Hi. So I've made my final touches to my terrain and terrain paint and am now moving on to a month or so of full blown vegetation production. It's gonna be a long month. I won't upload images until I have more parts of the level full of foliage. It looks bare with just terrain and rocks but it was a decent hurdle to get over. Now the fun part:)
This is pretty much the post processing colours and lighting I'm happy with for now. Let me know if you think it can be improved.
Also, this issue has been happening a fair bit. It comes and goes which makes me think it's something to do with lighting. See the shadows problems in the terrain? It is filling patches with just a flat shadow and no detailed shadows being cast by meshes. You see perfect shadowing then one or a few terrain patches get just a flat shadow. Any ideas how to stop this from happening?
Is that lighting error thingy at landscape component's edges? They seem to have a lot of errors, I guess it's because there is a separate lightmap for every component. Have you tried increasing the resolution?
Is that lighting error thingy at landscape component's edges? They seem to have a lot of errors, I guess it's because there is a separate lightmap for every component. Have you tried increasing the resolution?
It is happening on landscape components or patches, it's not the edges, it's the whole patch. It's not there with no lighting on. It's not there on 98% in lit mode. It's almost 100% visible on each component or patch in detailed lighting mode. I've put the light map res at 12 atm. The thing is, is that it was happening at the start of the level when I was working on it. Now, it's only happening at the last point of the level I am working on ( in lit mode) which is the only mode I care about.
actually, I had a look and it does seem to be around the edges of each patch adn bleeding into the centre. It's like a normals issue in max?????? How the damn can I fix this?
For anyone interested in the above issue with wierd shadowing on landscape components, I rotated my DDL and it went away totally.:) must of been a tech issue.
It feels like the water would be nicer with a reflective component as well, cube map or real-time. I also think you should go for a little bit of deeper green in this one. It's close to a river, it's a jungle, it should be lush and green.
See if you can get a waterfall-smoke particle in there as well it'll help you hide the alpha-clipping you get there. Good work so far!
It feels like the water would be nicer with a reflective component as well, cube map or real-time. I also think you should go for a little bit of deeper green in this one. It's close to a river, it's a jungle, it should be lush and green.
See if you can get a waterfall-smoke particle in there as well it'll help you hide the alpha-clipping you get there. Good work so far!
Hey.
'I also think you should go for a little bit of deeper green in this one. It's close to a river, it's a jungle, it should be lush and green.'
did you mean deeper greens overall? Like change all meshes?
'I also think you should go for a little bit of deeper green in this one. It's close to a river, it's a jungle, it should be lush and green.'
did you mean deeper greens overall? Like change all meshes?
I don't think you'd really have to go back and change any meshes or textures. Just use a post-process(I think you used it for AA?) and adjust the saturation and color values.
It looks good though. I agree about the greens and perhaps give the dominant light a little bit of color. It's washing out the scene, in my opinion.
I don't think you'd really have to go back and change any meshes or textures. Just use a post-process(I think you used it for AA?) and adjust the saturation and color values.
It looks good though. I agree about the greens and perhaps give the dominant light a little bit of color. It's washing out the scene, in my opinion.
Yeah I'll give it a go. It's hard to tell from this shot. The level is much bigger than this one little section. There's sparse rocky areas too that look odd with a green tinge.
Yeah I'll give it a go. It's hard to tell from this shot. The level is much bigger than this one little section. There's sparse rocky areas too that look odd with a green tinge.
What are your plans for this when you're done? Are you going to do flythroughs or static shots? If you're just doing static shots, you could probably get away with using Post-Process volumes where they're needed- you just have to be inside the volume for your view to be affected. If you plan on doing a flythrough, there might be some obvious changes when you move in/out of the volume.
What are your plans for this when you're done? Are you going to do flythroughs or static shots? If you're just doing static shots, you could probably get away with using Post-Process volumes where they're needed- you just have to be inside the volume for your view to be affected. If you plan on doing a flythrough, there might be some obvious changes when you move in/out of the volume.
The water looks like it's a bit of a desaturated teal color but this deep in the jungle, I'd make it brownish with a good amount of green. And a lot more opaque. Take a look at the attachment, I went to Costa Rica a couple years ago with some friends.
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Thanks again for the feedback mate. I'm gonna try create my water again. It's been the most criticised part of the level. Gonna use Hourences method again:) Your right, it looks shit:) Will use your photos as reference, they're perfect. Cheers.
Does your water have any kind of reflections (real or cubemap)? It seems like it's just flat color with specular highlights here and there, so having some kind of reflections and then of course fluid normalmap animation would make it look a lot better.
yeah it has reflections. No idea what type I just followed a simple tute. It's only there as a placeholder. I've not made water before this. I was gonna wait till the end and make it properly but I think I might do it now and have break from 3D.
spent a little on re-building foliage to fill it out more. Also on lighting and water colour. I'm still going to build the water again but not until after the 7th oas we have a dead line and more foliage needs to be implemented to fill it out first.
I've also gone for a more 'lush' green look with variations in the transmission colours to get a more natural look. what do you guys think?
Waterplants and more variations with rocks. A tip would be to create a cluster of smaller rocks in one model then aligning them along the river-sides, maybe have some stick out of the water as well. Basically you need to have more stuff happening, interesting visual detail but that doesn't end up as noise. (More leafy bushes will only make the scene more noisy).
quick paint-over to show what I mean. (I'm at work xD)
For the water you can always create and overlay a foam-mask, that will just be scrolling together with the rest of the river. It'll fake the foam. Then have a jungle-river pebble texture to blend in your rocks properly along the edges. As they should be more integrated with the terrain rather than just having a big rock standing in the middle of nowhere.
I also messed around a little bit with the Post-Processing , color-grading but I'm not sure what direction you want to take it so
Those are some fantastic ideas Chris. How would you go about making the small rocks you've placed on the right in the foreground? Use meshes or a landscape paint with normals? And I'm doing the dead leave/ground cover tonight. I want to cover the whole jungle floor with it. A mix of dead leaves and sticks and rocks. The leaves I'll do as a alpha plane and paint over the ground with the foliage brush. Do you think thats the way to go?
Do you have access to CryEngine SDK? If so, the default level has wonderful examples of what Chris is describing. They made clusters of rocks as indivdual meshes and arranged them in a way that they look like a cohesive border to the environment. It's entirely made of clipping but because of the values and tones, you can't tell without looking. And then the clipping is even more concealed with algae decals. Genius environment design, really. Attached are some illustrations of this.
The water has an material effect on it where all intersecting geometry has a foam border that is created around the geo. On a scene like yours I'm not sure the effect would be appropriate, though. Foam seems to be in raging water and standing algae seems to be in still swamps. But given that you're in a jungle with a steady, docile activity I'd argue it probably wouldn't have either build up. Maybe research what causes either effect and see if it applies though, cuz I don't know my waters.
I would add some blue-greens, yellow-greens, and some brown reds to ad veriation and interest. When I play games, I always wonder why they didn't use more color variation.
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right. I'll get on that asap. and some decals too, I have used CE3 SDK and know exactly what you are talking about. The water effect your speaking of.... you think I could do it as a particle effect? (the water hitting obstacles?) I have very little experience creating water.
Thanks again guys, excellent feedback.
The water effect your speaking of.... you think I could do it as a particle effect? (the water hitting obstacles?) I have very little experience creating water.
Thanks again guys, excellent feedback.
You mean the splashes when the water hits the rocks? Particles would probably be the best thing to use for that.
Is your water a flat plane or a highly tessellated mesh? It looks much better now, I would definitely want to see how it looks animated.
Those are some fantastic ideas Chris. How would you go about making the small rocks you've placed on the right in the foreground? Use meshes or a landscape paint with normals? And I'm doing the dead leave/ground cover tonight. I want to cover the whole jungle floor with it. A mix of dead leaves and sticks and rocks. The leaves I'll do as a alpha plane and paint over the ground with the foliage brush. Do you think thats the way to go?
Either I'd go for meshes for the rocks OR even better you'd go the DX11 route, make a tilable pebble texture and let the tesselation do its thing. Either way a texture really helps you blend the rocks if you keep the color tones sameish.
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right. I'll get on that asap. and some decals too, I have used CE3 SDK and know exactly what you are talking about. The water effect your speaking of.... you think I could do it as a particle effect? (the water hitting obstacles?) I have very little experience creating water.
Thanks again guys, excellent feedback.
You could probably go about it with Depth Biased Alpha
Some stuff about it here, if you can use it and then change the alphad information into a mask for your foam texture you'd could have foam around the rocks. I guess you could paint in the foam as well but it won't be as flexible and dynamic.
It's a challenge itself to make the foam move and look real as well though!
^^^^^^^^^^^^
well there's no better time to learn.
I don't think I'll go down the DX11 road for this project. I'd love to but it's not going to be implemented into what it's being made for. I think I'll make a mesh and sculpt it in zbrush. Just for that patch and a couple for use elsewhere. I've been exporting my landscape to .obj into max and modeling assets directly onto it. That way I can make my modular pieces fit better and get a more accurate scale perception. This can be easily done for these rocks.
Attached is an example of clipping. It's when meshes intersect each other unrealistically, just like the "hot spot" of every vin diagram. In most cases it's frowned upon for the obvious reason of breaking immersion, but the textures on the rocks in CE3 allow the clipping because it really is very difficult to see., even if you're looking for it.
I imagine there's countless examples of this in video games, especially when making organic environments, but none come to mind... which is kind of the goal.
Attached is an example of clipping. It's when meshes intersect each other unrealistically, just like the "hot spot" of every vin diagram. In most cases it's frowned upon for the obvious reason of breaking immersion, but the textures on the rocks in CE3 allow the clipping because it really is very difficult to see., even if you're looking for it.
I imagine there's countless examples of this in video games, especially when making organic environments, but none come to mind... which is kind of the goal.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Epic did something like that with their cliff rocks. I only noticed because of the UDK meshes, but their material is self-aware and tiles more depending on the size of the mesh, which makes it easier to use in different ways. I guess it all comes down to how well the texture tiles?
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not sure about the texture tiling automatically, my mind burns just thinking of how to make that work and whether it's even worth the time and if it would show too much repeating detail. I'd be more inclined to just make more custom meshes at different scales. I've learnt from this level that it's a good idea to import meshes into udk, scale them, export them and then start sculpting. Some rock detail looks whack when scaled out of original proportions, especially in the normal sculpt, which I'm not going to say definitely wouldn't tile, but I've no idea how it could be possible, seeing it's not a tileable map:)
The mountains tiling effect leleuxart is referencing is unnecessary for this application. There are some tuts floating around and I just saw an amazing example of it from a fellow here on polycount not more than a coming days ago. I'm positive that folks can point you in the right direction when you need it.
That said, here's a more thorough explanation of how to do this rocky bank effect. The rock-clustered meshes clip quite a bit but the effect is almost entirely unnoticeable because of how consistent the rock texture is. If they contained soft and noisy parts of the texture, this effect would be far more difficult to achieve. (Again, these are just screens pulled straight out of cryengine. Wonderful stuff if you can play around in it and dissect what you see.)
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not sure about the texture tiling automatically, my mind burns just thinking of how to make that work and whether it's even worth the time and if it would show too much repeating detail.
All you have to do is divide object radius (node) by a constant to control the amount of tiling and then multiply that with the texture coordinates.
Replies
heres a link in case you struggle to find it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP8WOTVBQaE&feature=player_detailpage#t=229s
legend
This is pretty much the post processing colours and lighting I'm happy with for now. Let me know if you think it can be improved.
It is happening on landscape components or patches, it's not the edges, it's the whole patch. It's not there with no lighting on. It's not there on 98% in lit mode. It's almost 100% visible on each component or patch in detailed lighting mode. I've put the light map res at 12 atm. The thing is, is that it was happening at the start of the level when I was working on it. Now, it's only happening at the last point of the level I am working on ( in lit mode) which is the only mode I care about.
See if you can get a waterfall-smoke particle in there as well
Hey.
'I also think you should go for a little bit of deeper green in this one. It's close to a river, it's a jungle, it should be lush and green.'
did you mean deeper greens overall? Like change all meshes?
I don't think you'd really have to go back and change any meshes or textures. Just use a post-process(I think you used it for AA?) and adjust the saturation and color values.
It looks good though. I agree about the greens and perhaps give the dominant light a little bit of color. It's washing out the scene, in my opinion.
Yeah I'll give it a go. It's hard to tell from this shot. The level is much bigger than this one little section. There's sparse rocky areas too that look odd with a green tinge.
What are your plans for this when you're done? Are you going to do flythroughs or static shots? If you're just doing static shots, you could probably get away with using Post-Process volumes where they're needed- you just have to be inside the volume for your view to be affected. If you plan on doing a flythrough, there might be some obvious changes when you move in/out of the volume.
Yeah I'm aiming for a fly through.
thanks man. absoultely good idea. I'm making my way through my asset list and 2 different flower species are included:)
Any suggestions? This is still very much a work in progress and doesn't represent the final product. thanks. Garth
Thanks again for the feedback mate. I'm gonna try create my water again. It's been the most criticised part of the level. Gonna use Hourences method again:) Your right, it looks shit:) Will use your photos as reference, they're perfect. Cheers.
I've also gone for a more 'lush' green look with variations in the transmission colours to get a more natural look. what do you guys think?
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thanks
thanks to this this thread, so many improvements were made:)
quick paint-over to show what I mean. (I'm at work xD)
For the water you can always create and overlay a foam-mask, that will just be scrolling together with the rest of the river. It'll fake the foam. Then have a jungle-river pebble texture to blend in your rocks properly along the edges. As they should be more integrated with the terrain rather than just having a big rock standing in the middle of nowhere.
I also messed around a little bit with the Post-Processing , color-grading but I'm not sure what direction you want to take it so
Oh well, great job so far. Keep going :thumbup:
The water has an material effect on it where all intersecting geometry has a foam border that is created around the geo. On a scene like yours I'm not sure the effect would be appropriate, though. Foam seems to be in raging water and standing algae seems to be in still swamps. But given that you're in a jungle with a steady, docile activity I'd argue it probably wouldn't have either build up. Maybe research what causes either effect and see if it applies though, cuz I don't know my waters.
Also some desaturated colors almost grey.
right. I'll get on that asap. and some decals too, I have used CE3 SDK and know exactly what you are talking about. The water effect your speaking of.... you think I could do it as a particle effect? (the water hitting obstacles?) I have very little experience creating water.
Thanks again guys, excellent feedback.
You mean the splashes when the water hits the rocks? Particles would probably be the best thing to use for that.
Is your water a flat plane or a highly tessellated mesh? It looks much better now, I would definitely want to see how it looks animated.
it's a flat plane. I'm going to make it custom shaped mesh though, to fit the different height levels better. Yeah I think particles would be easiest.
actually looks much better in-game. the whole thing does.
Either I'd go for meshes for the rocks OR even better you'd go the DX11 route, make a tilable pebble texture and let the tesselation do its thing. Either way a texture really helps you blend the rocks if you keep the color tones sameish.
You could probably go about it with Depth Biased Alpha
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=90797
Some stuff about it here, if you can use it and then change the alphad information into a mask for your foam texture you'd could have foam around the rocks. I guess you could paint in the foam as well but it won't be as flexible and dynamic.
It's a challenge itself to make the foam move and look real as well though!
well there's no better time to learn.
I don't think I'll go down the DX11 road for this project. I'd love to but it's not going to be implemented into what it's being made for. I think I'll make a mesh and sculpt it in zbrush. Just for that patch and a couple for use elsewhere. I've been exporting my landscape to .obj into max and modeling assets directly onto it. That way I can make my modular pieces fit better and get a more accurate scale perception. This can be easily done for these rocks.
what do you mean by 'clipping'?
Cheers
Garth
I imagine there's countless examples of this in video games, especially when making organic environments, but none come to mind... which is kind of the goal.
so it's multiple individual meshes combined as one and exported?
It's when multiple (separate) models intersect each other creating seams you can easily see.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Epic did something like that with their cliff rocks. I only noticed because of the UDK meshes, but their material is self-aware and tiles more depending on the size of the mesh, which makes it easier to use in different ways. I guess it all comes down to how well the texture tiles?
not sure about the texture tiling automatically, my mind burns just thinking of how to make that work and whether it's even worth the time and if it would show too much repeating detail. I'd be more inclined to just make more custom meshes at different scales. I've learnt from this level that it's a good idea to import meshes into udk, scale them, export them and then start sculpting. Some rock detail looks whack when scaled out of original proportions, especially in the normal sculpt, which I'm not going to say definitely wouldn't tile, but I've no idea how it could be possible, seeing it's not a tileable map:)
That said, here's a more thorough explanation of how to do this rocky bank effect. The rock-clustered meshes clip quite a bit but the effect is almost entirely unnoticeable because of how consistent the rock texture is. If they contained soft and noisy parts of the texture, this effect would be far more difficult to achieve. (Again, these are just screens pulled straight out of cryengine. Wonderful stuff if you can play around in it and dissect what you see.)
that's rad. definitely going to be doing that. Will have a look in CE3 and get some reference.
thanks again
Garth
All you have to do is divide object radius (node) by a constant to control the amount of tiling and then multiply that with the texture coordinates.
there ya go! nice one.
Cheers