Monthly Noob Challenge 4
interpolator
Welcome to the Monthly Noob Challenge 4!
Our Friend Tejay has supplied us with a concept that received more votes than any contest thus far. (Not her concept she just picked it)
RULES:
Please read all the rules.
This may seem like it's pretty complicated, and if you are starting out it can be overwhelming, so take it piece by piece. This can be broken down into a segments. Think about what will be unique, what will be tiled, what kinda textures you'll need to make, just plan before you go. Set your standards high for your work, do your best.
PLEASE look at the ref, and work hard to get the blockout right. Take your time before you dive into it and plan, this will make your life easier.
All that matters is that you learn and give and get advice and are willing to be critiqued.
So here are the specific rules:
Must make your own textures, no stealing, we can't keep you from it, but the goal is to learn, even tileables, I mean you can take someone else's image and make it tileable, that's fine.
You must use a game engine OBVIOUSLY. UDK or Cryengine will probably be the most used.
You must try your best and finish as much as you can in this month.
Post what you are working on in this thread so that way it's a more centralized place for advice and critique and we don't have 1000 disjointed threads littering the forums.
Well that's about it, if you think the rules should be changed let us know.
I would strongly encourage you to go and look at other games and see how they make their assets as well as get concept art to give it your own feel, but it must stay very close to the concept, if not super close.
Please stay away from Ddo, yeah, it's great if you know what you're doing, and for a production pipeline supplement, but other than that, please don't use it. Ndo2 is allowed.
Have fun!
PS: I am extremely familiar with Cryengine and can answer probably any question you happen to have when using it. Furthermore ask anything to anyone here, combined there is a wealth of knowledge.
PSSSS:
OPEN TO EVERYONE!
GOOD LUCK
Last month's thread
Our Friend Tejay has supplied us with a concept that received more votes than any contest thus far. (Not her concept she just picked it)
RULES:
Please read all the rules.
This may seem like it's pretty complicated, and if you are starting out it can be overwhelming, so take it piece by piece. This can be broken down into a segments. Think about what will be unique, what will be tiled, what kinda textures you'll need to make, just plan before you go. Set your standards high for your work, do your best.
PLEASE look at the ref, and work hard to get the blockout right. Take your time before you dive into it and plan, this will make your life easier.
All that matters is that you learn and give and get advice and are willing to be critiqued.
So here are the specific rules:
Must make your own textures, no stealing, we can't keep you from it, but the goal is to learn, even tileables, I mean you can take someone else's image and make it tileable, that's fine.
You must use a game engine OBVIOUSLY. UDK or Cryengine will probably be the most used.
You must try your best and finish as much as you can in this month.
Post what you are working on in this thread so that way it's a more centralized place for advice and critique and we don't have 1000 disjointed threads littering the forums.
Well that's about it, if you think the rules should be changed let us know.
I would strongly encourage you to go and look at other games and see how they make their assets as well as get concept art to give it your own feel, but it must stay very close to the concept, if not super close.
Please stay away from Ddo, yeah, it's great if you know what you're doing, and for a production pipeline supplement, but other than that, please don't use it. Ndo2 is allowed.
Have fun!
PS: I am extremely familiar with Cryengine and can answer probably any question you happen to have when using it. Furthermore ask anything to anyone here, combined there is a wealth of knowledge.
PSSSS:
OPEN TO EVERYONE!
GOOD LUCK
Last month's thread
Replies
Before I start, I'd just like to say that this will be my first actual game environment, I've made environments before but not for a game engine so all this modular business etc is new to me.
Is there any particular way I should set up my scene in max before I start blocking this out? as I'd hate to import it into UDK to find that its too big
p.s Good luck to everyone entering this month! let us all do our best and work together
Look up getting your scale correct, also I would highly recommend doing as I said, plan. Look at that scene and look at how much of it is modular, and can be reused. Think about adding dirt later with decals and such to make the modular parts seem unique, just study the previous thread. In all honesty they are similar scenes, they are assembled similarly.
Just do your best, and post what you do when you dont know if it's right, or ask people. Go into the polycount Google plus hangouts too if you want some more instant crit and advice, they can be really helpful at times.
And technically I posted first SO HA.
@uberphoenix yeah there were some more impressive concepts, but this one is much simplier, easier to complete in a month, and has a really nice mood, lighting, and materials. A lot of the concepts were simply to "big" to be a realistic challenge. I hope next week's concept is completely different but I am excited for this one.
You're not going to be learning the fundamentals of texturing by having a tool make all your base maps for you. Yeah, it's a good tool. But a noob shouldn't start having something like that done for them. I can't stop anyone from using it but it would be nice to not have people use it and instead work on making things good by hand and improve their own workflows.
Why start using something that every studio wont use and that could be a crutch in the end if you rely on it.
Just my opinion, nothing against Ddo.
But that's what I chose. If a large amount of people disagree then I will change it.
Not a bad tool but no good for learning, just my opinion anyway.
Good luck to everyone! And sorry in advance for my english...my french is much better I swear!
Wish the best of you luck! Will do irregular updates if I do end up contributing
AS for the dDo argument, I am on the side of being able to use it if you arent just throwing colors down and having it do the rest. It should be used as a compliment, not a one stop solution. dDo is a very big part of a lot of industry professional pipelines (Blizzard and InXile are two that I know first hand more than a select few use it on a majority of their work). This is to give newer artists the experience and practice to get better correct? As well as speed up pipeline work, polish stages, and overall completion of assets for industry specification. My vote is, why not? If it isnt a one stop solution like I said, I would say it is perfectly fine in my mind to use it as a compliment.
I am not the rules guy, just someone with friends in the industry currently who use it regularly, and voicing my opinion. Do not base your decision on my opinion, rules are rules and I will be abiding by them even if I disagree personally.
Looking forward to doing this.
Allow me to put some links from tutorials that could be useful during your progress
- From Mr. Christopher Albeluhn web site
http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/3D_Tutorials.html
- From Hourences , not technically UDK more of UT3 but theres alot of stuff usefull.
http://www.hourences.com/tutorials/
- How to fix shadows
http://www.worldofleveldesign.com/categories/udk/udk-lightmaps-03-how-to-fix-light-shadow-lightmap-bleeds-and-seams.php
Hope its usefull to everyone just starting UDK.
GOOD LUCK.
http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryEnvironment
Come to think of it, you can check in the main epic website for UDK although is a bit obvious.
http://udn.epicgames.com/Main/WebHome.html
On the Ddo argument "different strokes for different folks"
I can say I won't be using it on this scene but if someone wants to and can achieve a good result with it then *shrug* you could argue that people should learn to bake out everything and never use programs like Ndo2 or crazy bump and use maya or 3dsmax to bake out AO maps vs xNormal. Everyone has preferences to what they use and limiting people to not using something like Ddo reduces people creative freedom I guess. If they come up with a cool way of using Ddo through this then
Also, because I had planned to do some more contests this year but haven't figured out a nice way to set them up, I will be giving 3 games (trine and trine 1+2) away to people who join in. I don't exactly know how yet, but I'm thinking for originality/style and for technical qualities.
Posted some links above witch also say how to scaled right your objects.
Hope it helps .
Good luck.
I've done a quick paintover of what I think I'm going to split this whole thing into. It's probably not split well enough to consider modular pieces, but I'll figure it out tomorrow when I start. I plan on dealing with dirt, grime, vines in cracks, and etc. through some Vertex Painting.
This is gonna be fun to balance with school work.
It's all really about giving a number to something in the illustration and extrapolating from there.
I think I also messed up a bit with the FOV, obviously the camera in UDK has a different FOV from my modeling environment, so that threw me a bit off I think, going to set that to the same. What is the default UDK FOV?
EDIT: It's 65
I put Modo to metric units and it turns out 1cm is 1 game unit in UDK.
Thanks for these, although Im thinking of using Cry Engine, tutorials and websites like these are always an awesome resource.
I'll be posting my blockout soon...
UH might want to phrase that better. I didn't make the concept in anyway. Just found it. The original artist is Adam Baines. But thanks for the folio plug.
Thanks for putting my breakdown paintover to shame!
But yeah, I personally think those statues are torso+head sculptures, elongated for height. The door gives a very slight Buddhist or Hindu temple feel, however, that feel is negated by a few things in the room. I'd think ancient Indian architecture had something to do with this.
The white hooded figure in the center also gives an Assassin's Creed feel to it, and it makes me want to think it's some sort of Assassin's Cove or Hideout.
Also came up with an idea to have the part of the wall not seen in the concept have a cave entrance thing. Kind of how in the movies, the actors find underground ancient rooms.
DARN YOU PHOTOBUCKET FOR TAKING SO LONG!
or do you use 3ds max/etc then import it?
You can export the blockout of your scene from UDK by, going to brush wireframe, selecting all correspoding BSP brushes, right clicking a brush and hitting convert to static mesh. Then just export your static mesh of the blockout as a .obj from the content browser, then import into max/3ds ect as a obj file.
@Robeomega -
I for one suck at sculpting anything that resembles a human, so those statues are probably going to be the biggest thing im going to be working on to make it look any good. Unless I come up with a better idea rather then the statues.
Ive been using 3ds max for just over a year though
I have a feeling I'm going to rock this, hard. and dare I say- this is gonna be a ton of fun!
Good luck to all!
-rad
Here are some views of my interpretation of the unseen areas:
Here is my half-done blockout. I got a little carried away with that door, but maybe I'll use it as my basemesh for zbrush after giving it some tweaks ahha.
Damn you guys for rushing me, I wanted to be the first one to show my block out :P
Anyway, does someone have measurements layed out correctly in a modular power of 2 fashion ? played around fast in 3DSMax but im not getting the right feel yet in scale. How correctly should we stick to the concept regarding this ?
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1764266&postcount=28
I used it myself, and its really good, made it so much easier to get the blockout done. Of course, the scaling might look different when you get it into UDK, but at least you get the proper scale while inside 3DS Max.
For the colour overlay trick I find it easy to make the concept black and white, paint the section on a layer above it with softlight on and keep all the sections separate so that it's easy to adjust layers. Sorry if this is too vague :P
Loljks I r noob
1tt couple of hours
Its hurting my brain