Pirate Town Set

SarahFaber

Hey everybody! I am a student in my postgrad year. I am currently working on a Caribbean pirate town to hopefully export into the Unreal engine. Here are some pics of my progress. Feedback welcome!

Quick concepts:





Screen shots of some of the assets:

SarahFaber

Here is a layout of the scene:



Here are some screen grabs from max:








Right now I'm working on the outer environment. Will hopefully have an update of that soon.

Shogun3d

Other than the concepts, what kind of references are you using and texture sizes?

vcortis

This all looks really low poly. What type of platform are you doing this for?

Also texel density seems off on a lot of stuff. Make sure you're projecting a 512x512 texture for every 6 meters in unreal.

I'd slow it down and take your time on really polishing a few pieces up so you have a better idea of where you want to take the piece. What you have now is good for layout purposes and whitebox, but you should really go back in and improve upon what you have (unless this is being made for an i-phone or top down rts or something).

SarahFaber

General consensus has been more polys.

I've never used unreal before, but I'm trying to read up on it as much as possible. If you have any useful links or anything that would be great. The point of this project is to build something for next semester to play around with it in unreal.

I have unique unwraps on everything, 1024x1024 on my buildings. My feedback has been that I need to optimize my uvs by making multiple tileable textures. This is an example of what I have:



So, I have to go back and fix that too.

Here are a just a few of the references I've been using:











Thanks for all the feedback. I'll get down to polishing the pieces up and will hopefully have an update soon.

SarahFaber

Quick update:

tda

That last reference picture you posted has really great mood and colour, you should deffo aim in that direction i think. Your palette is turning more and more orangey brown atm, a bit monochromatic. The palm leaves and the speckles of moss are the only thing breaking that up right now.

Your models look pretty good overall but as was mentioned, if this is being pitched as a level or enviro for unreal you can afford a lot more polygons in there imo. I'd keep an eye on your textures too, a lot of the brickwork seems very uniform on your arch, but in your reference there's a lot of variation in the mortar that breaks up the monotony a lot. I'd also watch the strength of your normals in places, plaster wall on the house is too strong imo.

Keep it going, i like the idea.

Jungsik

ia gree with tda, the lighting could be better

SarahFaber

Quick update:

n88tr

I was never back in those times but just a bunch of boxes strewn around looks rather odd. Add some little market shacks with hanging flags and signs to buildings like Tavern, Whore House etc whatever the names. Give it a little commercial character.

Tili

I like you're ideas, but I don't like the way you model.

Less vertices = less work UV-ing
Less vertices = better performance

n88tr

huge n-gon above the gate there

PixelMasher

for a simple planar face like that the ngon wouldnt matter at all. I just made some rubble pieces at work that are a lot more crazy shaped and they are perfectly fine ingame as ngons. I dont want to start a ngon debate and take over the thread, just saying.

cool work so far man, the lighting is holding it back and making it muddy. also, having everything uniquely unwrapped is really inefficient. 1 or 2 tiling 512 brick textures broken up with vert blending and a small 512x256 trim sheet could give you the same results and be usable on way more buildings in the scene.

for the lighting its all yellow brown, having a warm sunlight and a cool ambiet would give you more contrast and some color variation. keep at it man, pirate shit is always cool. maybe steal some ideas from these fucking awesome concepts for the canned pirates of the Caribbean game done by Daryl Mandryk. they have such and awesome sense of mood and atmosphere.

HAL

Dont overdo the postprocessing like you did in the last picture, make it more subtile, shadows and lighting without overly ambitious usage of bloom are the way to go to add depth and moodd to the sceene.

I also suggest to use warm colors (I assume you did that for the last one?)

Crate are fine, n88tr.

Also I suggest that you add more objects to the scene to make it look more vivid and not that empty.
The Scene is like a large void atm cornered buy those buildings.

Also I suggest that you use tilebrakers for the textures to remove that overly visible "i am a tiling texture look".

Since i'm not one of those shader gurus from the tech artist area, I suggest that you take a look at the stuff there, especially the udk area.

I suggest you do a little research on vertex blending and material creation utilyzing that very technique for tile braking.

I also suggest a read of the following threads:

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=68089&highlight=udk+blending

Ah there it is:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=76295

Also take a look at this:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=74090&highlight=blending

I hope this helps a bit.

PatrickL

I have looked at this thread three or four times now. I kept feeling like something was really off about your scene, but I couldn't think of what it was. Thankfully, HAL said it for me: Too much tiling! It just demands the eyes look at it, and it gives a very artificial feeling to the shapes and buildings where it is present.

You actually improved it a good deal with that last picture, though maybe I just can't see it through the sun beams!

The artwork PixelSmasher posted looks like an excellent source of inspiration for you. Even if it's a different style and mood than you want, you can still carry over some of that believability that they depict. This is a pirate town, after all. Make it look like the pirates have laid a few years of wear and tear on those buildings!

tristamus

Wow! I must say, for the concepts you scribbled down, you went extremely far with them!

However, I do notice that the textures could use quite some work. It looks as if you almost went for a painterly quality, yet it ended up being a bit too realistic? Hard to explain...They seem very muddy...I suppose it just seems to be a little bit TOO in-between realistic and hand-painted to be THAT flat colored. I think punching out some more normal maps / increasing the bump in places might do you more good than not. Especially in certain pics of yours...the floor seems a lot flatter than it should.

The biggest thing though, might not be any of what I aforementioned, but rather it may just be your lighting setup that is detracting from the total quality of your scene? Who knows at this point...

I'd tinker with the lighting to see if what I said is at all justifiable!...

tristamus

PatrickL wrote: »

I have looked at this thread three or four times now. I kept feeling like something was really off about your scene, but I couldn't think of what it was. Thankfully, HAL said it for me: Too much tiling! It just demands the eyes look at it, and it gives a very artificial feeling to the shapes and buildings where it is present.

You actually improved it a good deal with that last picture, though maybe I just can't see it through the sun beams!

The artwork PixelSmasher posted looks like an excellent source of inspiration for you. Even if it's a different style and mood than you want, you can still carry over some of that believability that they depict. This is a pirate town, after all. Make it look like the pirates have laid a few years of wear and tear on those buildings!

I should have read your post first, lol...the amount of tiling...is definitely affecting.

Maybe he was planning to have a modular workflow though? I don't know...

Contrails

the perfectly flat cobblestone is bugging me a little too - a normal would help roughen it up and I'd subdivide it a little bit and make it uneven and also smooth out that sudden drop between the two levels.

keep it up!

SarahFaber

Thanks for all the feed back guys. Here are the final images... I may tweak them still a little, but I'd really like to start fresh on a new set. There's a lot of adjustments I need to make in my work flow and playing with the same messy set over and over seems kinda pointless to me.

Jungsik

whoah godrays..

Mistry10

Nice work Sarah !!!

proximity

Hey i am also working on a pirate esque scene for my Final major project at university.

a few questions and suggestions?

Where is the scene set? like world location and what era is it? this will help you gather architectual reference which would help this peice alot.

may i also suggest you remove all of the 'special' effects until your models and textures look good as they shouldnt be used to cover your mistakes but instead to compliment your work. And remove the blur when showing your work all elements should be veiwable.

Also i would go and gather so much more reference for your scene this will help you alot as it has helped me greatly, here is a good piece of reference i found that may help you to get some mood in your scene


http://www.stivesgallery.co.uk/HarboursFull/OldHarbourGallery.html

hope ive helped a little good luck would like to see this progress

SarahFaber

Thanks!

Yeah... the god-rays are DEFIANTLY getting toned-down. Can almost hear the "Hallelujah!" Update coming up real soon.


The setting for the set tried to follow some outlines set for a game premise. Basically, in a pirate-ridden world, there are two waring factions: the Caribbean pirates vs the Asian pirates. The Caribbean pirates are a mish-mash of English, French, Spanish, and whatnot, so I tried to incorporate mostly English and Spanish styles together.


Take heart, I do have a LOT more reference than shown... and if it means anything, I spent a whole afternoon putting "Arrrrrrr matey" after all my sentences to see if it helped. Even considered buying a parrot, but they poop too much.

P442

the scene doesn't really scream pirate. It could just as easily be titled 'Columbia 1975.'
You need more pirate stuff.