Cabin in Woods: WIP
polycounter lvl 10
Long time no new art from me. That changes today. Since January I've been working on an outdoors scene. I was inspired a lot by Skryim and The Witcher 2. Originally, I was wanting to get this done in a month and have a second project done by the start of March for GDC, but I picked up a freelance gig for two weeks that ate up a lot of my time and ended up pushing this back.
I'm fairly close to being finished and I figured now would be a great time to get the community's feedback. Unlike my last 3 projects which I posted up here every few days or so and had comments from the start, I wanted to work on my own and then post when it was close to being done. It's something I wanted to do for myself. Anyway-Art!
I don't have any Post Process/Color Correction right now. All of that will be added later in the week. The waterfall in the shot at the end is also not as far along as the rest of the image but I'm putting it up here so it's fair game to be critiqued. So with that in mind, comment and critique away!
This is the first major project I've done since I worked on Uncharted: Golden Abyss. Which I'll also point out, you can view here: http://rose3d.com/golden_abyss.html Please take a look (and pick the game up, my friends at Sony would appreciate it. And I do too!)
And finally, I'll be at GDC and am going to try to make it to the meet-up. If I can't and you want to meet up just drop me a line here or PM me. I would love to meet some of you!
I'm fairly close to being finished and I figured now would be a great time to get the community's feedback. Unlike my last 3 projects which I posted up here every few days or so and had comments from the start, I wanted to work on my own and then post when it was close to being done. It's something I wanted to do for myself. Anyway-Art!
I don't have any Post Process/Color Correction right now. All of that will be added later in the week. The waterfall in the shot at the end is also not as far along as the rest of the image but I'm putting it up here so it's fair game to be critiqued. So with that in mind, comment and critique away!
This is the first major project I've done since I worked on Uncharted: Golden Abyss. Which I'll also point out, you can view here: http://rose3d.com/golden_abyss.html Please take a look (and pick the game up, my friends at Sony would appreciate it. And I do too!)
And finally, I'll be at GDC and am going to try to make it to the meet-up. If I can't and you want to meet up just drop me a line here or PM me. I would love to meet some of you!
Replies
With regards to your overall scene composition though, it is looking very uniform and low-contrast. If you blur your vision when looking at the initial screenshot, the first thing that pops out at you is the moon - instantly drawing attention to that area. Personally, I think this is detracting from your overall scene.
Rather than doing anything to the moon itself though, try making the rest of the scene match or at least compete with its values.
Lighting needs more contrast mainly. Is this in UDK?
You could try driving the shadows darker and brightening up the lights. In UDK this would be easily acheived by turning down bounce light contribution of objects after a lighting build (World Properties > Lightmass > Diffuse Boost) and increasing the Light Intensity of each PointLight.
On this subject, the Moon is quite intense, but doesn't seem to be casting much light on the scene (or if it is, the shadows aren't as sharp as you'd expect from such a light source). Hopefully the above step might bring its scene contribution out a bit more.
Lastly, maybe decreasing the near radius of the grey fog a bit will help to stop the shack and trees from just blending into the background with each other.
Perhaps changing its colour to a slight blue might help create some nice contrast and harmony with the orange/yellow foreground lamps too.
This is a brilliant looking piece by the way. It only needs some fiddling to really show off your hard work
This is in UDK. However, I'm not using Lightmass at all. This is 100% Real time lighting and shadows. So what this is going to mean for me is playing around with lights themselves more and looking at some color correction fixes for it. But I'll check Diffuse Boost because you made me curious.
I'm going to take your lighting notes to heart and try to have a few screenshots up tomorrow. Finishing up work on my water tonight (at the particles part...grrrrr)
As you can still take advantange of Lightmass calculation and have fully dynamic shadows by utilising the Cascaded Shadow Maps parameter in your DominantDirectionalLight
I've never really thought much about a fully real-time lighting scene, so this has me hooked!
Are you using a Skylight to give a sense of radiosity in the area then?
Can't wait to see more!
And yes I am using a Skylight
The nice thing about real time lighting is no need for light maps, and there is a setting in the World Properties in Unreal to tell the scene that it doesn't need to build Lightmass. The problem is performance is heavily based on how many shadows casting lights you have in a scene. It's probably engine dependent too, I bet CryEngine 3 handles it very well since that's how it was designed from the start.
Loving the foliage and overall composition.
Also, really dig the Uncharted project.
Looking forward for more.
Although you're right about it seeming a bit dark - the foreground elements still need to be more brought-out and separated from the background.
Perhaps you could increase the brightness and radial influence of the lamps to create patches of more high-value areas in the scene?
As it's night-time, light sources should seem super bright in comparison to the rest of the environment
moon seems pretty bright here so it would probably look cooler if moonlight created more defined spots of light and clearer shadows.
pathway was probably the most significant addition, not only it brings some color variety to the boring greens of grass, it also does a good job at leading eyes towards the hut. butterflys made cool details.
the only thing that stands out is the stream, it's way too bright at the moment.
also, hut's windows look kinda cardboard.
If anyone has any questions for me feel free to ask. I'll do a full Post Mortem in my blog later today describing more of what I did in detail. I think the only "truly unique" thing I did was light this in UDK 100% Dynamically. There are pluses and minuses with this approach. It saves Lightmass baking time because you don't need to do any at all (and you don't need to make separate UV's). The down side is that if you have more than two shadow casting lights in your line of sight, performance tanks. There are probably some workarounds and an engine like CryEngine 3 probably can handle it better. But, as this wasn't intended for a playable audience and I just wanted to make it pretty, I'm happy with how it turned out.
Final images below.