Cornfield Environment WIP

JoshWilkinson

I'm a noob to foliage and in my attempt to expand my skillset, I decided to tackle a very organic, very simple scene. It's basically just one plane, one corn stalk mesh and a lot of dense foliage painting. I plan to add more foliage, things like weeds and grass, down the center of the road to conceal the very choppy vertex painting on right now. But for today I decided to put a large focus on nailing down the lighting and feel. All critiques welcome!

ZacD

Plant leaves tend to be translucent. That'll help get rid of the harsh blacks on the corn. Also the scene could use something that gives a better sense of scale, a tractor or trash, or something.

poopsterspappy

Hey, your sky is way too blown out. Your getting very monochromatic with your corn, some cool ambient light would help alot but your color range in the corn it's self is much narrower than some of the reference photos i found in a google image search... you need variance in your color in the dirt as well, some cool tones there as well .I know you can find photos that refute my claim and will support that your color world is within reason, but for the purpose of pictorial interest pushing the ranges of color, temperature and value would yeild a much richer image. Looks wonderful keep going

JordanN

Looks like the scene of a nuclear explosion. Even the corn looks like its withering.

I'd try to play around with the colours more. If you're going for a sunset approach, perhaps try and target this.

_DMage_

Thats a very nice everything you have there, But can you tell us a little bit about you rendering program or Engine?

JoshWilkinson

Thanks for the crit, guys. I completely agree with you, Zac; the corn stalks would really shine with some good translucency. I'm not completely sure I know the proper way to do that though. I attempted doing it through sub surface scattering and I think it did a lot to help the corn, but it's not really reading as "translucency", ya know?



As for my color palette, I saw this girl's work on Instagram and decided to make it into a project. Her yellows are a little more orange, her greens are pretty saturated and everything else is particularly desaturated; I love that. Planning on adding more foliage to the center of the road to try and create that effect. And obviously, I reduced the blown out sky a bit.



And thanks, DMage. I'm using UDK.

EDIT: forgot to add the Instagram pic

poopsterspappy

sooo much better, now I'm jealous really looking good

JoshWilkinson

I'm having some trouble with my foliage. I applied some dense grass through the foliage paint but the results are less than desirable. On the left is unbaked lighting and on the right is baked lighting: all black. What creates that effect? I figure the dark sections on the right are just from a single sided plane with downward-facing normals are casting shadow across the whole plane, but I'm not sure how to diagnose the problem on the right.

SanderDL

Did you just say that your normals are facing downwards? If so, they really should be going upwards. Also you need to adjust your shader to get correct lighting.

JoshWilkinson

I figured out the problem with my lighting; Eat3D addresses it in the foliage tutorials but to summarize in it's most basic form, the material needed to be set to "custom_phong" and the diffuse needed to be boosted.

Here's today's progress. I'm gonna get rid of those super ugly planes and just vertex paint the water effect.

JoshWilkinson

Been a while with updates. Changed the lighting quite a bit, added a dynamic skydome with sun disc and a barn in the distance for scale.

DWalker

You might want to reduce the lighting on the barn, turning it into more of a silhouette, both to match the sun's apparent position and to reduce its impact on the scene.

Since it's already so close, you might want to shift the road's vanishing point to the intersection of a line at the top third and the left third of the scene.

Bek

Corn leaves seem a little too dirty and saturated. The mix of green and brown grass down the middle of the road seems strange. What little grass you'd get there would probably be flattened and more sparse. Maybe also consider having the dirt appear slightly moist as it's weird having the puddles (especially tiny ones) next to really dry dirt. Sun is still too nuclear.

Pretty awesome scene though, looks like it would be fun to explore!

JoshWilkinson

Thanks for the crit, guys! Changed the camera position, cleaned up the dirtiness of the corn, tweaked the colors of the grass and corn a bit, lightening up the shadows and AO in the corn and changed the sun quite a bit.

I like the idea of making the shadows of the barn a little darker but I'm not sure how. I darkened the shadows in world properties under "environment color" and found the shadows were way too dark in the field. Adjusting the "diffuse boost" of the individual mesh affected the entire barn, not just the silhouette.