I have been procastinating by learning some new ways of making the cracks and bits on stone and bricks. After following closely at that Orb Vincent webpage, I have found a video link. Amazing! Made by the same guy. I want to share this with you guys so you can also create your own zbrush brushes.
The video is the tutorial! Took me a little to follow, but if you pay attention its quite easy to follow. I had to scratch my head a little bit to know how he did the slash/cracks, but its all alphas! I have sculpted and painted one of the modular pieces. Next is to make a low poly and some baking
If you guys have trouble to follow the video, I can do a step by step to follow. Not sure where or how lol, never done a tutorial! My page could do with a tutorial, but I do not know enough to start throwing out tutorials.
Hey PacoCasares, looking good. Before you move onto the low poly though I'd suggest hardening some of those edges so they look more rock-like. Right now the piece is looking a little doughy. Some of the rocks have a sort of bendy quality to them, making them look soft instead of like hard slabs of stone. Hope that helps. Thanks for the tutorial link!
And thank you heaps StormHertz for posting that shader. I'm messing with my shader right now to get a more stony look. It really helped. Hopefully I'll have some solid updates to post tonight.
@sybrix No problem! I'm here to help and to learn.
Also, I almost forgot to mention, when I imported your normal map, I used TC_NormalMap for the compression settings and I also flipped the green channel. I didn't know if the green was inverted in the texture already, but it looked better when I did. Just in case you didn't already know how to import Normal Maps properly in UDK.
ah, started already to low-poly it, but! its all good! because I can still go back and use the work I have done and re-introduce the updated high poly mesh, you are right, it looks kinda doughy! I'll have a good night sleep and wake up with fresh eyes. Thanks Sybrix!
Hey PacoCasares, looking good. Before you move onto the low poly though I'd suggest hardening some of those edges so they look more rock-like. Right now the piece is looking a little doughy. Some of the rocks have a sort of bendy quality to them, making them look soft instead of like hard slabs of stone. Hope that helps. Thanks for the tutorial link!
And thank you heaps StormHertz for posting that shader. I'm messing with my shader right now to get a more stony look. It really helped. Hopefully I'll have some solid updates to post tonight.
I agree with hardening the edges,it would use a lot of geo (well more than it should) as it also makes it unrealistic. I would say go low on the geo but honestly with next gen consoles coming out polycounts are not as important as your textures. So if I could say anything, I'd find a way to re-use the texture from that on trim or something else.
That's just me I might be an idiot though.(You never know)
Hey guys, I'm having a hard time getting satisfactory results so I'm here asking you guys for help Do you have any special tricks up your sleeve regarding hightlights in the textures? Any technique that is used cause all my textures are getting really flat once in the engine.
@Carter: Looks amazing! Mind sharing insight in your process from highpoly to engine? :P Cause that's precisely where I struggle a lot.
Hey guys, I'm having a hard time getting satisfactory results so I'm here asking you guys for help Do you have any special tricks up your sleeve regarding hightlights in the textures? Any technique that is used cause all my textures are getting really flat once in the engine.
@Carter: Looks amazing! Mind sharing insight in your process from highpoly to engine? :P Cause that's precisely where I struggle a lot.
Thanks for your help!
You should post some examples of the flat textures you're talking about, so we know how to help you.
Hi, this is a place holder mesh placement for my update, nezt will be making some texures, what I'am exactly doing is learning what you guys are doing and redo the job in the best way I can. does it have to be exactly the same in final shot?
@ Pieru : this is very inspiring, best texture work I've seen around man, you rock \m/.
I have lurked on this forum for far to long. Time to learn something and contribute. I have not really worked with UDK, so I am sure I will have a bunch of questions.
So I have blocked out and planned what assets are going to be unique and which are going to be reused. I have never worked from a concept before, so some things I struggled with. Can someone explain (or direct me to a link) on how to derive measurements from the concept. I basically tried to set up a camera and make placements from gut feeling. I found this challenging and a little annoying as I found that I could only get the camera set up to roughly resemble the concept. I ended up winging it and made assumptions on the concept to make things make sense to me.
Anyway, since I am getting a late start, I figure that I am going to focus on areas that I will definitely encounter in future challenges (ie. walls, floors, etc). I also think these will be easier to learn the UDK workflow.
I really want to get a lot out of this challenge and look forward to all of your comments and suggestions.
Thanks in advance!
Rabant
Good stuff in this thread guys. I think next month I will try my hand at that challenge, I've been having problems keeping up motivation with my current projects. That may be the creative boost I need.
Here I changed a bit my floor material to get the dust/sand between my tiles.
I'd never thought tweaking and thinking about math and material creation could be so fun! Thank you noob challenge! I still need to modify the material to darken the sand inside cavities but I'll get back to this later since I'm really late now compared to everyone
I wish I could have a directx 11 compatible card...your tesselated floors are amazing! :,(
Still procrastinating on redoing the tileable floor. I have done this though. I couldn't really tell what was in the concept so I went and done my own thing. Starting to feel more comfortable with Zbrush now
I've spent a bit more time on my floor tile texture, as before it was too dark between the tiles. Even though its still a bit dark, I presume thats from the lightmaps, because each tile is modelled to be raised. Also playing around with tesselation, which pretty much kills my laptop.
I should probably move onto something else, before the month ends, haha.
Diffuse Map
Normal Map
Spec Map
Height Map
Used just Photoshop and nDo2 for the maps. Taken forever, but I've never really done much texturing in photoshop before, but I'm gonna move onto ZBrush for other texturing like the door and pillars and stuff.
Another thing is that when I update my texture after it has been imported with a model, I cannot reload it. Is it better to load all the textures seperately and make brand new materials, instead of using the ones from maya?
Still procrastinating on redoing the tileable floor. I have done this though. I couldn't really tell what was in the concept so I went and done my own thing. Starting to feel more comfortable with Zbrush now
Woah that is some really sick detail o.o Nice job!
Still procrastinating on redoing the tileable floor. I have done this though. I couldn't really tell what was in the concept so I went and done my own thing. Starting to feel more comfortable with Zbrush now
SWEET! Mind explaining how you did that? Really cool!
Wow. There's some good looking stuff happening in this thread. I've been short on time, and I've hit some workflow hurdles. Maybe I could get some advice on the workflow stuff?
I'm working with Mudbox and I'm having issues with the scale of my models being different when I bring them back into Max. I'm pretty sure this is due to some export setting. I'm using generic units in max and cm in Mudbox. Also, I don't really have any experience doing retopo, and was wondering what the best method was for Mudbox sculpts. I'm planning on creating a few different tiles in Mud and placing them individually in my final scene (this is just for the edge of the pool). Not sure if this is the best way of going about it.
Anyway here's an image of my import problem. Big tile is what's coming back from Mud. Little tile is the size it should be in Max.
@Steen: Are you starting off with the tiles by starting your workflow in Mudbox itself? You might be better off just making a quick basemesh tile in Max, bring that into Mudbox to sculpt it, and then when you reexport it back to Max it should be the correct size. That's what I do in zBrush, anyway.
Made a cavity map to highlight my edges in the diffuse and spec map, and baked out a height map. Having some issues with the height map looking offset and weird, but instead of wasting more time on floor tile tunnel vision I'm going to move on and worry about shader setup later.
Made a cavity map to highlight my edges in the diffuse and spec map, and baked out a height map. Having some issues with the height map looking offset and weird, but instead of wasting more time on floor tile tunnel vision I'm going to move on and worry about shader setup later.
UDK, I'm still trying to learn about how nodes function and interact with each other. It's not noticeable from straight on, but when you view it from angles you can sort of see the offsetting of the height map.
In case anyone is interested, here's my WIP frankenshader, referenced from what people have posted in here, some reading on Hourences, and Google.
You must have a scalar parameter with your bump offset ! it will be more easy to tweak your power of paralax !
Moreover, work with MIC (Material Instant Constant) for your object. Create a default material type with complex ops and use a MIC to override your textures, tweak your values etc... I think it's better than have a loooottt of specific materials.
Quick update on my progress. I ended up scrapping the original spin i had in mind for the project causing a nice big waste of time. So this is where I'm at so far. Walls now being done its onto the floors. Once they're done I'll throw them all into UDK. For now this is just a screen grab from marmoset.
Quick update on my progress. I ended up scrapping the original spin i had in mind for the project causing a nice big waste of time. So this is where I'm at so far. Walls now being done its onto the floors. Once they're done I'll throw them all into UDK. For now this is just a screen grab from marmoset.
That is gorgeous, that wall is modular? would love to see the wireframe and zbrush model comparison.
Here's a quick breakdown quickly thrown together. The polycount for both pieces of the wall is abou 490 tris. The slabs down the bottom are a modular piece in their own to be used elsewhere if I wish. The grates are also planes. I wanted them to pop more than a normal map could, also thought it would be a cool place for a lamp or something maybe down the track.
Just an update, learned how to paint over seams in 3d coat which will be super handy in future! working on the tree textures at the moment, no spec on it atm
aye polycounters, i just recently started with white box modelling the scenery in Cryengine, after a while of struggeling with the proportions i am almost about to be done with those. (still not 100% sure of those) but getting closer. It's great to see all of the already done models here. cool stuff.
Dear polycounters, i'm new to this, i just have joined and want to share my "interpretation" of the area whiteboxed in Cryengine. still struggeling a lil bit with the proportions and not yet 100% done, but getting closer
Hey fellas! I hope it's not too late to join in for the fun!
So i saw the concept and alot of ideas popped up into my head. My first idea was to make a sort of icy/snowy theme but i have a tendency to do that in all my projects "I love snow" so i told myself not to do that in this one!
When i first saw the concept i thought that it was concept art from Assassin's Creed because that does look so much like ezio in the middle! But it turned out it wasn't so i came up with the idea of maybe this could be a temple of some sorts in the Assassin's Creed universe? "Yup i love the AC games "
First of all i made a rough picture with my thoughts and idea's.
And here is a quick blockout i made and asset list. I will start easy and add more objects etc as the scene comes along.
And here was just a very quick porportions reference to get a picture in my head how big the place is etc.
Oh wow I can see what you have done with the overlapping bricks. I want to learn how to do that. How did you do the retopology after doing the zbrushing? did you duplicate the tool, move with transpose, merge the tools and then crop the sides I wonder? Sounds too easy... because it has to be moved pixel perfect. I wonder how mr Tejay! Thanks for sharing that!
I had a mental view and idea of what I wanted to do with this challenge haha, but I am spending more time learning how to do this stuff than actually doing it
@Pacocasares
The wall I just flat rendered a plane, I had lined up the bricks perfectly before I started sculpting so it was no effort at all making it tile. I then cut into the plane or extruded bits. The bottom was just a quick alteration and a few cuts into a cube. Nothing really complicated about it, there were basic enough shapes on their own.
@Arctic Furnace:
I would suggest a little bit less noise within the tiles/at their center,
and also you only have one tile that is all off a sudden cracked like crazy, that's no good for a tilable, it can be ok for this bc it's a small sc
So I have really started to fall behind. Working 2 jobs and having to spend time with the gf really leaves very little time for this. Oh well I'm still giving this as much of a go as I'm able to give.
So yesterday I finally go around to creating a small stone floor texture and I feel it's finally at a level that I can move onto something else. Shaders and texture tweaks will come towards the end.
My WIP:
textures:
ps. I've been playing with the tesselation... it's so awesome!
Well I'm not happy, so far my progress has been very slow and my work very lackluster, there's still a lot stuff that needs corrections, I want to redo my walls and haven't finished the statues and the door and the vegetation fix the pillars, the lighting is very basic and already half of the month is gone, but o well, back to work.
This are the textures I been painting , also included my workflow and not good at hand painting so I'm going by instinct.
Hey rockguy, scene's coming along nice. I know you said you're redoing the walls, maybe you can break up the busyness of everything by having some bigger details in the walls. Like areas of "rest" in the amount of detail so the viewer isn't overwhelmed. Right now there's a lot of detail packed into every tiling square, making things look a little noisy and busy.
I really like your pillars. Maybe make those vines more green and add some leaf alphas to them to make them read more as vines?
Don't feel bad about your pace, at least you've got more done than a floor tile haha. (Like me! ><)
Starting late so I will probably not expand into the unseen area as I have seen other people do. This is a fun challenge, everyone's work is awesome and I am learning a lot from everyone.
Here is the basic layout for my tiling stone blocks that will make up the pool area.
I´m really loving all the different interpretations of the concept here
My recap of the last week; getting a bit more into Zbrush, but still no good at baking. Most of the time any mesh that is not planar keeps getting these spots of corroding texture during the bake. Haven´t figured out why yet, and to get some other stuff done i kinda had to resort to painting it over.. the shame..
In-engine screenshot, still without much lighting.
Closer look at the door- These are the more problematic spots for baking, maybe because the narrow geometry? Dunno, but it kinda makes me afraid to go to highpoly with the statue. So far there´s this blockout, but it looks like it´ll be changing a lot during sculpting. I haven´t really tried retopologizing anything so far, does anybody have any good tutorials on that? =X
Textures of the floor and the Door. I´m hoping that there´s still enough time to redo some of the other textures at the end, to get rid of the mismatched look.
So a quick update on my floors. I have gone and done mine as meshes that I can then rotate and hopefully down the line use vertex blending to break up any tiling. At the moment I'm having some issues where the specular highlights of some of the meshes are drastically different to other duplicate meshes, so I've taken the spec off for this WIP screen-grab
this is a screen-grab of that 'weirdness' in case there is anybody out there who can point me in the right direction to getting this fixed.
EDIT: I'm not really sure that I like the large stones anyway, so I may even end up re-doing them. I'm thinking of doing the stones in a purpose-built pattern. What do you guys think? Should I aim to re-do them or should I look to focus my attention elsewhere and come back to them at a later date?
@KyFer: So jealous, I had the same scultping style and idea in mind. Now I must match yours in turn. @Ruebe: Your wall tile looks very good. I like the attention to detail of the rock surface.
Finally, I've been able to achieve a decent blockout of the reference image. Now it's time to attempt zbrush/mudbox and start creating...
@PieruThanks, I'll definitely be making a master material when I get everything in UDK and I'll look into Scalar Parameters too!
Tonight I sculpted my modular pool piece. Need to think about how I want to approach retopo. Don't know if I want to map the top and front onto planes and model out the ledges (on a texture tiling horizontally) or just give it a unique unwrap.
I envy you guys with zBrush, I can't get as good looking bricks with Blender. Just shows how much tools mean to an artist .
Here is my WIP, played around with the lighting and changed the large bricks surrounding the pool so they didnt look so flat and boring. Square pillars have placeholder textures atm.
Still deciding on the center piece. What to put what to put... hmmm
Well I'm not happy, so far my progress has been very slow and my work very lackluster, there's still a lot stuff that needs corrections, I want to redo my walls and haven't finished the statues and the door and the vegetation fix the pillars, the lighting is very basic and already half of the month is gone, but o well, back to work.
I have to say that your scene would look much better if you would differentiate your floor, wall and ceiling textures. At the moment they all look samey and that makes the scene look bland. If you don't have time to redo textures, I would suggest to decrease tiling on walls (inside material editor), to make individual tiles look bigger, and to perhaps stretch them about 50% upwards, so it would look like they are stretched vertically. Also, would significantly reduce tiling for ceilings and perhaps make them brighter (?).
Ouch, did not know that. I think some of my textures need tweaking now :d. And BTW, can you force UDK to compress RGBA texture to DXT1 and RGB to DXT5?
It can't be done in the editor but it can be done on import.
So let's say you have some textures that have alpha channels and you want to move those alpha channels to another file but skip the step of re-saving your original texure in a new version w/o an alpha, just re-import (through the import dialog, not right-clicking in the generic browser) and make sure to check compression no alpha this will force DXT1 compression. It used to be back in the day we had DXT3 which was DXT1 compression with an alpha channel. But I'm not sure if UDK will import a dds file. I've never tried.
But you can almost always use much smaller resolution maps that you would normally have put in an alpha channel. Spec, MicroDetail, MacroDetail, Transmission etc... You'll find bump and transparency to be the typical exceptions to downresing
Replies
When I said DXT5 is for your Alpha Channel, I meant if your Alpha will not 1Bit but an grayscale. that's why DXT5 is more heavy than DXT1.
I don't know if it's possible to have DXT1 with Alpha in UDK... probably yes !
MAKE A TUTORIAL!
If you guys have trouble to follow the video, I can do a step by step to follow. Not sure where or how lol, never done a tutorial! My page could do with a tutorial, but I do not know enough to start throwing out tutorials.
And thank you heaps StormHertz for posting that shader. I'm messing with my shader right now to get a more stony look. It really helped. Hopefully I'll have some solid updates to post tonight.
Also, I almost forgot to mention, when I imported your normal map, I used TC_NormalMap for the compression settings and I also flipped the green channel. I didn't know if the green was inverted in the texture already, but it looked better when I did. Just in case you didn't already know how to import Normal Maps properly in UDK.
I agree with hardening the edges,it would use a lot of geo (well more than it should) as it also makes it unrealistic. I would say go low on the geo but honestly with next gen consoles coming out polycounts are not as important as your textures. So if I could say anything, I'd find a way to re-use the texture from that on trim or something else.
That's just me I might be an idiot though.(You never know)
@Carter: Looks amazing! Mind sharing insight in your process from highpoly to engine? :P Cause that's precisely where I struggle a lot.
Thanks for your help!
You should post some examples of the flat textures you're talking about, so we know how to help you.
@ Pieru : this is very inspiring, best texture work I've seen around man, you rock \m/.
So I have blocked out and planned what assets are going to be unique and which are going to be reused. I have never worked from a concept before, so some things I struggled with. Can someone explain (or direct me to a link) on how to derive measurements from the concept. I basically tried to set up a camera and make placements from gut feeling. I found this challenging and a little annoying as I found that I could only get the camera set up to roughly resemble the concept. I ended up winging it and made assumptions on the concept to make things make sense to me.
Anyway, since I am getting a late start, I figure that I am going to focus on areas that I will definitely encounter in future challenges (ie. walls, floors, etc). I also think these will be easier to learn the UDK workflow.
I really want to get a lot out of this challenge and look forward to all of your comments and suggestions.
Thanks in advance!
Rabant
I'd never thought tweaking and thinking about math and material creation could be so fun! Thank you noob challenge! I still need to modify the material to darken the sand inside cavities but I'll get back to this later since I'm really late now compared to everyone
I wish I could have a directx 11 compatible card...your tesselated floors are amazing! :,(
I should probably move onto something else, before the month ends, haha.
Diffuse Map
Normal Map
Spec Map
Height Map
Used just Photoshop and nDo2 for the maps. Taken forever, but I've never really done much texturing in photoshop before, but I'm gonna move onto ZBrush for other texturing like the door and pillars and stuff.
Another thing is that when I update my texture after it has been imported with a model, I cannot reload it. Is it better to load all the textures seperately and make brand new materials, instead of using the ones from maya?
SWEET! Mind explaining how you did that? Really cool!
I'm working with Mudbox and I'm having issues with the scale of my models being different when I bring them back into Max. I'm pretty sure this is due to some export setting. I'm using generic units in max and cm in Mudbox. Also, I don't really have any experience doing retopo, and was wondering what the best method was for Mudbox sculpts. I'm planning on creating a few different tiles in Mud and placing them individually in my final scene (this is just for the edge of the pool). Not sure if this is the best way of going about it.
Anyway here's an image of my import problem. Big tile is what's coming back from Mud. Little tile is the size it should be in Max.
What engine are you using?
UDK, I'm still trying to learn about how nodes function and interact with each other. It's not noticeable from straight on, but when you view it from angles you can sort of see the offsetting of the height map.
In case anyone is interested, here's my WIP frankenshader, referenced from what people have posted in here, some reading on Hourences, and Google.
You must have a scalar parameter with your bump offset ! it will be more easy to tweak your power of paralax !
Moreover, work with MIC (Material Instant Constant) for your object. Create a default material type with complex ops and use a MIC to override your textures, tweak your values etc... I think it's better than have a loooottt of specific materials.
That is gorgeous, that wall is modular? would love to see the wireframe and zbrush model comparison.
So i saw the concept and alot of ideas popped up into my head. My first idea was to make a sort of icy/snowy theme but i have a tendency to do that in all my projects "I love snow" so i told myself not to do that in this one!
When i first saw the concept i thought that it was concept art from Assassin's Creed because that does look so much like ezio in the middle! But it turned out it wasn't so i came up with the idea of maybe this could be a temple of some sorts in the Assassin's Creed universe? "Yup i love the AC games
First of all i made a rough picture with my thoughts and idea's.
And here is a quick blockout i made and asset list. I will start easy and add more objects etc as the scene comes along.
And here was just a very quick porportions reference to get a picture in my head how big the place is etc.
Right! Now let's start with the blockout
I had a mental view and idea of what I wanted to do with this challenge haha, but I am spending more time learning how to do this stuff than actually doing it
Yes! the concept reminded me a heck of a lot of a Spy/Assasin Cult of some sort. I got exited to do the environment for that reason too.
The wall I just flat rendered a plane, I had lined up the bricks perfectly before I started sculpting so it was no effort at all making it tile. I then cut into the plane or extruded bits. The bottom was just a quick alteration and a few cuts into a cube. Nothing really complicated about it, there were basic enough shapes on their own.
I would suggest a little bit less noise within the tiles/at their center,
and also you only have one tile that is all off a sudden cracked like crazy, that's no good for a tilable, it can be ok for this bc it's a small sc
So yesterday I finally go around to creating a small stone floor texture and I feel it's finally at a level that I can move onto something else. Shaders and texture tweaks will come towards the end.
My WIP:
textures:
ps. I've been playing with the tesselation... it's so awesome!
This are the textures I been painting , also included my workflow and not good at hand painting so I'm going by instinct.
I really like your pillars. Maybe make those vines more green and add some leaf alphas to them to make them read more as vines?
Don't feel bad about your pace, at least you've got more done than a floor tile haha. (Like me! ><)
Here is the basic layout for my tiling stone blocks that will make up the pool area.
My recap of the last week; getting a bit more into Zbrush, but still no good at baking. Most of the time any mesh that is not planar keeps getting these spots of corroding texture during the bake. Haven´t figured out why yet, and to get some other stuff done i kinda had to resort to painting it over.. the shame..
In-engine screenshot, still without much lighting.
Closer look at the door- These are the more problematic spots for baking, maybe because the narrow geometry? Dunno, but it kinda makes me afraid to go to highpoly with the statue. So far there´s this blockout, but it looks like it´ll be changing a lot during sculpting. I haven´t really tried retopologizing anything so far, does anybody have any good tutorials on that? =X
Textures of the floor and the Door. I´m hoping that there´s still enough time to redo some of the other textures at the end, to get rid of the mismatched look.
this is a screen-grab of that 'weirdness' in case there is anybody out there who can point me in the right direction to getting this fixed.
EDIT: I'm not really sure that I like the large stones anyway, so I may even end up re-doing them. I'm thinking of doing the stones in a purpose-built pattern. What do you guys think? Should I aim to re-do them or should I look to focus my attention elsewhere and come back to them at a later date?
@Ruebe: Your wall tile looks very good. I like the attention to detail of the rock surface.
Finally, I've been able to achieve a decent blockout of the reference image. Now it's time to attempt zbrush/mudbox and start creating...
Tonight I sculpted my modular pool piece. Need to think about how I want to approach retopo. Don't know if I want to map the top and front onto planes and model out the ledges (on a texture tiling horizontally) or just give it a unique unwrap.
Decided to scrap my lazy wall design and go for something a little more.....custom, and stylized.
also, I can feel my sculpting skills leveling up... With that, I'm expecting the walls and floor tile to come out really great.
Stay tuned!
PS. (Placeholder floor texture)
Here is my WIP, played around with the lighting and changed the large bricks surrounding the pool so they didnt look so flat and boring. Square pillars have placeholder textures atm.
Still deciding on the center piece. What to put what to put... hmmm
I have to say that your scene would look much better if you would differentiate your floor, wall and ceiling textures. At the moment they all look samey and that makes the scene look bland. If you don't have time to redo textures, I would suggest to decrease tiling on walls (inside material editor), to make individual tiles look bigger, and to perhaps stretch them about 50% upwards, so it would look like they are stretched vertically. Also, would significantly reduce tiling for ceilings and perhaps make them brighter (?).
It can't be done in the editor but it can be done on import.
So let's say you have some textures that have alpha channels and you want to move those alpha channels to another file but skip the step of re-saving your original texure in a new version w/o an alpha, just re-import (through the import dialog, not right-clicking in the generic browser) and make sure to check compression no alpha this will force DXT1 compression. It used to be back in the day we had DXT3 which was DXT1 compression with an alpha channel. But I'm not sure if UDK will import a dds file. I've never tried.
But you can almost always use much smaller resolution maps that you would normally have put in an alpha channel. Spec, MicroDetail, MacroDetail, Transmission etc... You'll find bump and transparency to be the typical exceptions to downresing