Home 3D Art Showcase & Critiques

[UE4] Mountain house (seeking critics, opinions, overpaints, tips&tricks and more..)

polycounter lvl 6
Offline / Send Message
jedenjenda23 polycounter lvl 6
Hello people and welcome to my first post on Polycount :D
I have started making scene in UE. To be honest I don't know when I will be able to complete this project, but I will COMPLETE it and I will be trying to work and post as often as possible.

WHAT I WANT TO ACHIEVE:

a) CONFIDENCE BOOST
- Remaking one of my old paintings into 3D  and comleting scene only with custom made resources #egostroking
- Having at least one work for portfolio (as I want to become game environment artist).
- If this scene will not be good enough for portfolio, at least complete one scene and learn as much as I possibly can :D.
- Being more visible on the Internet (more views = more feedback = knowing what sucks = getting better at what sucks = better skill = more views, repeat :D)

b) SKILLS
- Learn how to create natural looking scenery.
- Learn how to create custom folliage assets from scratch (photos only as references)
- Get comfortable creating larger amount of assets than I am used to.
- Get comfortable with making procedural textures in Substance Designer.
- Practice sculpting, modeling, UV mapping, texturing, manual retopology, lighting, scene composing, planning and FOLLOWING REFERENCE
(simply I want to get better)

c) FEEDBACK
- I want to get as much objective feedback as possible to ramp up my skills before I leave school (still have 1 and half of year). 

LATEST SCREEN:

Replies

  • jedenjenda23
    Offline / Send Message
    jedenjenda23 polycounter lvl 6
    - Starting replacing blockout assets (cubes), modelled first rock, creating materials and textures before creating other assets.
    So the first problem is that I don't know wheter I should start creating lighting. Also I am not entirely sure how to make it interesting. 
  • FreneticPonies
    Offline / Send Message
    FreneticPonies polycounter lvl 3
    Nice start! Keep going
  • jedenjenda23
    Offline / Send Message
    jedenjenda23 polycounter lvl 6
    - some work on main building, new wood texture, new wall texture, FOLIAGE and new lighting, also created new foliage shader
    It took some time but I finally found good lighting so it will stay this for a while. Today I created grass and some flowers. It was actualy my first atempt for foliage ever and I am very happy with result. It was modeled, baked and then painted in PS. I am still keeping my rule of not using photo resources in textures.

    High priority goals
    - Main building needs to be finished - remaining door and window(s)
    - Need to replace whitebox assets with mill
    - Create some sort of light source prop

    Ok thats a lot work already done, but there is ton of more...I'm starting to have good feeling about this! :D Have a nice day!

  • macoll
    Offline / Send Message
    macoll polycounter lvl 13
    Looks really good, i love your lighting so much... can't wait for the finished state, gratz ^^
  • Ashervisalis
    Offline / Send Message
    Ashervisalis grand marshal polycounter
    Nice mood, I want to be in that house drinking hot cocoa.
  • PixelMasher
    Offline / Send Message
    PixelMasher veteran polycounter
    this is looking great, has the potential to be amazing! your workflow is very similar to pretty much how we built the worlds on the farcry series.

    right now there are a lot of super contrasty blacks in the lighting you only really get those in harsh mid day sun type scenarios, I would boost the ambient to be a bit brighter to fill in the gaps and show the forms a bit more. I would always aim for a bit brighter than you think it should be, and then dial some of the fine tuned contrast back in with post process/color correction. you will have more to play with that way in terms of what you show.
  • FreneticPonies
    Offline / Send Message
    FreneticPonies polycounter lvl 3
    Lighting feels like it has potential, I like the contrasty look! But what time of day is it supposed to be? The sky is blue but the point light intensity (assumedly a lantern later) makes it look like twilight. Would say you've got to define it better for it to sit right.
  • jedenjenda23
    Offline / Send Message
    jedenjenda23 polycounter lvl 6
    @PixelMasher @FreneticPonies
    Thank you guys for your comments! ;)  I made the lighting little bit brighter and then adjusted contrast. Also tweaked the colors to  better fit the foggy midnight. Please let me know what you think now.
    -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    - main building is complete - (everything I need is to add emissive input for shader to better emulate light in windows)
    - created few dressing props
    - started working on mill - planning to create few props only for the interior (wheat bags etc.)
    - blocked bridge and field area - this will be priority for a while as mill requires only details to finish
    - blocked small area above house - place for rest
    - moved central light to bridge - not sure with it, so I would like to know your opinions..!! :D 

    What is planned as next:
    - Create bridge
    - Create some meshes for field
    - I need to look into blueprints and create spline mesh for a stream
    - Create bark texture for upcoming trees

    Enjoy your day and thanks for your time!!! :D

  • FreneticPonies
    Offline / Send Message
    FreneticPonies polycounter lvl 3
    Wow, starting to look great. Love the grass!
  • jedenjenda23
    Offline / Send Message
    jedenjenda23 polycounter lvl 6
    Quick update! I am preparing textures for pine trees, yayyy!  

  • jedenjenda23
    Offline / Send Message
    jedenjenda23 polycounter lvl 6
    - did some trees, small rocks to place around
    - remade mill to make it more consistent with main building
    - details like field and breaking ground a bit


  • Rnz
    Offline / Send Message
    Rnz polycounter lvl 8
    nice composition!
  • shabba
    Offline / Send Message
    shabba polycounter lvl 15
    The last image being from a distance looks good, but when you get up close on the individual portions I think there are alot of things you can improve upon.
    - For the pine bark, i'd recommend leaving out the moss, doing a regular pine bark tileable, and then vert painting a blend for moss to the bottom of your trees so you can have more variation, and so your trunks dont have moss all the way up. 
    - foliage in general i think you really need to revisit, especially the conifers. It almost looks like you just have two large cards intersecting through the middle old skool style. For everything you do with foliage, you always want to cut your cluster texture up and use those raw geo to make volume and branches that look good from all angles, if you rotate around a cluster/branch, and you see your entire card vanish at a particular glancing angle, thats bad. Same /w your grass/plants, they are all just solid planes, they are being lit evenly across them, and they stand out like sore thumbs as old skool foliage, cut them up, change the angles, think of the way they are built in nature and the way light will hit their surfaces. 
    - probably just me, but the water wheel/hut combo on the left feels a wee bit small, that door is the entire structure.
    - the split rail fence needs some love, its silhouette is fairly boring, it has really no visible normal map, and just looks very low rez in terms of geo and texture. The big fat rope also feels a bit out of place given the other building materials used on other things. Likely a large iron spike/nail would hav ebeen used? Maybe not as visually obvious, but also not as strange

    Good work so far, keep going!
  • jedenjenda23
    Offline / Send Message
    jedenjenda23 polycounter lvl 6
    shabba said:
    The last image being from a distance looks good, but when you get up close on the individual portions I think there are alot of things you can improve upon.
    - For the pine bark, i'd recommend leaving out the moss, doing a regular pine bark tileable, and then vert painting a blend for moss to the bottom of your trees so you can have more variation, and so your trunks dont have moss all the way up. 
    - foliage in general i think you really need to revisit, especially the conifers. It almost looks like you just have two large cards intersecting through the middle old skool style. For everything you do with foliage, you always want to cut your cluster texture up and use those raw geo to make volume and branches that look good from all angles, if you rotate around a cluster/branch, and you see your entire card vanish at a particular glancing angle, thats bad. Same /w your grass/plants, they are all just solid planes, they are being lit evenly across them, and they stand out like sore thumbs as old skool foliage, cut them up, change the angles, think of the way they are built in nature and the way light will hit their surfaces. 
    - probably just me, but the water wheel/hut combo on the left feels a wee bit small, that door is the entire structure.
    - the split rail fence needs some love, its silhouette is fairly boring, it has really no visible normal map, and just looks very low rez in terms of geo and texture. The big fat rope also feels a bit out of place given the other building materials used on other things. Likely a large iron spike/nail would hav ebeen used? Maybe not as visually obvious, but also not as strange

    Good work so far, keep going!
    I am sorry for the late response, but there was a lot of things to do. I took your advice and remade tree from scratch. It still looks odd so I will take another try later. Please if you know some good sources about creating trees feel free to post some links :). I also got rid of the old fence and created small kit with wooden beams. There are some small changes to grass as well. Thanks for your time and have a nice day!
Sign In or Register to comment.