Thanks man, your words gave me some confidence. Very appreciated !
I'm gonna take everyone's advice and aim for a full time job as a junior artist, but I'll still go all the way with this test and get it done once and for all. I think its going to be a good add to the portfolio. Im going to give myself some artistic freedom since in the end I'm not going to apply for the internship.
Your environments you've done so far (the udk meadow with stone spires and the moody cryengine one) are good enough for a portfolio. Add some props and you're done
@urgaffel : thanks man, and yea some of the previous works I did could definitely be used as portfolio material. I guess that adding one or two focal points to those environments might help with the finishing touch.
I did another version of the roof texture today.
I'm planning to use some decals to break up the silhouette of the roof.
Needless to say that the other textures (woodframe etc...) will need to be adjusted in order to have overall consistency.
Why not model those extra parts (essentially just one or two more polygons per edge (idk about your budget though)). It feels like using decals for those big edges at the end of the house might look a bit cheap.
@e-freak : I'm about to try out multiple approaches and see what works best. Maybe using a combination of both techniques will do the trick :thumbup:
Currently testing out some vertex blending for the base wall :
Will add vegetation and slightly tweak the vertex normals to improve the blending later on.
I might also consider adding some geometry to the base wall to break-up the silhouette (bricks).
This looks great so far, but as people say the moss is very saturated and lumpy looking. Almost as if it was generated from a photoshop cloud filter run through CrazyBump.
Thanks for the awesome feedback guys, you made a really good point regarding the overall saturation of the moss. I shall tone it down and spend more time on it. I'm experimenting with different approaches atm to see what works best for the base wall.
The wierd look of the moss is also probably due to the fact that I'm using 2 essentially different shaders on the house which use different lighting sources (cgfx and maya blin materials).
The cgfx shader handles lighting differently compared to the native maya shaders which kind made the moss look very lumpy. Doesn't excuse the fact that the color was way too saturated tho.
Keep in mind that the mossy area is supposed to be covered by some vegetation allowing me to balance the colors by adding some yellow, red and purple to break up the monotony.
I might spend some time doing some paint overs to see which color scheme works best with the house.
Any suggestions regarding that would be highly appreciated.
Nice work so far Choco!
My advice at this stage would be to concentrate less on making pretty textures and more on making a pretty shot/building first. Maybe fiddle with geometry more. If they indeed canned the env. test you could use some extra tris to make the thing pop.
Check this one out: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=108031
It doesn't seem like the guy went scrupulously from texture to texture. In fact texture alone aren't that impressive but he has a coherent and comprehensive piece that works wonders.
Also why is moss on top of the foundation like that? It's almost like snow. Moss grows where it's cold and damp, which usually the part that get less wind and sun(crevices, or northern side of the object if you're in the northern hemisphere.)
Anyway, keep up the good work and looking forward to you making it awesome.
Thanks for the advice d!ver, I'm actually going to build a whole scene for the final shot in CE3 with a video presentation. The screenshots I've shown so far are by no means meant to be used as presentation. These are just WIP screenshots showing where I'm at and what I'm working on.
Adding geometry to the borders to break up the silhouettes is in the plans thats for sure
Here's a test I did today for the roof for example :
The borders are actual geometry with some thickness since the decals method looked cheap like e-freak mentioned.
Its a double-edged sword since its kinda expensive polycount wise.
Choco, I know you're goal to keep your stuff for this scene under a certain polycount is important to you, but in all honesty, do not fret over polygons.
I get a lot of flack because my work supposedly has "more poly's than necessary," but I really don't believe it's true. I also have a lot of support from people who argue FOR my methods of using more polygons than less....ESPECIALLY when the topic of using extra texture maps such as height / displacement instead of more polygons comes up.
The point is, using more polygons is almost ALWAYS better than using more texture maps, or things like tesselation, height, displacement maps, whatever. So just go ahead and model out some extra details to get that silhouette looking good =]
Yes, it's true. I don't know about Arena Net's engine in question, but nearly all modern game engines struggle much less with polygon count than they used to, but they still choke up over drawcalls and shader complexity; the more texture maps, the more drawcalls. Those stack up. Realtime lighting is another issue too.
Heck, the PS2 could take 2 million polygons on the screen without a drop in framerate.
Higher polycounts are an issue of the past (within reason). Worry more about shader complexity, texture size, and drawcalls. See if you can make it a practice to have all of your modular textures that you use for a scene on one or two texture sheets (of course you'll have to seperate diffuse from normal and spec, etc). That's a fairly common practice, though it's not possible with every situation. Do it where you can.
And combine them after you've sized them down. Photoshop doesn't reduce combined sheets too well.
I agree with much of the advice in this thread, the limits mentioned are more realistic to what would be observed in a production environment and you would likely have a whole bunch of wiggle room to stretch them once in a position. But this is a test, following the limits imposed (even if outdated) are not just about realistic limits but your ability to follow direction, which is pretty important when your artwork is so damm good it may just intimidate the people hiring you .
Hey choco, just a quick question if you don't mind me asking. I saw this post and I was wondering what polycount you try to stick to for each stone? Not looking for exact numbers but just curious if you go for millions of polys per stone or stick to less than that. I tried a similar setup but it really hogged down my system. Any pointers would be awesome. Thanks and nice job on the roof above.
Choco! Question about your Texturing Process you outlined. Where do you bake your Curvature map? Because CrazyBump doesn't seem to do it, and the map xNormal shoots out looks nothing like that.
Thanks guys. I'll be adding some definition around the corners for sure.
There is no need to keep myself from going over 3000 triangles anymore.
Might as-well create LODs for the house.
@Brygelsmack : I useally work with stones that have less then 40k polys. Smaller stones need even less polys. You might wanna turn on viewport 2.0 and disable 2 sided lighting.
When duplicating the highpoly stones in maya and doing the placements, you'll need to use instance objects. So instead of hitting Ctrl+D , use Ctrl+Shit+D to create in a instance of the selected object.
Works basically like game engines. Instances a rendered faster then unique objects.
With this setup you can easily work with over 20 million polys in maya at over 30 fps.
(I personally went up to 45 million polys and it was still running smoothly).
Also you might want to organize your assets in the scene with the layer system so that you can easily hide/unhide objects.
@Joopson : Crazybump's curvature maps are probably more suited for tiled textures or flat textures.
Xnormal would give you better results in any case since you're using a raytraced method which allows you to control the sharpness of the highlights for example.
I'd use Xnormal's curvature map for models that are being baked since crazy bump's curvature map transfers the gradients that are present on the normal map to the curvature map as seams.
Started detailing the edges of the house and did a quick paint-over for the vegetation.
Also started to train myself at painting some clouds for making the future skybox.
Well, what I meant was, I don't even see that option in CrazyBump.
And for xNormal, I would bake one, and it would be 3 colours, which was bizarre. But then I took another look in the settings, changed it to "Monochrome", and I started getting results akin to yours.
So yes, thanks! I learn a lot from you and your process. Thanks for being so open about sharing techniques and stuff!
You welcome Joopson, and yea I forgot to mention that you needed to switch the option to Monochrome. I'm guessing that the colored version allows you to split the curvature map by direction XYZ (not sure tho).
@ridvancakir : thanks man, and yea I used some reference photographs which I took from my balcony haha
Had to learn how to shoot proper photos in overcast situations.
@Brygelsmack : I useally work with stones that have less then 40k polys. Smaller stones need even less polys. You might wanna turn on viewport 2.0 and disable 2 sided lighting.
When duplicating the highpoly stones in maya and doing the placements, you'll need to use instance objects. So instead of hitting Ctrl+D , use Ctrl+Shit+D to create in a instance of the selected object.
Works basically like game engines. Instances a rendered faster then unique objects.
With this setup you can easily work with over 20 million polys in maya at over 30 fps.
(I personally went up to 45 million polys and it was still running smoothly).
Finished detailing the roof borders, the process was very tedious because of the nature of the mesh. Had to add geometry without destroying the UVs leading me to do lots of manual work.
Next thing on the list is the roof top then I can move on to brick stone area and finally the plaster walls.
Well, it's not always good taking every cool feature you can find in an engine, and just throwing it onto stuff cause it's cool. If your goal is to make something look cool, no matter what, then sure. But if you'r doing a portfolio piece it's important showing that you can make awesome art without shitloads of shader features.
Then, if displacment would make this crazy good looking and really bring it up. Go for it!
For thouse who don't want to click the wiki link, POM is self occluding parallax bump mapping..
One thing that bugs me a bit with the roof texture is that there are a lot of vertical lines on the shingles. It's a bit late to mention that now but what the hell, I figure you can handle it And it's not like you need to do anything about it if you don't want to, still looks good.
Choco: How are you assembling the geometry for your stone wall textures in maya without it taking several hours to do so? I really don't have a weak machine (by all accounts it's a beast), but trying to emulate the way I saw you do those stone walls my machine locks up and just can't handle the massive amount of geometry. Any pointers, or possibly alternate workflows you can suggest would be awesome.
Let me know!
Choco: How are you assembling the geometry for your stone wall textures in maya without it taking several hours to do so? I really don't have a weak machine (by all accounts it's a beast), but trying to emulate the way I saw you do those stone walls my machine locks up and just can't handle the massive amount of geometry. Any pointers, or possibly alternate workflows you can suggest would be awesome.
Let me know!
Always give these threads a read, you never know what might be hiding in there. Quote from the previous page:
@Brygelsmack : I useally work with stones that have less then 40k polys. Smaller stones need even less polys. You might wanna turn on viewport 2.0 and disable 2 sided lighting.
When duplicating the highpoly stones in maya and doing the placements, you'll need to use instance objects. So instead of hitting Ctrl+D , use Ctrl+Shit+D to create in a instance of the selected object.
Works basically like game engines. Instances a rendered faster then unique objects.
With this setup you can easily work with over 20 million polys in maya at over 30 fps.
(I personally went up to 45 million polys and it was still running smoothly).
Replies
Your environments you've done so far (the udk meadow with stone spires and the moody cryengine one) are good enough for a portfolio. Add some props and you're done
I did another version of the roof texture today.
I'm planning to use some decals to break up the silhouette of the roof.
Needless to say that the other textures (woodframe etc...) will need to be adjusted in order to have overall consistency.
@e-freak : I'm about to try out multiple approaches and see what works best. Maybe using a combination of both techniques will do the trick :thumbup:
Currently testing out some vertex blending for the base wall :
Will add vegetation and slightly tweak the vertex normals to improve the blending later on.
I might also consider adding some geometry to the base wall to break-up the silhouette (bricks).
Btw *cough*
Cool stuff man.
The wierd look of the moss is also probably due to the fact that I'm using 2 essentially different shaders on the house which use different lighting sources (cgfx and maya blin materials).
The cgfx shader handles lighting differently compared to the native maya shaders which kind made the moss look very lumpy. Doesn't excuse the fact that the color was way too saturated tho.
Keep in mind that the mossy area is supposed to be covered by some vegetation allowing me to balance the colors by adding some yellow, red and purple to break up the monotony.
I might spend some time doing some paint overs to see which color scheme works best with the house.
Any suggestions regarding that would be highly appreciated.
My advice at this stage would be to concentrate less on making pretty textures and more on making a pretty shot/building first. Maybe fiddle with geometry more. If they indeed canned the env. test you could use some extra tris to make the thing pop.
Check this one out:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=108031
It doesn't seem like the guy went scrupulously from texture to texture. In fact texture alone aren't that impressive but he has a coherent and comprehensive piece that works wonders.
Also why is moss on top of the foundation like that? It's almost like snow. Moss grows where it's cold and damp, which usually the part that get less wind and sun(crevices, or northern side of the object if you're in the northern hemisphere.)
Anyway, keep up the good work and looking forward to you making it awesome.
Adding geometry to the borders to break up the silhouettes is in the plans thats for sure
Here's a test I did today for the roof for example :
The borders are actual geometry with some thickness since the decals method looked cheap like e-freak mentioned.
Its a double-edged sword since its kinda expensive polycount wise.
I get a lot of flack because my work supposedly has "more poly's than necessary," but I really don't believe it's true. I also have a lot of support from people who argue FOR my methods of using more polygons than less....ESPECIALLY when the topic of using extra texture maps such as height / displacement instead of more polygons comes up.
The point is, using more polygons is almost ALWAYS better than using more texture maps, or things like tesselation, height, displacement maps, whatever. So just go ahead and model out some extra details to get that silhouette looking good =]
Heck, the PS2 could take 2 million polygons on the screen without a drop in framerate.
Higher polycounts are an issue of the past (within reason). Worry more about shader complexity, texture size, and drawcalls. See if you can make it a practice to have all of your modular textures that you use for a scene on one or two texture sheets (of course you'll have to seperate diffuse from normal and spec, etc). That's a fairly common practice, though it's not possible with every situation. Do it where you can.
And combine them after you've sized them down. Photoshop doesn't reduce combined sheets too well.
There is no need to keep myself from going over 3000 triangles anymore.
Might as-well create LODs for the house.
@Brygelsmack : I useally work with stones that have less then 40k polys. Smaller stones need even less polys. You might wanna turn on viewport 2.0 and disable 2 sided lighting.
When duplicating the highpoly stones in maya and doing the placements, you'll need to use instance objects. So instead of hitting Ctrl+D , use Ctrl+Shit+D to create in a instance of the selected object.
Works basically like game engines. Instances a rendered faster then unique objects.
With this setup you can easily work with over 20 million polys in maya at over 30 fps.
(I personally went up to 45 million polys and it was still running smoothly).
Also you might want to organize your assets in the scene with the layer system so that you can easily hide/unhide objects.
@Joopson : Crazybump's curvature maps are probably more suited for tiled textures or flat textures.
Xnormal would give you better results in any case since you're using a raytraced method which allows you to control the sharpness of the highlights for example.
I'd use Xnormal's curvature map for models that are being baked since crazy bump's curvature map transfers the gradients that are present on the normal map to the curvature map as seams.
Started detailing the edges of the house and did a quick paint-over for the vegetation.
Also started to train myself at painting some clouds for making the future skybox.
And for xNormal, I would bake one, and it would be 3 colours, which was bizarre. But then I took another look in the settings, changed it to "Monochrome", and I started getting results akin to yours.
So yes, thanks! I learn a lot from you and your process. Thanks for being so open about sharing techniques and stuff!
@ridvancakir : thanks man, and yea I used some reference photographs which I took from my balcony haha
Had to learn how to shoot proper photos in overcast situations.
Finished detailing the roof borders, the process was very tedious because of the nature of the mesh. Had to add geometry without destroying the UVs leading me to do lots of manual work.
Next thing on the list is the roof top then I can move on to brick stone area and finally the plaster walls.
Parallax occlusion mapping.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_occlusion_mapping
Well, it's not always good taking every cool feature you can find in an engine, and just throwing it onto stuff cause it's cool. If your goal is to make something look cool, no matter what, then sure. But if you'r doing a portfolio piece it's important showing that you can make awesome art without shitloads of shader features.
Then, if displacment would make this crazy good looking and really bring it up. Go for it!
For thouse who don't want to click the wiki link, POM is self occluding parallax bump mapping..
Do you mind giving a quick insight to what method you are creating your normal maps, for example for the wooden beams ?
Big up
Let me know!
I tried it and it works great.
Great job btw.