The Swamp

d1ver

Hey guys,
I thought I'd finally post something that's been collecting dust on my hard drive since summer. I'm sorry it's not a big fancy project. I have one in my mind I just don't know when I'll be able to get to it.

This one though, though, it just minor thing that I spent a few weeks on. Oh and I didn't not do the geometry of the center piece Let's get on with it.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Se-gILjUXY&feature=player_embedded"]Swamp - YouTube[/ame]

If you think you recognized the the geometry - indeed you're right. It was a texturing test that was nothing but pure joy to sink my teeth into.
The test did get me the job, but unfortunately I had to turn it down for personal reasons.

All texturing took exactly one week.

d1ver

Thanks for stopping by folks Come agian!

PredatorGSR

*cough* nd art test =P

d1ver

I tried to keep it spoiler-free but you ruined it

Lloth

Awesome work man. The ambiance is great. Nice breakdown as well!

d1ver

Appreciate it Lloth! I might do a little tut on the some shader stuff here and set up a package for giveaway whenever I have time. cheers

mikhga

Looks absolutely stunning, and thank you so much for the breakdowns. That tree texture is unbelievably tasty. Good luck if you are going to submit it!

SideEffect

wow that alpha trick is a really good idea

toolpaddz

Wow that opacity trick is neat! Thanks for sharing!
Btw the scene appears a bit over-saturated to me. Surely just personal taste, though.

d1ver

Thank you very much,Mikael!
Yeah that tree texture was one tough bugger, so I'm glad you're liking it

I already submitted it a long time ago and it went really great! The guys liked it and it really was a pleasure to chat with them. I got the job but due to some circumstances decided to eventually let go of the idea.

Ha-ha thanks SideEffect! I found it be pretty slick too if I may say so myself :P

You're welcome toolpaddz and thanks for your input. Yeah I tend to push a tad far at times.

benji

Awesome stuff man, loving the breakdowns! There's always so much to learn from your stuff!

d1ver

You're to kind benji! I just wish a had more time to postable stuff and share it with you guys.

CactusFantastico

Damn I learnt a lot from this.

leleuxart

Nice work. Thanks for the extra bits of info with the blue channel mask and your setup for the barrel!

mikhga

That's a shame, you certainly seem like a good fit for ND. One question about the scene, how did you do the foliage textures/normals? Did you use something like Maya's Paint Effects or is it a combination of straight forward modeling and nDo?

d1ver

You're very welcome, CactusFantastico.

Thanks, leleuxart! You're welcome. That particular piece of information could be found in something as old as Eat3d's Damaged Pillar tutorial. "Oldie but goldie"

Mikael, yeah I used to be bummed about it as well, but...
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7leQB_Oe_k"]The Rolling Stones - You Can't Always Get What You Want (lyrics) - YouTube[/ame]
Whatever happens I'm just making lemonade out of it

Regarding the foliage - it's nothing like that. I noticed that people tend to go the roads you mentioned but it feels too slow to me. Foliage is 100% done in Zbrush.
I prepped a demo of that technique to give as a workshop here at work and was thinking of doing similar stuff for the lovely people of the internet, but I just can't seem to find time. Hopefully not far from now. But if you want a pointer just create leave objects and paint with them and do the base branches from zspheres. You can then just arrange them on the canvas and paint additional smaller brunches right in 2.5D. Just make sure to do it all on separate layers if you'll want to tweak stuff later on in photoshop.
I hope it helps!

If anyone got any more questions of crits don't hesitate.

cheers,
Andrew

mikhga

Thank you so much for the explanation! I didn't think of that way of doing it before, mainly since I don't use zBrush, but the reasons for me to learn it are certainly piling up. Did you bake your normals etc. from zBrush as well or did you use an external baking application for that?

m4dcow

How do you combine the soft transparency with the levels adjusted image?

I was thinking of doing something like this to pack multiple gradient maps into single channels of an image, but could never come up with a way to combine them.

d1ver

No worries, mikhga!
Zbrush is an environment artists friend. Highly recommend.
And baking for environment artists is a point I have quite a lot of gripe with. Environments use tiled textures and I find Zbrush to be the best for that. So noooo baking for environments. I find this point to be stressed to much for beginning artists, where they just try to bake everything down. Real game environments are not made like that. Props - maybe. But environments - tiling all the way!
Also there's a question at the end of the post

Hey, m4dcow,
It's tricky for sure. Well the way you do it in photoshop you just grab the level adjustment sliders assign some particular space to particular images as in this image:
http://www.artisaverb.info/Swamp/NoTransparency.jpg
But it's decoding that that become tricky.
For example if you allocate first 32 brightnesses for the transparency map you can't just clamp it in UDK to 0.125 and then multiply by 8 to restore it. Something happens upon compression that screws the values so I had to just play with them until I got an acceptable result.
But I never tried encoding multiple maps at once - just diffuse and a transparency map. Which means I could use my image for diffuse as is and extract the Transparency without worrying about where it sits there in regards to 3 more maps.
I wish I could be more helpful but that is as far as I went. Although it would be interesting to look into it later on. I'll keep you updated if I do

A General Question:
Seeing that this could be an issue of interest to a bunch of people I was thinking of doing some proper tutorials on texturing and Zbrush. What parts would you be most interested in particular? From this environment as an example or not if you've got a broader question.

I would greatly appreciate your input!

mikhga

Thank you for the answer. And about your question, I would absolutely love a tutorial on how you did your foliage.

GrimFiction

Awesome stuff, really like how you did the alpha trick! =D A tutorial seems in order *nods*

d1ver

Thanks guys! I'll be looking into it

m4dcow

d1ver wrote: »

Hey, m4dcow,
It's tricky for sure. Well the way you do it in photoshop you just grab the level adjustment sliders assign some particular space to particular images as in this image:
http://www.artisaverb.info/Swamp/NoTransparency.jpg

I guess my question is between the 3rd and 4th image, how do you actually blend the the soft opacity mask with the clamped leaf image?

Snight

Beautiful work D1ver

d1ver

m4dcow, gotcha man. Just grab the transparency mask and use it as a layer/group mask in photoshop. It's as straightforward as it sounds. That way you create intermediate values in the reserved range.
You bg has 0 in there. Your subject has more then 32 and since the mask is soft you end up blending between the two in that specific range.
I hope that helps!

Thank you very much, Snight! I loved your work all the way back since UC 2009, so it's double the pleasure

Jeff Parrott

Very cool take on this piece. Awesome job sharing all the tech behind it.

DrunkShaman

Awesome work sir. Thanks for sharing.

ScudzAlmighty

I'm not really a fan of the overall mood and lighting in the final scene, as it feels a little too much like Pyro-vision without the pastel brushwork. But the actuall asset quality and overall amount of awesome stuff going on is just phenominiall. Seriously impressive dude, and makes me kinda ashamed of the version I did a few years back:(

jamiemurphy

great work, thanks for breakdown

ZeroStrike

IT'S SO DARN PRRRRDDDEEE! Nice Job.


*Edit*

*1 hour later* I just watch your youtube video on "Quantifying Beauty in Representative Art". Quote, "WOW!". lol I am really glad that I watch it. Learned more about the breaking down an image even more. Thank you so much for doing that presentation and recording it and sharing it.

d1ver

Wow guys, thank you so much for the kind words!

Thanks Jeff. It's my pleasure.

Nitewalkr, you're very welcome!

Appreciate the feedback, ScudzAlmighty. I had to google pyro-vision, 'cause I'm not much of a TF2-head:D
But I see what you mean and it's actually quite interesting. I try to push lights and colors as far as I can. And naturally people like bright lights and saturated colors compositions, but after a certain point it seems overwhelming for some. Like for example the new DMC, in the IGN review i think they said the colors looked like an overdone instagram filter, while I was crazy in love with the colors.
I wonder what causes that in particular. And interesting subject to study and some valuable feedback...If you had to specify, what puts you off? Color saturation, color composition, contrast, brightness?
Anyway, I digress, man:) Thank you very much for the kind words. And, hey, that's why it was s a few years back - I'm sure right now you'd kick some serious ass

Thanks, jamiemurphy! I might even have more breakdown stuff in a while

Thanks , ZeroStrike. And, hey, I'm super happy you like the talk! Yeah, I know I could definitely use one these when I was starting out. But seriously - I'm super happy if it helped you out. I was considering posting it up around here but the crappy sound quality still keeps me thinking.

Tim1

This is some really nice work, as a beginner with udk and having a swamp in a scene im working on at the moment, I'd love to know how you got that really nice swamp water effect, just looks gorgeous, would be great if you could show a breakdown, thanks!

d1ver

Thanks Tim1, I'm glad you're enjoying it.

I don't have the materials around now but as far as I remember the trick here is UDK height fog I just did the water surface as a distorted reflective plane and used another plane for the bottom. And in between is the height fog with with colors and falloff set up accordingly.

I hope this works for you! Let me know if you have any more questions.
Cheers,
Andrew

synergy11

Nice work.

So you sculpted all these textures in zbrush then did the color maps in photoshop? Even sculpted the big leaf and ground moss in zbrush?

If so what was your staring object for sculpting the big leaf? Did you use zspheres or light box?

Also for the flat ground textures did you sculpt a few pieces of grass then duplicate it around the zbrush canvas?

As devils advocate why not just paint the leaves in PS and pull a normal map with ndo2?

Again great job. Thanks for any feedback!

d1ver

Hey man,

GoZ is an extremely comfortable tool that leaves you with no reason not to do a proper basemesh in your package of choice. So yeah before you get to paint a 2.5D textures you've got to prepare your "brushes"/tools and before you do that you take the 2 minutes to do a proper base in max/maya or whatever. I mean it literally takes you less then 60 seconds to do a base for a leaf or grass.

Some colormaps were done in zbrush, like the grass and the tree leaves for example. Others in photoshop.

As for the flat ground textures, fibermesh allows you to generate your grass like hair in zbrush and "style" it accordingly.

Oh no, no devils advocate here Because the quality is uncomparable. The biggest problem with generated normals is that they can't assume that the object itself is at angle. They "bevel" edges, with a varied definition of an edge. But leaves in real life are actually all over the place with their normal direction and thus will never be lit uniformly, as in generated from a texture. And it goes for all kinds of surfaces. Generated bricks normals will never allow you to put some bricks at an angle allowing you accept light differently then the rest of the bricks. Like here:
http://www.mvirks.de/mvirksWord/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/gcs_details_web.jpg
http://www.mvirks.de/mvirksWord/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/lib_details_web.jpg

And I'm not even mentioning the quality loss that happens upon scaling and rotating your leafs around in photoshop. And also placing them around manually is just a hassle compared to painting them in ZBrush.

I hope that helps
Cheers

synergy11

Thanks for the help regarding the difference in normal map creation. Those pics really helped.

1. Your base mesh is just a basic sillohouette of a flat leaf (all quads) which you then sculpt in zbrush?

2. After you create one leaf you scatter it around the zbrush canvas and then capture your normal maps straight from zbrush?

Is there a scatter function in zbrush or do you place and rotate each leaf?

d1ver

I salute your tenaciousness in asking questions synergy11 Seriously. I think a lot of people are usually reluctant to ask more direct work flow questions, including me sometimes, which is a shame

1.) Exactly. No all-quads required. I don't think I pay attention to that at all and it works out everytime. Subdivide your triangles once and they become quads anyway. So maybe in the days before dynamesh you needed all-quad meshes to compliment the anatomy of faces or something that precise, but right now I hardly seen it being an issue for anyone. At least for environment people.

Not necesserily flat though. Extrude that bad boy, give it some depth, so you'd have some edge transition after subdividing. Maybe even add a bend in max, so it just wouldn't be all to flat. You can play around there all you want.

2)In zbrush you can spray paint with your meshes, yes. And in order to make them rotate more randomly you could just create a 2.5d plane offset by random clouds, so that when you paint your leaves in a separate layer, they still pick their orientation from the normal of the underlying surface. That way it's more organic. And you can also always put a few leaves around by hands to get that specific few places that you want.

Zspeheres are ideal for branches, so the whole pipeline seems very natural. And don't forget to polypaint your leaf tool before populating the canvas. That way you end up with a finished diffuse texture right in zbrush.

If there's anything else, fire away

synergy11

Oh man. Thanks for being helpful.

I didn't know you could spray paint meshes around. So useful for leaf and stone/rock textures. Although I admit I don't follow the conforming to a 2.5d plane offset you mentioned.

And just to confirm you capture your normals, AO etc right out of zbrush with a screen grab correct?

Your bigger plant/leaf looks really good. Everything is completely hand sculpted and painted? Also love the bark texture...Talk more about how you started that texture! heh.

Foliage forever!

JValencia

Great work here, d1ver! I love your take on this piece.
Your talk about the concept of 'Beauty' in art, is really spot-on too; I too arrived at the same conclusion you presented, last year. That little concept is a real game-changer.

Hey, I was wondering how you applied color to your ground textures? I'm sure it was a mix between hand-painting/photo ref. If time allows, I would really appreciate a break-down of the ground texture(s) diffuse map!

Thanks.

bluekangaroo

groovy style