[CE3] Forgotten Fortress

Poloboo

Well,

After a good few months of lurking the forums i've finally decided to join all of you and post some of my work.



this project is a bit of a "make it up as i go" one so bear with me
the idea i have in my head is just a large environment with a forest surrounded by mountains ( ala Skyrim) and an old ruined fortress perched on a mountainside overlooking the whole thing..

Cliche'd i know

i've spent the last few days learning and trying to perfect my terrain creation skills and think i'm starting to get somewhere


so here are a few screens of what i've come up with so far (i'll explain after screens)







So..... i found a load of tutorials on youtube by a guy called Wenda111287 Dedicated to advanced terrain for cryengine. so i followed his tutorials to learn the ropes and then warped and changed things to my liking...

so here i have a 1024 x 1024 map using an 8192 x 8192 color map. i would have used a smaller res color map if this was for production but i'm going for detail and this is not going to be intended as an "interactive" environment as such....




so yea... CRIT ME PEOPLE... and thanks for being such a cool community!!


PS
i know Wenda111287 is on these forums somewhere i know but i just cant remember his forum name so if you know it please tell me so i can give him credit for being such a great teacher!

neverwander

That would be choco. I agree, his terrain tutorials are awesome. Can't really crit you, as I'm still making my way through college for this stuff. Only thing I can say is about the swirl effect your getting in the center of the map, if that's not intentional, you might want to smooth that out. Maybe do some vertex blending on it.

Good luck! Can't wait to see more!

Poloboo

That would be choco

thanks man


as for the "swirl" its part of the terrain "flow" texture and is slightly intentional but i may tweak it it will eventually be covered by vegetation and lots of other things so it will be barely noticable by then end of the project i hope....

Poloboo

Small update.

Progress on this project is going to be rather slow because of my lack of free time due to a demanding work life but i'm still going to update as often as i can.... even if its just really small updates.


anyway...

started playing around with some TOD ideas for atmosphere and colors etc

threw together the start of the roughest whitebox you've ever seen....

and finished tweaking the detail of my terrain colour map..at the moment the terrain has no detail layers. all the detail is stored in the color map

still making it all up as i go so things may change drastically on a whim.

reverendK

I'd like to see a shot of the ground textures from some sort of standing eye-level height. From the one closer shot i've seen it looks like it may be a little pixelated. Are you hoping to keep that underneath a lot of foliage?

Poloboo

the colormap for the terrain isn't actually that pixelated. its an 8192x8192 map..

the pixelation effect is probably because i overlaid a highly tiled grass texture over the top of the color map i exported from WorlMachine. mainly to create the "imperfect" color of grass. no patch of grassland is really the same color as another so i tried to create a subtle difference but in my first tests with foliage it wasnt apparent enough so i've had to crank it up a bit.

anyway less of my talking. here are the screens and an explanation


my colormap without any detail textures looks strange because of the overlay effect i created in the texture


when i apply detail textures it smooths the effect somewhat and reduce its "OOMPH" and will be reduced further once i cover it with grass,rocks and general debris


eventually it will barely be noticable

Poloboo

Update time.

While i'm ever so slowly chipping away at the "fortress" when i have time i started working on some vegetation.


This is my first EVER attempt at any vegetation modelling so i have a few things to learn and optimize etc but i'm happy with the result so far

Darkleopard

Really nice grass!

Im curious about cryengine, since i havnt used it yet. Did you have to place all that grass manually or was there a handy button that populated the ground for you :P

iniside

Darkleopard wrote: »

Really nice grass!

Im curious about cryengine, since i havnt used it yet. Did you have to place all that grass manually or was there a handy button that populated the ground for you :P

There are two ways. Procedural and manual. Procedural automatically place grass over selected detail texture. You select it inside vegetation editor for you desired object that have to spawned proceduraly. This can be used for grass, trees, rocks.. everything.
Second way to just paint it.

There are few things to remember:
1. If you are going to use massive amount of grass, over level it should be in BIG patches. More than 3m radius.
2. Always arrange grass patch into hexagon. Or you will have tiling issues.
3. Always collapse object before exporting.

respawnrt

^awesome, soon soon...:D

Poloboo

inside is right about large levels and grass

i currently have an 8m radius patch and a 4m for the large areas and will make a few smaller patches that will be used in places of particular detail....

the cryengine 3 SDK documentation on www.crydev.net is really useful on teaching you how to set up the vegetation and the budgets etc etc so i suggest anyone looks at that