Welcome to CeleryLand!
Hello PolyCounters,
After teaching classes for the last few years I realized that a lot of students still have difficulty connecting the dots when it comes to making a complete environment. For instance they might understand individual lessons like baking normal maps, creating materials, modeling, etc but they don’t feel confident enough to tackle a full environment.
Wtf is Celeryland?!!
To help make the whole process more transparent I decided to develop a curriculum that revolves around a single environment tentatively titled “Celeryland”. Some of the over-arching goals with this project are:
1. record high quality video tutorials that cover the core aspects of the video-game art pipeline. Eventually it will include concepting, character and vehicle creation, and animation.
2. Genre variety, so that students interested in sci-fi, fantasy, and realism can all benefit from the lessons.
3. Micro to macro attention to detail. The environment should look equally good from far away vistas and a close up blade of grass.
4. Next gen standards and techniques: we want these lessons to hold up throughout this next generation of consoles so the polycounts and texture resolutions will be authored with that in mind.
5. make something that looks good ... crap I just jinxed it
Polycount has been such an important resource for game artists so I wanted to post some of the wip shots here and share some of our tutorials as well.
I’d also like to thank Danny Weinbaum ( http://artofdanny.blogspot.com) and Ned Gasorntip
( http://thanet-art.com/ ) for their help on creating assets and tutorials for this project and I'll be sure to credit their work as it's posted.
Here is some of the reference Danny and I gathered at the beginning. Check out out-doorphotos for some beautiful landscape ref. Most of these shots were from there. The most important thing to look for is that gut reaction... if you stop in your tracks when you look at a certain image then ask yourself what makes it so impressive then try and translate those into your scene.
Next, I took the ref sheet and starting painting a general landscape that would give me something to work from. I used some of the photos for texture and even pasted the ravine directly into the concept.
After seeing some of Choco's amazing terrain tests I decided to start messing around with World Machine. This whole workflow is so much better than the old mash potato terrain that I worked with on GuildWars 2. Thanks for sharing Choco
started to r&d ways to do overhang props so that they match some of the concept features
I did a slight paintover on the top to help figure out the best way to blend these with the terrain. As I mentioned before in the GuildWars thread http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=105551, going back and forth from concept to production ends up being a very valuable workflow.
Danny added a sky-box that he created which I'll upload a tutorial for soon. He went out on one of the Seattle Ferries to take an unobstructed view of the Puget Sound and turned it into a sky-box.
closer view of the mountain along with some added decals for the snow.
I'll try and update this as regularly as possible. I have a bunch more wip images I need to go through now
After teaching classes for the last few years I realized that a lot of students still have difficulty connecting the dots when it comes to making a complete environment. For instance they might understand individual lessons like baking normal maps, creating materials, modeling, etc but they don’t feel confident enough to tackle a full environment.
Wtf is Celeryland?!!
To help make the whole process more transparent I decided to develop a curriculum that revolves around a single environment tentatively titled “Celeryland”. Some of the over-arching goals with this project are:
1. record high quality video tutorials that cover the core aspects of the video-game art pipeline. Eventually it will include concepting, character and vehicle creation, and animation.
2. Genre variety, so that students interested in sci-fi, fantasy, and realism can all benefit from the lessons.
3. Micro to macro attention to detail. The environment should look equally good from far away vistas and a close up blade of grass.
4. Next gen standards and techniques: we want these lessons to hold up throughout this next generation of consoles so the polycounts and texture resolutions will be authored with that in mind.
5. make something that looks good ... crap I just jinxed it
Polycount has been such an important resource for game artists so I wanted to post some of the wip shots here and share some of our tutorials as well.
I’d also like to thank Danny Weinbaum ( http://artofdanny.blogspot.com) and Ned Gasorntip
( http://thanet-art.com/ ) for their help on creating assets and tutorials for this project and I'll be sure to credit their work as it's posted.
Here is some of the reference Danny and I gathered at the beginning. Check out out-doorphotos for some beautiful landscape ref. Most of these shots were from there. The most important thing to look for is that gut reaction... if you stop in your tracks when you look at a certain image then ask yourself what makes it so impressive then try and translate those into your scene.
Next, I took the ref sheet and starting painting a general landscape that would give me something to work from. I used some of the photos for texture and even pasted the ravine directly into the concept.
After seeing some of Choco's amazing terrain tests I decided to start messing around with World Machine. This whole workflow is so much better than the old mash potato terrain that I worked with on GuildWars 2. Thanks for sharing Choco
started to r&d ways to do overhang props so that they match some of the concept features
I did a slight paintover on the top to help figure out the best way to blend these with the terrain. As I mentioned before in the GuildWars thread http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=105551, going back and forth from concept to production ends up being a very valuable workflow.
Danny added a sky-box that he created which I'll upload a tutorial for soon. He went out on one of the Seattle Ferries to take an unobstructed view of the Puget Sound and turned it into a sky-box.
closer view of the mountain along with some added decals for the snow.
I'll try and update this as regularly as possible. I have a bunch more wip images I need to go through now
Replies
Where will these tutorials be located?
I'll be embedding quite a few videos right in this thread but eventually they will be part of an online class. I'd like for the thread to become sort of a beta version of the class.
I'm just waiting to see the FLARHGUNNSTOW!
This tutorial talks about using an older program called SkyPaint to create custom skyBoxes and importing them into Cryengine.
Enjoy
*edit trying to figure out how to imbed the html code... here is the url for now.
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1876525617001?bckey=AQ~~,AAAAv1s33Ak~,N2Teo4GAFCqVHZcyEwD4q0wo5_PfIYTI
ok so not really but I do love seeing stuff like this
All I get is a blank page when I go to the URL. Can you fix it? Are you using your own hosting? If so, polycount can take this kinda stuff down pretty quick with all the lurkers hitting the servers.
Also, embedding is only possible with YouTube videos. (and vimeo if you know how, but that's the only other one)
Right now the mountain is much taller in the engine than in the concept, as well as you have it more hilly too. I think the concept had a very sturdy feel about it, as it was much flatter.
@ Chillydog- ha the Celery name is an homage to Tim & Eric's master piece "CeleryMan". Give it a youtube if you want to see "Tane".
thanks for letting me know Computron, some people said the link works but I'll try and upload some youTube versions soon.
I agree that it's lost some of the structure from the concept. I'll try and tweak it later once I get this thread up to date with the current progress. Thanks!
Here is a quick test to get some crumbling erosion props blending in with the terrain.
Danny (aka OrchidFace) has been working on a lot of the vegetation for CeleryLand. Here is an early test that showed promise but was repeating too often.
Here is Danny's updated grass with bushes and flowers. It's getting closer to what we are looking for. The grass and bushes were modeled out and baked so that the alpha and lighting looked sharper.
Another vegitation shot with some rocks added in.
Thanks everyone, I'll post more soon.
count on another subscribed!
Feel like I can get some fresh air just watching this.
makes the enviro stand out more
can't wait for those vids!
+1
I really like the atmosphere on the frist render, on post #28
Perhaps adjusting the color of the grass to match the terrain, and setting up a distance fade-out could do the trick too.
Seems to me it's CryEngine, not Unreal.
BTW subbed