Environment art that I hope can motivate fellow env artists
Greetings everybody
I have experience and am working in the industry but trying to get better. There are huge gaps in my talent right now that I've been in the process of rooting out (never ending battle)
I really hope some of my latest personal work will inspire a few of you. Feel free to contact me about anything, I'm an open book as far as my process and approach to game scenes for newbies. Thanks guys and gals.
https://vimeo.com/55727974
I have experience and am working in the industry but trying to get better. There are huge gaps in my talent right now that I've been in the process of rooting out (never ending battle)
I really hope some of my latest personal work will inspire a few of you. Feel free to contact me about anything, I'm an open book as far as my process and approach to game scenes for newbies. Thanks guys and gals.
https://vimeo.com/55727974
Replies
https://vimeo.com/48120368
https://vimeo.com/36800763
Do it anyways.
Cool work!
Neko I'm glad I could help a little. It's good to keep trying things we haven't done in a while to keep from getting rusty.
One small critique to maybe improve the presentation of your work: at every scene in your video.. after a while I felt that I want to see the next one.. but.. the same scene was still dragging on. I feel the video is way too slow paced and I know that when you are presenting a showreel or something to an employer.. it needs to be fast paced. Show less of each scene in my opinion because it feels too slow at the moment.
But that's only my opinion
Thanks for the inspiration and keep it up!
Don't think about how you want your assets too look as much as how they were made in the real world.
Wet rocks; water will chip and erode rocks exposing layers but also smooth them unlike most rocks with exposed layers do to earthquakes.
Bark is not extruded out of the surface, it gradually grows on top of itself, uneavenly in some areas.
I also added a little painterly flare to my tree (always add your own cool stuff to your models in zbrush)
Horizontal and vertical striations of rocks and cliffs show their growth when exposed. It helps to make the detail larger and more apparent if it's a distance piece and it uses a smaller texture map or else it's awesomeness will get lost in the pixels.
I have a question though - I'm doing some level design inside of 3ds max, and every tutorial I watch (for example making realistic rocks and cliffs) wants me to make a texture map specifically for that one object. . do you use tons of those? Or do you have any tips on making everything look good using 1 or 2 tiled textures?
I love to hand sculpt everything I can, the only stuff I don't is the fine detail noise which I get from projecting alpha masks.
Quick tip: Draw some thick lines horizontally across the model with the mask. Invert the mask, now just use any brush to pull out or push in some of those rock layers.
Jagwire
Under the ship crash screenshots you'll see the 8 main assets I used, if you look closely at the environment you'll see that I just repeated them all over the place in order to keep the resolution high no matter how close. The huge cliffs are the same size texture as everything else which is why the camera never gets close. if I wanted to bring those cliffs in closer to the player I would need a repeatable texture.
Just about all games use repeatable textures in their environments which is why I'm surprised that there aren't more tutorials on that. To be honest making cliffs and mountains look decent enough with repeatables is easy, making them look awesome takes a lot of trickery.
Below is a screenshot from id's Rage(Which I had nothing to do with, those guys are really good), I know that they used mega textures giving them freedom to meld assets together better but that aside. Given this task I might build 5 or 6 different large chunks of canyon, and bake down only their normal maps. Since those normals are specific to each canyon asset they would look great from afar but blur a lot up close, so then I would create a repeatable normal, Diffuse, spec.... to also add on top of that canyon assets normals for when the player gets close.
I would apply the same shader to everything, this shader would hold the street, sand, rocky sand, and canyon wall repeatable materials, and then go into the map and vert paint where I need everything.
I'm sorry if that sounds really confusing, I should put together a tutorial or something. But for your scene I think you would need the ability to vert paint different areas, say a damp cliff base, a cliff wall, and a dirt and grassy top, and then use clever geometry modeling to
make it look cool and different everywhere for example. As well as peppering in some other rocks and canyon stalagmites as they did in Rage to spice it up haha.
Thanks so much for the very detailed example! You don't even know how helpful this post was. It is really exciting to see how you go about making these. Confidence and sanity restored, man. Thank you thank you thank you
Yes you can have many duplicates of an asset (many actors) in a scene. as long as they have a separate uv channel for lighting, the lighting build will make all the assets play well together.
I am putting together some build process details and art/design strategies that I'm discovering along the way for anyone that may be interested.
Funny note, the small clouds are just simple little brush strokes with some gritty custom Photoshop brushes that I got from a friend working at 2K Marin. Never thought that they would come out as well as they did.
Its from Rage!
Thank you for sharing the tips, they are extremely helpful!
Thanks for the tips! I will always take a little help from anyone. I was making the scenes from some motivational concept art and there were no walking paths in the concepts so I just built away some cool little scenes as i saw them painted. I guess that's the nice thing about personal work, I'm not as constrained by player progression and fps vs. flying game types. I can just have fun with it.
For the spaceship wreck I will go back this week and open it up more and add some walking paths as per your suggestion, while i'm in there I'll update my lighting scheme. Thanks for the suggestions! I appreciate it!
This current scene is suppose to be seen from this distance. I haven't done any distance LOD scenes in a while so this is it. here is another shot showing where some of the vantage points would be. Gorillaz style floating islands YEAH!
I did have that stuff very saturated but my current company makes Dungeon Defenders sooooooo if you want saturation, we're your people!
Since the scene was going to be post process heavy, I wanted easy and quick results with something I was already very familiar with so I did it via material scene effects.
If you're not familiar with this, you can simply create a material, and have it act as your post processing.
Here is a before shot, as well as with a simple version of edge detect and finally some crazy color leveling.
If you need to know how to plug-in materials for post, let me know. Hope this helps!!!!
Thank you! I don't know if there is a real right way or great way to do trees but my strategy has done the job so far. I try to give bark, and tree knots, and crevices a bit of dimensionality as though it's just kind of growing out of control a little.
In Zbrush I build all of that up with the ClayBuildup brush. just go kinda crazy with it. smooth it out with TrimAdaptive & Dynamic, and then start pushing crevices and pulling edges with Dam_Standard all over the place set up to be pretty sharp. You can then add some tree noise to it via alpha projector.
Make sure to distinguish between outer bark and inner wood in the sculpt! And have it carry on through the color and spec.
Not sure if that will help you at all, hopefully the screenshots will help you more than me bumbling around with words.
Here is a quick shot of the waterfall in action.
https://vimeo.com/61401187
I am not experienced with making waterfalls but with this one I learned through experimentation that from the distance it's seen, simpler textures are better.The water was fun to try to keep simple considering the distance it's seen but also make look realistic using only hand painted textures.
Glancing at the textures I made two falling water types. Misty falling water, and the main falling water.
I just used some gritty/chalky custom brushes for some streaks and then erased some speckles for the misty, and some horizontal water break-ups for the main.
Crazybumped both.
those two textures worked well in the scene but looking at photos of niagara falls I just couldn't get it to shadow as I wanted it to considering my sunlight angle, so I tossed a fake shadow into the diffuse which is the third texture. Without it the entire waterfall would have been almost white.
Created this shader for it, and cranked up the specular amount.
the mesh; I duplicated the mesh and varied it a little because the water wasn't quite thick enough. Also stretched the mesh slightly in places so that the water would randomly fall faster in certain areas. I had no clue if that would look good, but it actually did in my opinion.
It's difficult to get a shot showing a good path for player traversal while also showing a chunk of the environment because of the amount of vegetation and the size of the ship. But oh well.
Also changed the lighting and post scheme a little to suit a different time of day.