Wild West Test level

renren22

Hi Guys,

I am a freelance games artist (offsite only at the moment but available!).

I was inspired by Choco/Wenda's landscape tutorial on polycount/crynet and started to create a barren landscape while getting to grips with Cryengine 3.

Halfway I decided to turn it into more of a deserted Wild West.This would make the level more original compared to the heavily forested Cryengine levels.And also the architecture is very simple to build/texture.I'm also a big Red Dead Redemption fan!

A lot more could be put into the level (more buildings,wagons,lamps,wells etc) but
time was against me and this was meant to be a small test level to learn the basics of level building in Cryengine.

I am happy to answer any questions you may have (if any!).

A short HD video is here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDttPpkkM7M&feature=youtu.be
High resolution pics here - http://www.flickr.com/photos/3dcraig/
My site has more pics and information on the levels construction here - http://www.3dcraig.com

renren22

One more pic!

JonMurphy

Liking it, Craig. One thought niggling at me is the terrain might be a little peaky

glottis8

You need dust being carried all over the place. You have all of the plants swaying around without any hints of dirt getting dragged around. There is that, and for some reason your plants just look floaty. I know its mainly because they don't cast shadows. So they just look overlayed. Anything you can do about that?I think that the plants movements don't need to be so severe, unless you are going for a really big gust of wind. Little movements goes a long way for ambiance.

Love the lighting tho. Maybe on the hills, the rolling depth of field can have some tint to it. To match to that western feel of dread that your scene has. It's looking pretty awesome tho!

Love the music choice. Ennio is the man.

renren22

Glottis8 - I did have some particle dust blowing across the plains but it really killed the frame rate.Same goes for the shadows for the vegetation.Only the larger bushes have shadows.My rig is three years old.Time to upgrade!

ivanzu

Then you did something wrong while setting them up as particles shouldn't kill the frame rate even on 5 year old PC.

SimonT

i think that looks really cool!

renren22

ivanzu - Just a beginner with Cryengine.If you got any tips please share!

ivanzu

What number of particles are you using?

renren22

Basically I have around twenty 50x20 meter dust particles/clouds.Their in large clumps scattered around the landscape.Kind of a low level/thin dust storm slowly moving across the land surrounding the town (but not entering it).I slightly modified a default dust particle found in cryengine called - wind-quarry_dust-large_dust.All the stats are in the
particle database.

PeterK

What a fantastic display. Great modeling, textures, the works. Awesome job man, can't wait for future works.

renren22

Cheers for the nice words Peter.Hope to work with you soon and the Exis guys.
Can't wait for Majestic 12!

Darkleopard

Really awesome. I am aiming to create some similar world machine landscapes for a school final project soon. Do you have any tips? Did you colourise your landscape in world machine or outside it?

renren22

Hi Darkleopard,

Firstly, I'd recommend watching Choco/Wenda's great tutorial(s) on creating landscapes for Cryengine.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=88933&highlight=choco

Once you've decided what landscape your going to build get plenty of references off
the net.I chose the Tabernas area in Spain and got lots of useful pics.Flickr was
also a great place for references.This also helped getting the vegetation/rocks right and what to aim for when doing the final postprocessing.References also came in handy
when creating the skybox (the distant mountains/sky/clouds etc).

WorldMachine helps generate textures/masks for you to modify in Photoshop to get the
final look you want.Once in Cryengine you use the terrain tools to reduce the level (in my case) and use the smoothing tools to get rid of noisy data from the heightmap.

You will probably need to tweak the colour map in PS to get the right look once you've viewed it first person in Cryengine.

There's more info on my site aswell.Hope that helps!

gsokol

Looks pretty good..sorta thought they were red dead redemption shots at first glance.

Your distance mountains are offputting to me. They seem very peakish..they don't strike me as the type of rock formations you would see in arizona, nevada, etc... while I could be wrong and there may be areas like this, I imagine rock formations looking more like this:



Also, your lighting looks fine, but maybe you can try getting a subtle warm tone to give a rustic/vintage ambience. Also..you could adjust the color of the shadows to have some blue in them to compliment the orange light.

I really dig the incline in the town...always nice to see some elevation vs a flat ground.

Awesome stuff, keep it up.

renren22

Hi gsokol,

The mountains are accurate (to a degree) as they are derived from Satelite height map data from Tabernas, Spain (where the famous Spaghetti westerns were filmed).Their more heightmap friendly and eliminated need to build geo.

The map resolution is quite low at 2048 for 2 Kilometres square so its never going to be perfect and not high enough to represent the full spectrum of the heightmap I settled on.But the exercise was to learn and you have to finish a level to learn from it.

Thanks for the Red Dead compliment