Discovery at the Foggy Valley Ruins

NickGW

I figured it was about time I posted what I've been working on and get some more thoughts on it.

This is a project I've been working on as part of an independent study for school. The goal is to create a complete environment that encompasses both hard surface and organic forms as well as terrain foliage and architectural structures. This is where I'm at after 5 weeks, not as far as I'd like to be but its getting there.





Here is a general style sheet including the initial concept from Mass Effect 3. It reminded me a lot of Ilos and Virmire from ME1 so I'm trying to capture a little bit of those locations as well. The concept was created by Mikko Kinunnen, so props to Mikko.



I haven't handled terrain before in UDK, nor terrain of this scale so I'm currently trying to figure the best way to handle it. I've been using the method that Choco has used, and so far it's been great for getting natural looking large scale terrain. I just can't seem to achieve the type of terrain I'm going after. Below is a reference sheet for the type of terrain I'm trying to make.



I'll be working on the tower textures for now until I can come up with a better way of creating the terrain. Let me know what you all think, I'm interested to hear your feedback and any tips you all may have.

m1neh

Really cool, I like the sculpted stone textures and their modular usage - look forward to seeing textures on the next bits, and maybe some further lighting work?

NickGW

Thanks m1neh, I spent some time this weekend trying to get the lighting closer in line with the mood that the concept has, but overall it's still too brightly lit. I'll keep at it.

NickGW

Made a few variations on the tower after the professor overseeing my independent study mentioned how unstable the current one looks. I'm leaning towards 3 or 4 at the moment. Now I'll actually get jamming on the textures for the tower.

I also made some adjustments to the lighting and height fog, but it's really flattened things a bit so I'll continue to tweak it as I move forward.

As always any feedback is greatly appreciated.

NickGW

It's been a while, but here's an update on the scene.

I've continued to wrestle with getting the lighting and height fog to match the atmosphere and mood that the original concept has. I'll keep tinkering away as I move forward, but I wont be worrying about it too much till I get closer to the end. The terrain has also been revamped. I stopped using the world machine color map and painted on detail textures and instead used several height maps to blend the different layers together. Overall it looks a lot better, but I'll probably add in a layer or two more to better blend certain areas.

Since I put in the new terrain there has been a huge dip in performance. Where I was getting 50+ frames and fewer draw calls with the older terrain I'm now getting 20-30 frames. I've tried cleaning things up, using more material instances where it makes sense, and optimizing where I can but the frame rate still stays within that low range. I'm not really sure what else I can do to improve performance, but any ideas are welcome.

Right now I'm working on creating more foliage to decorate the foreground and background with. I also want to create a few larger rock meshes to place off in the distance to break up the smoothness of the hills and mountains in the terrain. After looking over the Celery land thread I liked what those guys did with the larger land mass meshes so I might try something like that as well. I also made a few crates and a floodlight to got with the walkway set (only HP so far). Wont get around to creating low poly and baking them till I get more of the foliage in.

Any and all crits are greatly appreciated!

nedwork

This is very cool. Can't wait to see you foliage. I feel like those towers are a little flat. Adding geometries or making attachments something like vents, pipes or landing pad. good luck with world machine

NickGW

Thanks nedwork, I had stuff hanging off the sides of the towers in my previous versions. I'll try out some stuff like you mentioned and see what works best. I should have some foliage updates tonight, If I have time I'll add those details to the towers as well.

The Celeryland thread has been a recent source of inspiration for how I handle the foliage and terrain, but I didn't realize it was already done till I just checked your portfolio. Can't wait to see the breakdown of how the Pipetown stuff was done.

NickGW

Back again with another update. I spent a lot of time messing around with various ways to create foliage and this is where I'm at after a lot of experimentation. I still want to create a few more foliage pieces to add a little more variety, but for now I'm satisfied with what I have.







I figured out where my performance issue was coming from. I had left the scene capture reflection actor enabled in the scene like an idiot, so lesson learned. Unfortunately I fixed that problem only to run into another when I did a frontend build. For whatever reason certain changes I made to the landscape aren't showing up in the build which leaves the foliage floating. I made a thread about it which can be found here.

That's it for now. Only a few more weeks till this thing is supposed to be done so I'm gonna start picking up the pace and have more frequent updates (hopefully). If you have any hot crits then let 'em loose!

NickGW

Finished working on this around mid December, but here's the finished deal. Let me know what you guys think.

lucashug

Nice one man!
I really like the floor with the water and the grass
Cheers!

NickGW

Thanks lucashug I'm glad you like it. Now that the Mattock is nearly finished being re-textured I'm taking another stab at foliage and a few more props based on the feedback I received in my portfolio thread.

Reventius

Hey man this is looking really awesome, and I really like the way you did your ivy. I've been struggling to find a way to handle convincing looking ivy on my own. Could you perhaps share your workflow for it or some insight on how you went about doing it? Thanks!

NickGW

Thanks Reventius! The ivy was the first piece of foliage I had ever created so It went through a few different attempts before I landed on what you see in the images above.

The process I used for the final ivy involved using few images I found on CGtextures and identifying several groupings of ivy that would provide a good level of coverage and variation. I started off by masking out the clumps that I wanted from each image and combining them into one texture sheet. I used the shadow and highlights adjustment to reduce some of the lighting from the image and hue/saturation as well as some painted in detail to change areas that still had strong lighting present. The 5 ivy variations I used were, one large, one medium, one that is shaped like Florida, one that grows from the bottom up, and a single vine.

When I placed them around the building I used the large and small clumps of ivy for surface coverage, the Florida shaped one to give a sense of it creeping across the structure in certain areas. The thin strip was used for hanging and curling bits towards the bottom of the large and medium clumps. The piece the grows from the bottom up was used near the ground and in areas where I wanted thin growth.

I made a modified version of the material that Damian Lazarski demonstrated in his foliage video on 3dmotive for the ivy and instances of that material for all the other foliage in the scene. At first it turned out great, but I took a different approach for the other bits of foliage that gave me more control. Next time I attempt ivy I'll give that method a go instead.

I hope all that makes sense and helps you out. If you have any other questions I'm more than happy to answer them.

Thanks again!

Reventius

Thanks a lot for sharing your workflow, Nick! I'll see if I can find an excuse to integrate it into one of my future projects, hah.

NickGW

Of course, I hope you find it useful. Let me know how it goes.