BEAT-EM-UP! | cow1787

cow1787

Miezul nopţii umbre

Background
I usually don't do challenges, but I thought I'd give it a go after seeing this side-scroller challenge. The idea I'm going for is actually an idea my friend and I have had for quite some time, wanting to turn into some kind of game, but we've never been able to start because of no time or lack of motivation; it'll just be me working on this challenge though.

Environment
The name I'm giving this environment is "Miezul nopţii umbre" which is Romanian (or so Google says) for Midnight Shadows. It'll be set in a Romanian/Transylvanian-type town at dusk, hopefully descending into night; with plans for snow. It'll go from a farm/field area into the town, ending at a church or town square. Main theme - vampire attack. So there will be blockades, fires, blood?

Personal Challenges
Motivation: I lack it, posting progress w/ critiques should help
UDK: I've only tinkered with it, never actually made a level other than the eat3d one
Short deadline: Seems that it'll be short for doing/learning/trying a bunch of new stuff, but it will just enforce my motivation
Zbrush: I'm not sure how much I'd feel I'd need to use it to finish...but finish or not, I must work Zbrush into my pipeline.

Moodboard


Level Concepts
Still messing around with this, just worked on it a bit tonight. The last couple panels I'm not entirely fixed on yet obviously. I may shrink it all down some to fit more in, seems kind of 'short'. I'll probably be able to fix it once I get into the blocking stage.

cow1787

Started blocking out the farm area, getting a feel for the size and distance of everything.

cow1787

After a bit of starts and restarts, confusion, a bit of crying and more restarts I've been able to throw this together.

I don't think I'll spend too much time on the background detailing (terrain) as I hope to put in some fog which would just hide it anyway. But I still plan on some farm houses, etc

All crits welcome.

Ben Apuna

I like the idea behind this scene, sounds like a nice horror movie. I see your reference is modern day photographs. Are you planning on keeping the setting as modern day? or will it be more 18/19th century?

I thought your earlier blockout post looked good. Nice rolling hills with a thicket and flat farmland. I think you may have gone a bit overboard with the terrain sculpting and lost a bit of that idea. That's completely fine but now your terrain looks more like a bumpy hilly area, ie. not farmland (fields) anymore.

The sense of scale seems a bit strange now too with the stone wall being that large. Looking at your reference pictures that wall is about half the height of a car, just pointing it out in case that wasn't what you were going for.

I think there's something strange going on with your sky. One thing is that the clouds are brighter than the sky itself which is possible being lit from the moon above or city lights below, but in this case darker clouds/lighter sky might be a better fit. Looking outside my apartment right now (after sunset) the sky is still comparatively bright but the clouds seem very dark. See here for some more info about dusk/night lighting. Another thing is either the FOV of your camera is causing visual distortion or the cloud layer is too low to the horizon.

Or a final possibility is that I'm posting with less than 4 hours of interrupted sleep and I'm just not seeing things right yet :poly136:.

cow1787

Yeah I was thinking around the 18th century, maybe earlier.

Many of the farm land and buildings I'd assume look pretty similar. The buildings in the town square (in the images) I'm not sure about, I'm no expert on Romanian architecture in the middle ages.

The terrain was what I was going on an off on... Should I just make it in max instead of using the Unreal terrain?

I'll be scaling that wall down a bit too, you're right on that...and the sky, yeah that'll need some work still.

Thanks!

Ben Apuna

You get a few advantages by making the terrain outside of UDK.

1. You can use more advanced materials like Virtuosic's Advanced Mesh Paint with UDK and the ones discussed in The Snow and Ice of Uncharted2? and UE 3 - Shader threads.

2. You can add optimize it for the challenge with more geometry up close and less in the background.

3. You can use tools like World Machine to help create more natural looking terrain.

4. You can get the actual triangle count easily.

But then you loose some advantages and the speed of using the integrated terrain in UDK.

1. The terrain material is easy to use without much setup involved.

2. You can sculpt the terrain easily according to the rest of your scene. To do it in Max or other app you'd have to export all of your static meshes (or at least the large ones) out of UDK and import them into whatever app you want to use.

3. No need to make a second lightmap UV channel, though with terrain that's usually really easy.

4. I've read somewhere that for a real game that's going to have to deal with collisions with the player that using the actual UDK terrain is better.