edit: removed other shots because they were badly coloured as were done on a low end 22" monitor at school. This one is still too dark but will eave it as an example.
This environment can look so different depending on the monitor it's being viewed on. Maybe I'm going insane.
^^^^^^^^^
I'm not sure whether this is the correct stats but I THINK it's around 3 million all up? I used stat ENGINE command to get those results. I've instanced the s*#t out of everything, that was a main focus of this level, to create assets that can be used without noticable repetition.
I have GTX 580 SLI on i7 2700k @ 4ghz with 16gb RAM and it runs at around 80-100fps.
Does 3-4 million tris sound like a lot? I have no idea, seeing this is my first UDK level. I might be reading the stats incorrectly.
Cheers
Garth
EDIT: 1.2 million on screen at the moment. It's fine.
That's a wild machine you have there, Garth. And an environment's poly count is very, very relative. There are so many variables to consider, such as scale of scene, instanced vs unique assets, and texture maps take up so much more memory than poly counts (especially in UDK). If you're not experiencing slow down than you're fine. Even if you are, personal portfolio work is often meant to demonstrate skill sets. It's actual, functional games that you start being more intentional with assets and texture resolutions.
I've started making changes based on Chrisradsby's paintover. It's not finished I still need waterplants and more leaves and rock variations but this is all i had time for today. image below.
Also, I have a question. With painting foliage to the landscape, is there a limit on how many mesh layers you can have? I'm having an issue where the meshes I paint a lot of (ie small rocks and leaf clumps) don't bake any kind of decent shadows. In fact they are just black after a light build.
Is there anyway to convert them from the foliage painter and just have them as regualr placed meshes? Or do I have to delete them from the foliage painter and place them all individually? Thanks again.
For those following, I finished this level early and now have nothing left to do but some nice screenshots. I'll do a production bake and have some shots up real soon. It's looking nice and full and has max of 1.5 million tris on screen and runs at around 50-75 fps on a GTX 260 with i7 2700k with no overclock with FOV set at 100:) Shots soon.
So after my production build I am going to release some images over the next day or so. Let me know how they look on your screens. Going from home to school, it looks so different so be good to hear how it is on yours:)
First one is of a not so jungle-ey bit leading to the bridge. It's the plateau from the start section, to the end.
I think you did a great job on the foliage assets. It's also refreshing to see nice, sunny day-time lighting since you tend to see environments with super dramatic sunsets and whatnot.
My crit would be the water reflection. The environment has a nice green canopy but the water reflections seem to be a dull blue color.
Would definitely like to see the waterfall in motion!
^^^
Thanks man. Yeah the water has been an issue from the start. I never got time to make it like I wanted. Will work on it a bit after its all done. cheers.
Hey boss I gotta say, your scene has inspired me to tackle a jungle scene as well, which will be a very daunting task for me because I'm so hard-surface minded. I'm curious though, what water tutorial did you end up using because I will need one.
^^^
TBH it's not that hard to do once you get vegetation down. The hardest part is lighting and shadows. I'm sure you'll nail it. Let me know if ya get it up on polycount:) I got my water tute from about 3 different sources, that's probably why it's not great. Hourence has a good one, which I did once. Great results. Link below.
I have a couple shots I've been asked to contribute for advertising for my school and am wonderng which one of the following 2 you guys like better. Cheers.
Final images. will pimp them for my portfolio but this is good enough for the game that is now finished:) Thanks all for the crits. Gotta love this community!
Thanks everyone for commenting. Nice link dudealan2001. My biggest fear was how the colours lookon other monitors. I've got dell u2412m IPS monitors which display fantastic color and contrast accuracy compared to your average LCD. You almost need a cheap monitor aswell, to test your projects on. :P
The fly through will be a while, me and my fam are moving interstate tomorrow.
If anyone has a good fly through method sing out. I've been using the udk.exe shortcut target method with matinee to generate screen dumps which is good but the compression on after effects is killing it.
Cheers again
P.s if anyone has any question regarding foliage methods chuck it up. I was really aiming to have a lot more tech talk in this post bit was too tied down with the deadline to get it rolling:)
I'm not sure I follow what you mean by After Effects' compression screwing up the quality? My personal workflow has been to do matinee, download some sort of screen recording software (I use FRAPS) and record the raw footage. It'll be a tremendous file size but well worth it, since After Effect's export will be the only compression.
If you're talking about needing a hand with good codecs and compression within After Effects, I can set you up.
I'm not sure I follow what you mean by After Effects' compression screwing up the quality? My personal workflow has been to do matinee, download some sort of screen recording software (I use FRAPS) and record the raw footage. It'll be a tremendous file size but well worth it, since After Effect's export will be the only compression.
If you're talking about needing a hand with good codecs and compression within After Effects, I can set you up.
Ya sorry bud, but I haven't seen that tut. I'm just gonna go ahead and write up my own tut.
*It's worth mentioning that the specs of your PC determine the success of this method. The lower end of a PC may experience slowdown during the record or playback processes.
1. First download fraps, or any other screen capture software. I like fraps because it's simple and efficient. In the movies tab, I record at 30fps and "force lossless" quality. The FPS tab displays your frames per second, which might be good for testing purposes, but when you want to record for real, just check the "hide overlay" box to remove the FPS watermark.
2. After kismet is setup for a camera flythrough, press "play" and the video should loop. Just enable FRAPS right before the beginning of the second loop and stop it right after a complete playthrough. The output video should be a pretty large file size because it's raw, uncompressed footage, but that's what you want.
3. Import the file into After Effects and trim any excess in the timeline editor.
Thanks again sunkist, will give this a go once I get my pc unpacked:)
Will be starting a new portfolio piece in a couple weeks. its a zombie apocalypse scene on top of a building in NY, a campsite thats been abandoned. will definitely put it up!!
Cheers
Im impressed even more i know how hard is to set good foliage to UDK, can you tell me anything abaut your pipeline when creating folliage
This environment benefited mostly from instancing. I have 2K textures on most medium/large foliage assets but it still runs fine on most PC's. 120FPS+ on mine. It was made into an actual working game called ithaca, which is a 20 minute exploration/psychological experience, mainly as an art showcase though.
For the foliage, I just followed the 3dmotive tutorial a few times and adapted that knowledge to create palms, ferns, flowers etc. Simple as that to get started.
I got a little OCD with it and used the RTT (render to texture) tool in max for literally every single leaf, which I've noticed in many other games, isn't always necessary but for a portfolio piece, if you have the time then do it.
I also got a lot of knowledge from the default Cryengine and UDK assets that come with the engines. Exporting them as .obj's and having a look at how they were constructed.
I went out and studied and took photos of real vegetation for referencing and textures myself too. That proved to be much less time intensive than searching through tons of websites to find the right images and videos.
I found most vegetation textures on cgtextures etc have some degree of specularity which ruins the texture (it just looks white in UDK). And I wasn't interested in finding images that were 'kind of like' what I wanted. You can always remove the spec but at the cost of making the original images less natural.
Also, variety was a good decision. In the 3d motive tute, he uses 2 or 3 (can't remember exactly how many) variations of 1 leaf texture to make his canopies. I used 5 or 6 DIFFERENT textures and made individual high poly models for each of them which made the leaves look more varied and realistic. It did take an extra 2 hours to make a tree canopy but.....whatever, I had the time, it's a portfolio piece:P
The biggest factor was creating this thread. Even though 50% or more of the 140 odd posts were by me, it was extremely beneficial to have input from other artists. Taking feedback is essential for people like myself and many other polycounters, who are really just starting out and learning 3D.
So to sum it up, if anyone wants any advice on foliage
* do the 3d motive tute (I didn't use his material setup though, mine was much simpler to make the transmission more realistic)
* take your own reference and texture images with a good camera and make sure you get plenty of variety and make sure the images you use have as little specularity on them as possible, preferably none
*use as many resources as you can find (my canopies were trash until I found references from UDK, CE3 and asked other foliage artists way too many questions)
*have a look at real vegetation. (have a few beers and delve into how they are composed) :P
* CREATE A POLYCOUNT THREAD (really important) take feedback and make changes when needed.
This looks ace, when do we get to see a fly through?
I've just started working about a week ago as an env artist so am, as we all know, pretty busy. I haven't opened this jungle level for a month. When I get a spare day ill make sure I get this done. I need to work more on post processing and lighting first:)
Replies
This environment can look so different depending on the monitor it's being viewed on. Maybe I'm going insane.
I'm not sure whether this is the correct stats but I THINK it's around 3 million all up? I used stat ENGINE command to get those results. I've instanced the s*#t out of everything, that was a main focus of this level, to create assets that can be used without noticable repetition.
I have GTX 580 SLI on i7 2700k @ 4ghz with 16gb RAM and it runs at around 80-100fps.
Does 3-4 million tris sound like a lot? I have no idea, seeing this is my first UDK level. I might be reading the stats incorrectly.
Cheers
Garth
EDIT: 1.2 million on screen at the moment. It's fine.
hahah! I can't wait to do that in this level. I wanna see blood splatters on the leaves:)
TLDR: you're fine.
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Also, I have a question. With painting foliage to the landscape, is there a limit on how many mesh layers you can have? I'm having an issue where the meshes I paint a lot of (ie small rocks and leaf clumps) don't bake any kind of decent shadows. In fact they are just black after a light build.
Is there anyway to convert them from the foliage painter and just have them as regualr placed meshes? Or do I have to delete them from the foliage painter and place them all individually? Thanks again.
Forget that question. The meshes lost their 2nd uv channel for some reason. Made 2nd uv for light maps and its fine now:)
Keep going! *thumbs up*
thanks man. your help has been excellent.
garth
this is in my mind all the time now when I create trees. Been nailing it since this. Thanks man:)
First one is of a not so jungle-ey bit leading to the bridge. It's the plateau from the start section, to the end.
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My crit would be the water reflection. The environment has a nice green canopy but the water reflections seem to be a dull blue color.
Would definitely like to see the waterfall in motion!
Thanks man. Yeah the water has been an issue from the start. I never got time to make it like I wanted. Will work on it a bit after its all done. cheers.
TBH it's not that hard to do once you get vegetation down. The hardest part is lighting and shadows. I'm sure you'll nail it. Let me know if ya get it up on polycount:) I got my water tute from about 3 different sources, that's probably why it's not great. Hourence has a good one, which I did once. Great results. Link below.
http://www.hourences.com/ue3-water-outdoors/
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the colours in the last shot looks great on my monitor. The first one also. Let me know if thats not translating to yours.
1.
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2.
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Thanks again
Cool thanks guys.
Far Cry 4!!!!:) I wish.
P.s. Chris, really looking forward to FC3, seen just about all the footage released. It looks so damn nice. Good work:)
thankyou
Perhaps if you added flairs that put dust specs like on a camera lense, it would look even more real.
Check this out ^
btw Fantastic progress.
The fly through will be a while, me and my fam are moving interstate tomorrow.
If anyone has a good fly through method sing out. I've been using the udk.exe shortcut target method with matinee to generate screen dumps which is good but the compression on after effects is killing it.
Cheers again
P.s if anyone has any question regarding foliage methods chuck it up. I was really aiming to have a lot more tech talk in this post bit was too tied down with the deadline to get it rolling:)
Yea 2nd screenshot is definitely better!
If you're talking about needing a hand with good codecs and compression within After Effects, I can set you up.
This is the method I used
http://ubudave.weebly.com/udk-creating-a-video-sequence.html
I did everything he did, even the codec setup and it still looks blurry. I haven't tried recording it at 60fps though, maybe that'll help?
Cheers
*It's worth mentioning that the specs of your PC determine the success of this method. The lower end of a PC may experience slowdown during the record or playback processes.
1. First download fraps, or any other screen capture software. I like fraps because it's simple and efficient. In the movies tab, I record at 30fps and "force lossless" quality. The FPS tab displays your frames per second, which might be good for testing purposes, but when you want to record for real, just check the "hide overlay" box to remove the FPS watermark.
2. After kismet is setup for a camera flythrough, press "play" and the video should loop. Just enable FRAPS right before the beginning of the second loop and stop it right after a complete playthrough. The output video should be a pretty large file size because it's raw, uncompressed footage, but that's what you want.
3. Import the file into After Effects and trim any excess in the timeline editor.
4. When exporting, everybody has a process that works for them. These are the settings I personally use; a variation on the suggested vimeo suggestions.
If you have any questions, PM me and I can elaborate on anything.
Will be starting a new portfolio piece in a couple weeks. its a zombie apocalypse scene on top of a building in NY, a campsite thats been abandoned. will definitely put it up!!
Cheers
thanks mate.
The foliage is all hand made:)
This environment benefited mostly from instancing. I have 2K textures on most medium/large foliage assets but it still runs fine on most PC's. 120FPS+ on mine. It was made into an actual working game called ithaca, which is a 20 minute exploration/psychological experience, mainly as an art showcase though.
For the foliage, I just followed the 3dmotive tutorial a few times and adapted that knowledge to create palms, ferns, flowers etc. Simple as that to get started.
You can buy it from here
http://www.3dmotive.com/training/3ds-max/creating-foliage-for-udk/
I got a little OCD with it and used the RTT (render to texture) tool in max for literally every single leaf, which I've noticed in many other games, isn't always necessary but for a portfolio piece, if you have the time then do it.
I also got a lot of knowledge from the default Cryengine and UDK assets that come with the engines. Exporting them as .obj's and having a look at how they were constructed.
I went out and studied and took photos of real vegetation for referencing and textures myself too. That proved to be much less time intensive than searching through tons of websites to find the right images and videos.
I found most vegetation textures on cgtextures etc have some degree of specularity which ruins the texture (it just looks white in UDK). And I wasn't interested in finding images that were 'kind of like' what I wanted. You can always remove the spec but at the cost of making the original images less natural.
Also, variety was a good decision. In the 3d motive tute, he uses 2 or 3 (can't remember exactly how many) variations of 1 leaf texture to make his canopies. I used 5 or 6 DIFFERENT textures and made individual high poly models for each of them which made the leaves look more varied and realistic. It did take an extra 2 hours to make a tree canopy but.....whatever, I had the time, it's a portfolio piece:P
The biggest factor was creating this thread. Even though 50% or more of the 140 odd posts were by me, it was extremely beneficial to have input from other artists. Taking feedback is essential for people like myself and many other polycounters, who are really just starting out and learning 3D.
So to sum it up, if anyone wants any advice on foliage
* do the 3d motive tute (I didn't use his material setup though, mine was much simpler to make the transmission more realistic)
* take your own reference and texture images with a good camera and make sure you get plenty of variety and make sure the images you use have as little specularity on them as possible, preferably none
*use as many resources as you can find (my canopies were trash until I found references from UDK, CE3 and asked other foliage artists way too many questions)
*have a look at real vegetation. (have a few beers and delve into how they are composed) :P
* CREATE A POLYCOUNT THREAD (really important) take feedback and make changes when needed.
I hope this helps
Garth
I've just started working about a week ago as an env artist so am, as we all know, pretty busy. I haven't opened this jungle level for a month. When I get a spare day ill make sure I get this done. I need to work more on post processing and lighting first:)