Twisted Swamp - Tropical Environment WIP
polycounter lvl 12
Hey Polycounters,
I wanted to get some practice in on zbrush and in particular organisc and tropical foliage with some swamp stylization. The tree's were created via zSpheres and hard surfaces in modular rock sets. I also created custom water shaders and fog planes for the water elements as well as foliage sets. I'd like to get some eyes on this as i've been staring at this too long now. Everything is also rendered via UDK with Lightmass enabled on certain elements.
There are a few things i've yet to add and im still working on the lighting, some helpful crits (especially in lighting or foliage placements) would be appreciated.
I still need to implement various rocks to break up the shoreline and increase the color of the flowers within the grass (if you notice they're very dark purple right now).
Thanks ahead!
-Will
I wanted to get some practice in on zbrush and in particular organisc and tropical foliage with some swamp stylization. The tree's were created via zSpheres and hard surfaces in modular rock sets. I also created custom water shaders and fog planes for the water elements as well as foliage sets. I'd like to get some eyes on this as i've been staring at this too long now. Everything is also rendered via UDK with Lightmass enabled on certain elements.
There are a few things i've yet to add and im still working on the lighting, some helpful crits (especially in lighting or foliage placements) would be appreciated.
I still need to implement various rocks to break up the shoreline and increase the color of the flowers within the grass (if you notice they're very dark purple right now).
Thanks ahead!
-Will
Replies
The only crit I can think of at the moment is maybe add a little variation to the individual plants and vines. The vines seem uniform and straight up and down. That's a small crit though, overall it looks awesome.
i think your color scheme could be improved. like if you added something that was redish purple. like a brightly colored flower or something like that... it might really catch you attention and draw your eye.
Thanks for the crits. I really like the texture editor within UDK, allows me to make some quick adjustments to the texture values. I'll see to breaking up some variation within the foliage. Thanks again.
Thanks
I agree with you on both the height fog and the flower idea. I've been having a tough time batteling the colors within the heightfog to accent the environment. I'll test it out some more. As for the flowers I do have a set to break it up, however I need to adjust the textures. It's coming out really desaturated atm. Thanks Andy.
Thanks Rooster. I'll adjust the values to the god rays on the right hand portion of the scene. I was trying to bring some warm values, i'll lighten them up some more. I agree with the statue idea, only i'm going to add some dinosaur skeletons a'la Turok as much of it is inspired by turok concepts. I agree as well with the fog over the water its abit thick i'll increase its opacity and adjust its height some. Thanks again.
other than that it looks really neat so far and with a few more colorfull spots like brighter flowers it might even become awesome
I think the water could so with some reflections and refractions, right now it dosen't read very well as water.
Id also get rid off the god rays as your environment isn't strong enough to suggest them. Make the environment a lot brighter and stick a sun in there if you still want them.
The grass looks a little faint, maybe make the grass strands thicker.
Id also add in some different coloured foliage to break up the environment as everything is too green at the moment.
Last point would be there's no focal point in the image or at least it isn't being highlighted like it should. Maybe a stronger coloured plant to create some colour contrast in the scene.
The colors right now seem very flat, and it reminds me of king kong the game
I think the main reasons being that a swamp is generally flatland that is flooded with a few feet of water, having high grass, some land above the water, lots of trees, etc.
Your scene has tons of rocks in it, not much grass, making it seem more like a tropical forest in the mountains or something.
Maybe you should throw some specular on those broad leaves and put some bright colored flowers around.
The only suggestion i have is to change that fog plane along the ground to water, or place some water somewhere else. since its a swamp you know.
I think it's the balance between the ground fog and the waters reflectivity. I do have the sky reflective within the shader for the water, however I wanted to make sure the water wasn't too opaque. I'll be touching this up, thanks for your feedback
I agree with you on the palm leaves, I'll exaggerate the bend some more to provide a more natural look. Thanks!
The grass is in unlit, translucent right now and generated in foliage volumes, i'll increase distance draw and density and see if I can rectify this.
Thanks, I generally aim for desaturation, more of the style that I like to direct my art towards but the lighting is very flat. I do need to push the darks and lights of the scene for sure.
I wanted to combine some swamp elements with a very tropical feel, to make it look prehistoric, however the scene does appear more tropical than swamp-like. I'll probably create a more suitable title once I finish
I know, the build times were killing me however. I think on my final build i'll just enable them all.
I think my title is contradicting itself. Thanks
this looks really nice, heres a few things that immediately come to mind, I think they may have been stated-
Lighting needs work as currently, it's very flat to read
ground mist is a nice touch, maybe have it flow around plants more?
the water needs some loving - reflections, distortion, and where it meets the ground. With mesh vert painting in UDK there's no reason to not go bananas a little and have it muddier where the water laps.
But I had a hard time trying to make out the water with that fog!
More than anything i think this scene just needs a little pop. Your props are solid, but it's also a bit generic. I think some highly saturated flora or flowers could go a long way peppered into areas you want more interest.
A waterfall in the background on the left side framed by the rocks you already have in place would also be money.
I'm not too sold on the godrays, they're a bit yellow i think, maybe shift 'em to blue?
Also some rocks to litter the floor would help a bit, especially on the edges of the river. The ground suffers from a rolling silhouette you see often in games with terrains, kills the illusion of a hard rock floor.
As for lighting a "lighting only" shot would help us critique it a bit, but right now it's a little flat, like the skylight's a bit too high and your directional is too low or positioned to illuminate too much of the scene without creating any highlight on the silhouettes in the shot.
Lookin' forward to your updates dude.
I also continued working on the shaders to push a very wet feel to the materials, mainly the rocks. The water shader has also been worked on and now linked up with real time reflection camera. I feel I still need to tweak the camera angle for reflection due to the brightness of the right side of the water that should be under cast shadow.
Continued working on the textures, in particular the flora should pop out a lot more now.
Screenshots are all built in 'preview' Lighting quality.
Final critiques are welcome, thanks all.
Only crit is the lighting at this point, i think you should change the main light direction to create a focal point:
No need to overhaul the lighting in the scene, you could just adjust the light channels of the water, uncheck everyting and check gameplay1 for example and add a new light that affects only the gameplay 1 channel. Then just put a yellowish point light in the back to affect only the background.
Regardless, scene rocks whatever you decide to do!
The lighting and materials also look vastly improved.
Really nice scene, if I was to crit something I'd say you could push the shadows a bit more. Other than that, great update
Here's my 2 cents on it:
Definitely try to get some shadows on the water if you can, it will help merge the water with the rest of the scene.
Your foliage is looking good but I think you can push it a bit further. If not on this project then the next one. Right now your foliage is looking fairly uniform in color (aside from the red flowers which are a nice touch).
One thing you can do if you can spare the texture space is adding some dead leaf variations to the mix, don't overdo it, just a bit here and there will probably help make it look more natural. If you can't spare the texture space or don't have the time, you can make simple color shifts with vertex colors and blend it into your existing materials.
Also, it's kind of hard to tell if you are doing this or not since your lighting is fairly diffused, but sometimes it helps to use back to back polygons rather than two-sided materials for foliage so that one side of the leaves can be lit and the other side dark from their own shadows.
It's very cool to see you going for a jungle look in UDK rather than Crysis, you've done a great job so far. I look forward to seeing the final version, keep it up
Just wanted to say I think the scene is looking great. I think the lighting could be pushed quite a bit more though. Keep rocking it!
No I have a decent system. For quality sake i've been building on 1024 lightmaps for large meshes down to 128 for small meshes such as the plants.
The Lightmass process finishes just fine, takes about an hour. It's the map building process that takes a long time for some reason.
Thanks though Tyler, i'll see what I can do.
Once Lightmass finishes the actual lighting part, its taking all those lightmaps, re-mapping them for better shadow contrast resolution and packing them. This takes a really really long time and is why large lightmaps (like a 1024, holy crap man) will kill this process.
Can you post a nice asset / shadow that looks bad w/, at max, a 128 lightmap?
-Tyler
I reduced the importance volume and ran some tests. Really, the difference between preview and production is hardly minimal, and I have good lightmap unwraps so lowering the resolution appeared to produce fine results.
The bounce was the main problem for washing out the shadows. I've reduced all of them except for my primary source.
I'm rebaking again i'll post up screenshot soon. Thanks for the help though.
I do have to agree with Tyler that your lightmaps are way to big. Also I'm pretty sure you are using seperate lightmaps for each assets which in reality you wouldnt do. Really you want light maps for the floors and walls.
Remember you want to show you can do Environment Art that not only looks good but can fit a production scale. And with this scene, and even your hanger I think you tend to far exceed what should be texture sizes.
Its one thing to make great looking art when not worrying about texture limits and another thing to make great art with a production value in mind.
Sill looks great though
http://www.hourences.com/book/tutorialsue3water2.htm
That's my dirty little secret. Literally. LOL.
I used hourences shader setup as outlined in his indoor water tutorial as a basis for mine. I basically added a real time camera setup for the reflections, otherwise I would have used cubemap, mixed several nodes to accommodate an outdoor environment and customized normals for texture panning.
But it's all thanks to Hourence.
funny I used this same thing to get my water but to get it to be semi translucent it didnt handle a reflection very well