that may be what you have problem with.

Thanks for feedback everyone. I'll try and get this worked on and improved.

praetus

So, I'm trying to do the AO thing and having some trouble with it's setup. Basically, I think my maps are "dirty" with artifacts and other rendering problems. See here:



And these are my settings.



I'm mainly curious as to what settings you all use when baking out AO maps. Any help is much appreciated.

-Mike

Ott

If I remember correctly, it comes from the Adaptive Undersampling of textures rendered past like a 256 or 512. Try turning that off and see if that fixes it.

praetus

Thanks Ott, that was indeed the problem.





Things that have been done:

-Ground texture was redone from scratch and is now a tileable texture with masks as opposed to one texture rendered out.

- The mine entrance UVs have been laid out from scratch and repainted so I could get serperate detail on different pieces as well as an AO map that was worth a damn.

-Made some mushrooms to drop in to break it up a bit. Grass texture remade from scratch so it looks less like floating planes. Laid out grass foliage to break up the scene a bit. I still have more to do on this.

____________________________

Stuff that needs done yet:

-Round the edges of the mound as right now they are very evident. Redo mound texture as tileable textures with mask.

-Zbrush the tree and try to get more of a "Diablo" feel. Redo tree texture as needed.

-Color match the textures to a common color theme and set up better lighting.
_______________________________________

What else? I want this looking awesome. Let me know what needs improved.

-Mike

praetus

So, unless anyone has some major input on this guy I'm calling it done! I think it looks loads better. What about you?

renderhjs

the orange and the comic font at the bottom kind of destroy the picture - maybe pick something less distractive ?
All the renderings are way to dark - add more light and give warm lights a shot dont leave it with default white lights

s0id3

You really need a skydome in there... it doesn't look complete. I would also have stronger light sources and more contrast in the overall lighting. The lighting just looks washed out right now. Materials need work as well I'm not seeing any real spec or normals on anything, everything looks the same material wise. Also take out the character silhouette it's not really serving a purpose.

Tumerboy

Aziz, LIGHT!

praetus

Ok, So i can make sure that the next screens don't have the Orange bar and toned down text. Character is removed, sky box is placed, and working on lighting now. I guess I am a bit confused though with lighting this thing.

s0id3 - By more contrast do you mean color variation? Also, if the lighting has washed out the colors and detail, wouldn't a stronger light source kill it more-so? I've never really had to light environments before so I'm a little lost I guess.

Tumerboy

Contrast AND less washed out. Crazy, I know.

Mark Dygert

Maybe this came up already? But it feels like there's an elephant in the room? Diablo3 isn't that heavy on the photo sourcing... At least not from what I've seen. It looks more hand painted, like the concept, only more polished. Something along these lines: http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=62527

One of the key components seems to be that shadows never really hit 100% black they're always a blend of colors around them. I'm not sure what engine you're using but try to soften up the shadows and definitely get rid of the harsh shadows in the textures.

Also try and hit a consistent overall color theme. I'm sure they pull off some of that in a post effect but it looks like they also try and hit that in each asset. Almost as if you could look at two barrels and know which one goes in the dungeon and which one goes outside next to the inn, because of the color pallet used to create them.

You could start with photos, and paint over them I guess but to nail Blizzards style you gotta hit the textures pretty hard with the painterly style, and so far you've kind of missed in that dept by using photos.


I'm not the best guy at nailing this style, but hopefully this helps illustrate what I'm sayin'.

The modeling is pretty solid though

praetus

Going to mess with these a bit more in the next day or two. If it looks orange I'll be fixing that. I just got a new monitor and haven't had a chance to color correct it yet so that may be a bit off.

In response to Vig, I'm sure I'm going to get crap for this but I was never trying to match the hand painted Blizzard approach. While it is from Diablo 3 I made the decision pretty early on that I wanted my textures to be more realistic in nature. It's somewhat my fault for choosing something from a series that is so well known for it's specific artistic styling. You do bring up some excellent points on color themes though that I will look into.

Tumerboy - Hopefully this is a bit better?

As for now, I'm off to work for the evening...

almighty_gir

question: have you ever seen the entrance to a mine sitting sideways on a hill, with a brick wall around the "base" of the entrance?

no, you haven't. mine shafts move INTO the land, with the entrance aligned with the wall, your design just doesn't make sense =[

rawrsie

it's not his design, it's a d3 concept that he linked in the first post.
I think that it's improving greatly and I second vig on the note about colour styling. keep at it

Mark Dygert

Awesome! If that's the goal, cool stuff
I just read D3 and saw a painterly concept and then saw non-painterly stuff. But since thats the goal its looking good
Nice lighting change btw.

imb3nt

I'm actually working on the same scene, looking good praetus. I was going to try a next-gen approach as well but I keep getting sidetracked with other projects. The concept has a few red gems here and there in the walls of the mine, are you going to add those? Also some small rocks around the scene might break things up a little. Otherwise good job :thumbup:

praetus

Imb3nt, you should totally make the hand painted style so anytime someone mentions it I can send them your way. Haha. I'll get some final touches on this guy tonight when I get out of work. Good idea on the rocks and gems.

seforin

that hill still could use some polys to make it look less like a cylinder and more like a hill (push a few verts in create it clumpy etc

I dig this so far I suggest maybe some smaller alphas for the tree leaves to give it some awesome in it

skybox I would think would be nice to be a dusk setting (orange/redish, ) It would blend nicer with your envrionment/ current lightings imo.

hope these help man, talk to me on messenger if you want

Mcejn

I still don't think this thing is close enough to be calling it next-gen. You might have wanted to have spent more polygons in some places, especially in the terrain below and around the tree. None of the textures really pop for me, maybe this is a lighting issue because everything looks almost the same. Really try and experiment with using more lights and going off a much lower Brightness/Radius. At this point it's all presentation and I feel your lighting is hurting this scene right now. Hope to see some improvements though mang! :]