Medieval Village - UDK

barbeaulex

Hey guys! Long time lurker, first time poster here. This environment was heavily inspired by games like Medieval : Total War, Epic Citadel/Infinity Blade and Mount & Blade (which rocks). It was more of a reason to try my hand at making foliage from scratch. Anyway, it's almost finished, but C&C is always welcome !

Daves

The Trees face in the exact same direction (screen3+1)
I think the biggest improvement would be to fill the textures with more detail. It looks a bit washed out.
The landscape is realy flat with no variation, maybe a bridge or a little canyon helps.
The tree looks good from the distance but is too lowpoly in screen 1.
Don´t be afraid to use a few more polys.


Overall its a good start, but needs to be filled with more detail and variation.

barbeaulex

Thanks for commenting Daves! Indeed, I only have one low poly tree. I'll make one or two different models and add some tesselation in the trunk (I assume the low poly comment is about the trunk, right?). And since this was my first shot at the landscape, I didn't try anything too risky, but I really like the river/bridge idea! I'll be giving that a shot

wirrexx

try to just rotate the trees barbeaulex. And scale some up and some down

Arctemple

Not sure if you are still working on it or not, but seems to me that the front building in the top pic is unfinished. It has the wood frame support, roof with windows (indicating another floor), but is missing its middle level walls.

Once again, not sure if that is just a WIP thing, just stating it :P
Looks great otherwise.

locater16

wirrexx wrote: »

try to just rotate the trees barbeaulex. And scale some up and some down

Second.

Also a tiny random offset on the orientation for each can help as well.

Fwap

looks amaziballs! a bit of Oblivion tier bloom going on in the second pic though

Jessica Dinh

This is beautiful!! :] I think it would be nice if the flowers were more abundant though, and if you put some smaller rocks and pebbles along/on the pathway in the village. Just to break up some of the empty spaces a bit more, and it would look a bit more natural and not so 'clean'.

barbeaulex

Thanks for all the awesome comments! I'm keeping all of your comments in mind and I am still working on this. I added some terrain variation and added a river (with a water shader that doesn't suck (well not too much...)), randomized the trees with rotation AND scale and tesselated the trunk a little bit. And that building in the first pic is actually some sort of guard tower/village entrance; but I can see how that is misleading with the windows and all. So, I'll scrap that building and make an actual tower. Then I'll add a bridge over the river. I don't know if I'll have time to work on this soon though with work and moving out/in, but be sure to check every so often ! Thanks again !

Zakafein

It's beautiful! Can I see ur lighting/post process settings? my shadows are too dark.

barbeaulex

Thanks Zakafein ! I don't have my project with me right now, but I can tell you really quickly how I achieved this plus a few links that you might have seen already. I'll try to get some screens up tonight.

FOG :
I have a really dark blue sky color and 3 fog actors that brighten up the sky using height fogs and an exponential height fog. This may sound strange, but the fog is actually a really important part of my lighting. Play around with the settings (especially light brightness and light color).
HeightFog

LIGHTS:
I have one dominant directionnal light with the intensity set really high (between 5 and 7). Dominant class lights use dynamic shadows when you're near and distance field shadow maps when you're far. You can set the distance in the light settings.
DistacneFieldShadows
ShadowingReference

WORLD SETTINGS / POST PROCESS CHAIN:
I really cranked up the bloom everywhere ; World Properties and UberPostProcess and I put an orange-ish hue in it. Added some DoF, anti aliasing and Ambient Occlusion.

TONEMAPPER:
I used the default color grading lookup table un UDK (that you can download in the link below) and place it in your world settings in the color lookup slot.
ColorGrading *There is a brief tutorial on how to create your own lookup table on this page*

I think that by adding some fog and playing around with the settings that you should be able to brighten up your shadows. If all else fails, set your 'Light Shadow Mode' to 'LightShadow_Modulate' and tweak the color afterwards !
ModulatedShadows

Hope this helps !

barbeaulex

Hey guys, sorry for the 2 week downtime... I was moving and didn't have any internet, but all that's almost behind me. Got my workstation up and running and connected. Here's where I'm at. I'm just about to call it done :

DanRoss

Really good but it just seems a tad bit too bright you know?

Daves

hey i think this is getting better and looks really good but there is still room for improvement.

What i would change or implement:
-more rocks in the landscape, maybe height levels with "rockwalls"
-height differences in the village(Buildings)
-more flowers with a higher contrast(maybe red)
-less brightness
-a second tree model
-mill at the river
-a better or additional texture at the middle of the village on the ground. larger stones within the floor,like this from skyrim :
hope it helps!
best regards

Package

I like what you have done... Id say keep the front building i like how it looks but one thing that could really bring it to life is muck things up a bit and give it a lived in feel. More contrast will help as well. Most of the tones are very even..

Cibo

The Roofs are to bright, you need more differenc ebetween roof and wall.