Moroccan Environment
polycounter lvl 14
[UPDATE]
Latest Update:
This is the remains of my BRAWl entry. The BRAWL deadline ended up coinciding with a work deadline. Push came to shove and I abandoned ship.
But I'm back on it now and plan on re-purposing the assets for an environment thats a little more expanded. I'll probably try and keep to the 4096 texture map size however. At least for the time being.
So for those that are interested here is the origonal BRAWL thread here.
And this is how far I had got:
I have decided to start with a small street and go from there. If I can i'll expand into a more substantial scene that can be walked around a little bit.
But this is where I'm at the moment:
Textures and models still rough.
Latest Update:
This is the remains of my BRAWl entry. The BRAWL deadline ended up coinciding with a work deadline. Push came to shove and I abandoned ship.
But I'm back on it now and plan on re-purposing the assets for an environment thats a little more expanded. I'll probably try and keep to the 4096 texture map size however. At least for the time being.
So for those that are interested here is the origonal BRAWL thread here.
And this is how far I had got:
I have decided to start with a small street and go from there. If I can i'll expand into a more substantial scene that can be walked around a little bit.
But this is where I'm at the moment:
Textures and models still rough.
Replies
it's similar to prince of persia 3 desing
Ayoub44 glad you approve
Here is the texture sheet for the buildings, this accounts for most of the models you see, all except the steps and the arch way. And not the sky of course, which is currently a map that came with UDK.
Those are my thoughts on the large area.
The small area you have is really cool. I don't think you need to go further for the moment. You could just focus on that small hallway area and make something really nice. Morocco seems like a bustling and crowded city. If you put market stalls and a bunch of crap in that hallway and make if feel slightly claustrophobic I think you'd have a really nice scene and you wouldn't have to change the lighting or any of the work you've already done.
I don't know if you've played final fantasy 12, but something like the Nalbina Fortress market would be cool.
I can't find any other good pictures, but you get the point.
And what is the size of that texture sheet? 1024? 2048?
Nice scene. I do have a question, the lattice on the top, are those meshes?
But now I am now kind of trying to make it more of a realistic environment rather than continuing the with the Brawl/MK theme. So I have stripped everything back to that small environment, I will build it to a nice busy environment, etc, slowly expanding to a wider scene. Thats the plan anyway.
polygonfreak The lattice is made of two alpha planes, one set slightly above the other to give the illusion of depth. Although you can't really notice that from this distance.
A small update:
Some sketches to work out tillable assets etc:
Been a little stuck on direction so threw some scribbles and photos over a screen grab just to get a feel for where I wanted to be going. Its no where near a "concept" but enough to keep me going.
TorQue[MoD], Pixelz & shrew81 Cheers for the crits.
06-04-2011 08:55 PM
JozzyThe textures are still lacking normal, spec maps, etc. if thats what you are referring to?
Started on a shutter door. I have been holding off on using mudbox until I got a workflow in place. Now that Im on a bit of a (slow) roll id thought id see how it goes.
This looks a little 'blobby' because its not on the highest subdiv level, PC couldn't handle it all at once
Very quick placement too, just testing them out. M
I placed some shelves across the wall for now, ill probably swap them out at some point for something more appropriate, but this is the kind of thing im going for: image, image
[EDIT] Almost forgot:
A few sketches/doodles of some of the other assets I had in mind:
Keep it up, this is starting to look really nice!
Inital bake; Some dodgy bits in the AO around where are yoused some floating geometry but pretty happy with it. Still need to find a balance with those sharp edges too. I'm going to play with some UDK material to get the appearance that there is a candle or something inside. Also to note this a very large texture that will be scaled down.
Not so interesting a bin/container thing for a stall, to fill with fruit,nuts etc. I stayed a lil later at work and had a go at using the cintiq with mudbox, so much fun! Took some getting used to but looking forward to trying it out with something a bit more adventurous.
Some assets to populate the market stalls.
Its been a (very long) while since Ive made a pimping post. I have had some spare time recently and was able to consider working on a personal project again. Rather than start something completely new I wanted to have a go at finishing a project Id already started, but not had time to finish, so Ive been looking back over my Moroccan environment. When I last toyed around with it I felt I was lacking some direction so Ive gone back to the drawing board a little to be sure I have an genuine understanding of what I want to achieve. Id like to bring back some of the original assets that Id built previously, but for now Ive spent a while blocking out the environment so I have something to work to. Previously I was creating modular assets but with out any real thought to what I wanted the environment to look like as a whole. I think this is part of the reason the project began to falter.
I wasn't particularly sold on my original art direction either. I had plenty of ideas, but once this was was no longer going to be based on the Polycount challenge it kind of lost its purpose and things stalled. I'm trying to rectify that by being a little more focused. I spent a long while looking through photos and videos taken from around Morocco and kept coming back to Chefchaouen, Moroccos Blue City. The blue rinse buildings are very striking, especially when played off against vibrant colours from foliage and market stalls. Some of the reference material below is also from the city of Jodhpur, India. Besides being another example of a Blue City, it had some interesting shapes and silhouettes, that being said, we wanted to hold to the Moorish architecture of Morocco.
And by we I mean Scrawld URL="http://www.scrawledpages.co.uk"]site[/URL and I. After both getting our first industry jobs a year or so ago we have had little time for personal projects and so together we thought we might actually stand a chance of completing something.
I think thats enough talk for now here are some pretty pictures.
This how we have laid out the map to begin with, a really rough block out which I split into four areas, two each. Itll be nice to complete the entire area, but for now we are concentrating on the Street and Courtyard areas in yellow and green, I have actually shortened some of the areas since this pic because they were needlessly oversized.
These are some renders from 3Ds Max. We are pretty much blocking the whole thing out in Max and exporting huge chunks to UDK to get a feel for how its working. Its gone through several iterations to get to this stage. We are only now just starting to think about how we want to split things up into separate assets.
I think next Im going to focus on a single corner of the courtyard, bring back some of those assets Id made and flesh it out, see how it looks with something in there besides coloured grids. Here are a few early assets being re-introduced into the environment.
ysalex: That's rather disturbing to hear about Chefchaouen's hashish trade, especially as it looks so beautiful & picturesque in the photographs we have collected for reference. I admit the concept we have is very idyllic, with market stalls selling trinkets rather anything...untoward...
Been working on getting a few more assets in there. Still WIP, textures are rough, models to be refined and things moved around etc, just feeling my way around the environment to see what works and what doesn't.
I visited Chefchaouen a couple of years ago and my friend took some reference imagery on his SLR. perhaps they will be useful to you guys for this project
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/f6pimd5p5djt2s4/7q-8_oCgGN
I have been working on a material that supports vertex painting so that I can add the kind of blue tide line, so it won't all be blue.
This is just a bit of a demonstration but you get the idea:
That being said I do want to have an area that is all blue, and then as you move up to higher ground, and the buildings get taller, it'll break out into more of the white with with blue patches, just to add a touch of visual change to the environment, I quite like the contrast:
I still have to work on the specifics, but that's currently the general idea...