[UDK] Moated Grange Environment
polycounter lvl 12
Final Shots:
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This has been a type of environment I have wanted to do for a while now and finally have time to do so. It's somewhat based on a painting, I say that because I have decided to take it in a different direction in many ways.
I've haven't wanted to post this before as I was slightly nervous and I felt it wasn't at a place where I should. Most of it is still in an early blockout stage and I've been really trying to lock down lighting and such.
I would really appreciate critique, suggestions, advice or anything of the sort.
Here are a few of the shots:
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This has been a type of environment I have wanted to do for a while now and finally have time to do so. It's somewhat based on a painting, I say that because I have decided to take it in a different direction in many ways.
I've haven't wanted to post this before as I was slightly nervous and I felt it wasn't at a place where I should. Most of it is still in an early blockout stage and I've been really trying to lock down lighting and such.
I would really appreciate critique, suggestions, advice or anything of the sort.
Here are a few of the shots:
Replies
I dig water and foliage and will wait to crit the rest!
one thing that stands out is the edges along the stairs and the roof of the house, there's some real un-eveness to the surface that feels weird to me.
I would tone down the godrays a tad, and maybe add a little fog to the atmosphere, barely noticeable but it should add some depth, right now its like the foggy god rays showing something in the air but everywhere else is super crisp.
@Haiddasalami - I'm not exactly sure what your talking about but I believe that would be the lens flare.
@PixelMasher - Thanks a lot. Will definitely work on those things.
Things i did notice though was the blue light (i dunno what its from, lens flare?) thats in your first 2 shots, not sure if those are needed, more so in the first than the second.
Secondly was my eye keeps getting drawn to the tree by the house, I think its cause its more bare than the other trees in the scene, any particular reason for this? I think it makes it look outta place so adding more leaves to it would make it fit together better imo. I think adding more leaves everywhere especially to the water would help out alot too.
Cant wait to see the house and the stairs completed too! Definitely following this!
Its the bluish light but nvm I saw it on my LCD monitor and it's just a light. Thought I saw bokeh effects
I know you want to achieve an oil painting kind of look, but I say you already achived that with the colors. I think if you did some contrast corection, added som depth of field, probably some fog out in the distance you would really hit the nail with a gigaton hammer!
The only thing that really bugs me is the sparse foreground tree. The leaf clumps don't look too natural, maybe just strip that tree bare.
I look forward to seeing updates
-Phil
What I have begun doing:
Texturing the house
Toning down the Bloom and Lens Flare
Made some new trees (which from the screenshot I doubt there will be any noticeable difference but the old ones still had very recognizable planes up close)
Made slight adjustments to the colour
Things which still need to be worked on:
Finish up texturing
Add more history and story to the house (along with doors, windows and other essentials)
Fix the main tree
Work on any feedback I get from the wonderful crew here
I'm still working on some of the previous suggestions and haven't made any major changes to the scene. Once I get most of the texturing done I think I'll start playing around with colour, contrast and lighting more but I may start sooner since I'm getting far too hung up on details at the moment.
Feedback, critique and suggestions are both needed and welcome. Thanks!
But that's literately my only suggestion. Looks excellent.
i wonder what it would look like if you went with a more kinkade look. purply blue shadows.
@00Zero - I'm going to begin playing with the LUT as soon as I figure it out and will try that out, Thanks.
It seems peaceful, like the water should be more still (like a mirror) with exception to some pockets of undercurrent.
Beautiful piece.
@Swizzle - I'll be able to take a couple bigger screenshots today and will try to find somewhere to post them as my flickr account doesn't like anything bigger.
@Vrav - thanks
That's a really beautiful scene
Try out photobucket for the pictures, they've been pretty okay with larger resolution and file sizes.
On the second one though, buttom of the pic, where the land meets the river, is that grass? Or just something with the water? And the reflection (the yellowish areas) of the water seems to abruptly cut off nearing the middle of the river. Is that just because of the angle or anything?
Awesome work. I'm working with udk too at the moment, i hope to attain something near this quality in the end
great job !
congratulations
Topic name says UDK, Unreal Development Kit.
@Bishop - The reflection cuts off because of the shadows from the trees - It's a specular reflection right now. I've fixed some of the random grass placement now and will try turning down the spec so it's not so abrupt.
@BeatKitano - Bloom
@Mistry10 - Thanks a lot
@Phones - Thanks man. I'm still working on the reflection as I'm not entirely happy with it and will try to work on what you pointed out.
@P442 - UDK.
@Xendance - will do
@an aggressive napkin - I'll post down here the process I've gone through for this scene. Honestly, I wouldn't be able to do the process justice as it's been a huge learning experience for me. I think the biggest help/source of inspiration has come from Adam's brilliant Evil Genius thread which I would recommend going through multiple times and just looking at different threads from other people (eg. Jason's Demon Throne)
Honestly, It's been a constant process of updating, feeling great about it and thinking I'm pretty much the best thing since sliced bread, then looking to see how I could compare my stage with the stage I thought Adam would have been at, getting very depressed, then inspired, then rinsing and repeating over and over again
Biggest thing I've learned though is to just blockout something (Maybe and hour or two, really quick), doesn't matter what as long as its some indication, throwing it in to UDK, lighting it, and then move on from there. I also tried working on the environment first before even thinking about the house in attempt to not get bogged down by detail (which in the end I did, just with environmental stuff
I also took some screens of various stages of my progess. Here's a link to a more detailed step process.
[IMG][/img]
Hope this helps some and best of luck!
I'm sort of struggling balancing schedules between this and school but I think I'm close to being finished and figuring out how to do a video of it since I do have some things animated.
At the moment I'm trying to flush out the environment more so that when you actually walk around it there is more than just one random cottage. I've also tried fixing some of the issues pointed out and hope I'm getting closer.
Thank you everyone for your encouragement and feedback. As always, critique is very much appreciated.
@BlvdNights - Thanks a lot. I'm a big fan of your work. As said above, I agree with the comments on the terrain and will work on it tonight.
-How are you keeping the colors so consistent and how did you got about finding the right postpro LUT? I find this extremely difficult, there's just so many thing affecting each other, hard to get them consistent.
-Mind showing your rocks, something like wires or how you went and created them? I' ve had a hard time a while ago creating decent rocks.
-The gras is really nice, how do you get those geometry planes laying flat on the ground?
- The consistency in colour has been a constant battle. UDK's lightmass has some great features in it which can also be a pain to handle if you are lighting while building the level, at least, that's my experience. In order to try and get the colours of all the different materials in some sort of harmonious range what I ended up doing was, when I brought the textures in I made all my adjustments solely through the shader (desaturation, brightness, tint, etc). I set up a Master Shader which allowed me to easily make changes to any one material. Obviously, this can be really expensive and I'm not sure I'd do this again. Once I had most of my assets in though, I started stripping the shaders down and making all the changes I had made in the shader in the actual texture itself to save on instructions. Again, I'm not sure if this is the best way to do it but looking through Epic's stuff, all the shaders are very versatile and allow for pretty much any type of change in the texture. Don't know if that's what you were asking but good for me to write it down.
- I tried a pretty standard workflow for the rocks. I made a very simple mesh in Maya, almost a box, brought it into zBrush and sculpted it. Throughout this project I've been trying to polypaint more and more as it helps me get the meshes into my scene quicker since you go through the whole process at once. I'm still struggling with finding a way to approximate colour in zBrush as it's either over saturated or grey, probably need a better Material.
I then build a low poly, bake out the maps, do a quick texture pass in Photoshop (either colour adjustments or on or two photos thrown on top with a very low opacity) and then bring it into UDK. I also got a basic tiling rock texture and generated normals though CB and brought that into UDK as a detail Normal map to add a bit extra.
In the end, I'm not terribly happy with my sculpt as I think it's too noisy, same problem with the texture, but I'm leaning slowly
One more thing I learnt, which I'm a bit hesitant to admit
Sculpt:
PolyPaint:
UDK (500 tris):
- Finally, for the grass, in the Terrain material under the Foliage Mesh Tab there is a setting which is called Slope Rotation Blend - put that up to 1 and the grass mesh will conform to the hill.
Hope this helps.
I guess doing texture color changes through the shader first is easier than doing it in Photoshop every time. Still the hardest part for me is getting the postpro colors right, the new LUT system is so versatile that I can barely handle it.
And cool to see I was on the right track with the rocks, I did pretty much the same approach on my second try.
For the grass I thought you'd be using the slope rotation blend, but it it still tends to clip the grass into the groudn or have it float when the slope is too bumpy.
As for my env, yeah, well it took a lot longer than I expected, I sorta went past my self imposed deadline. And I still have tons of work to do for a paid job, not as fun however. I'll probably get back to it, it'd be a shame to drop it now that I got this far.