[UDK] Sea Defenses
polycounter lvl 18
Hey guys,
Here is something I have been working on in UDK, I posted last week in the WAYWO thread. I have been working on it for the past 4 or so weekends.
Originally I was going to do a very similar scene which I posted here, but in starting it I got distracted / scared and instead went on to do this. It is based on a concept I found by the crytek
guys:
I had to stray a bit from the concept, mainly in the lighting, The direction wasn't helpful in showing the more interesting areas of the scene. Aside from that I am trying to stay as close as I can!
Cliffs:
I had a few different approaches in mind for this, mainly sculpting tiled rocks, that was doing my head in so I went with crazybump instead. Using displacements made from crazybump as a base for the sculpting I think I got a few nice results. Half these textures were never used in the end how ever:
The main form of the cliff I sculpted in zbrush, then took into meshlab for an ingame mesh:
This was taken into UDK and slapped with a vert material. I had unwrapped 2 channels, one for tiled
textures and one for the lightmap. I used the lightmap channel to overlay normals generated from the zbrush sculpt of the mountain and in the normal maps alpha channel I had a leveled cavity map to pop the highlights of the cliffs out more. This was added over the top of the vert painted diffuses.
In addition to this I had grass / moss texture mixed in for the z-up thingy method, thingy:
Beyond this I added decals on top for streaks and bird poo etc. There are still more decals to come in this way as well as some vegetation for the entire scene.
The end result of all this is this:
Water:
!! BREAKDOWN TO COME !!
Castles:
The castles are fairly simple, a few variants of the one brick - damaged clean etc overlayed with a messy 1-1 diffuse for the streaks. The base of the towers have a few extra verts to paint in the flagstones, which I have yet to properly blend
The walls have a different sort of brick, it inst obvious when looking but adds a tiny bit more variation. The taller towers will also have a few different bricks.
Anyway enough rambling, I am very hungry! Her are some pics of the scene as it stands today:
I have a lot planned for this as far as atmospherics go, lighting, fx, flags and seagulls are all still to come.
Any feedback good or bad would be appreciated, I tend to get lazy and leave stuff unfinished if no one notices anything wrong with it.
Some more shots / progress shots up until this point can be seen here:
http://mrsmo3d.com/sea_defense/
Thanks for reading!
Here is something I have been working on in UDK, I posted last week in the WAYWO thread. I have been working on it for the past 4 or so weekends.
Originally I was going to do a very similar scene which I posted here, but in starting it I got distracted / scared and instead went on to do this. It is based on a concept I found by the crytek
guys:
I had to stray a bit from the concept, mainly in the lighting, The direction wasn't helpful in showing the more interesting areas of the scene. Aside from that I am trying to stay as close as I can!
Cliffs:
I had a few different approaches in mind for this, mainly sculpting tiled rocks, that was doing my head in so I went with crazybump instead. Using displacements made from crazybump as a base for the sculpting I think I got a few nice results. Half these textures were never used in the end how ever:
The main form of the cliff I sculpted in zbrush, then took into meshlab for an ingame mesh:
This was taken into UDK and slapped with a vert material. I had unwrapped 2 channels, one for tiled
textures and one for the lightmap. I used the lightmap channel to overlay normals generated from the zbrush sculpt of the mountain and in the normal maps alpha channel I had a leveled cavity map to pop the highlights of the cliffs out more. This was added over the top of the vert painted diffuses.
In addition to this I had grass / moss texture mixed in for the z-up thingy method, thingy:
Beyond this I added decals on top for streaks and bird poo etc. There are still more decals to come in this way as well as some vegetation for the entire scene.
The end result of all this is this:
Water:
!! BREAKDOWN TO COME !!
Castles:
The castles are fairly simple, a few variants of the one brick - damaged clean etc overlayed with a messy 1-1 diffuse for the streaks. The base of the towers have a few extra verts to paint in the flagstones, which I have yet to properly blend
The walls have a different sort of brick, it inst obvious when looking but adds a tiny bit more variation. The taller towers will also have a few different bricks.
Anyway enough rambling, I am very hungry! Her are some pics of the scene as it stands today:
I have a lot planned for this as far as atmospherics go, lighting, fx, flags and seagulls are all still to come.
Any feedback good or bad would be appreciated, I tend to get lazy and leave stuff unfinished if no one notices anything wrong with it.
Some more shots / progress shots up until this point can be seen here:
http://mrsmo3d.com/sea_defense/
Thanks for reading!
Replies
How exactly do you go about using more than one uv channel in one shader anyway?
I'm curious about you castle parts, you have some nice details in the diffuse. Is that a mix of vertex painting and big decals/patterns inside the material to break the tile ?
rocks are very convincing and i love the monumental feel of wall structures.
Froyok - Thanks! The castle walls have a texture over the top of the brick work, the brick diffuses themselves are very basic, a few light and a few dark ones here and there
How well does it hold up at player level? Any plans for shots at a human scale? Probably the only weakness in this atm.
Your rock texture ROCKKKKKK!!!
Cheers!!!!
WATER:
The water shader is based on an idea I had on how to go about getting some nice tessellated waves, this was basically 3-4 heightmaps that were different scales / pan speeds controlled by how dark the output is.
I used the output of the height maps to mask the white foam for the wave caps which added a bit of realism. When the waves crossed over each other the output got whiter and so the white foam caps came in more.
This was working pretty well but I ran into a lot of problems that my brain couldn't handle. The result of the tessellation can be seen here
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pretty bad quality video I'm sorry
This was the base I used for the water in this scene, but instead of going down the tessellation road I used the wave set up on a normal shader.
After ditching tessellation and keeping the wave setup I worked on the depth blending to pop out the sand bars under the water. As well as depth blending for the shore foam, which has a bumpoffset to put a bit more life into it.
The waves are passed through a lerp with the alpha being a splotchy low res map that scrolls in the opposite direction to the waves to give it that sort of rolling foam feel, it worked to a degree, mainly in breaking up the solidness of
The wave caps:
The reflection is fairly transparent and desaturated then run through the normal map for its distortion. I changed the waves from simple grey scale heightmaps into nice volumed normals through crazybump, this brought the wave caps and
depth of the wave into line, made a bit more sense.
The Uv's for the water are bent in and around the geo from the cliffs and the beach / dock etc, again to put a bit more life into it.
WAVES:
Here's the hack, it's just a bunch of low poly planes on top of the water plane - vert blended to pop in and out:
Things still to do:
Impression of rocks / refs / seaweed under the water itself, either through diffuse on water or maybe tiling texture on the sand bed below it.
Fix shoreline foam! Too blue
Probably lots more.
I hope this breakdown makes sense, let me know if there anything you guys want a bit more detail on!
The Cliff uvw:
faerin: Cheers! I hope to do some up close shot around most of the areas, I think maybe adding a few props, like barrels, cannons, rope and a ton of decals should help alot. and vegetation!
tottot: Thanks! I ended up taking crazybumps displacement map into zbrush, polishing it a tiny bit, then baking that, and overlaying it with even more crazy bump love from the same tiled ref texture from cgtextures! A lot of back and forth trying to get the bigger shapes to read well.
toolpaddz: You are right I didn't use world aligned. For unwrapping the uvw I used the normal relax in max. I got very lucky as to how well they came out, there is a lot of pinching here and there but it's hidden in all the noise
Here is a shot of how varied the angles are:
Hope that helps.
Thanks for all the feedback guys, I will be updating all this when I can
You said you generated a heightmap and used that as a base to sculpt in zbrush. Any particular brushes you used? And did you sculpt it in 2.5D or 3D? If 3d, how did you get it to tile?
You said you didn't use all of those cliff textures. Which ones did you not end up using and why? What made you decide to use the ones you did?
How did you set up your shader to paint the tiling rocks? Are they all on one image, or are they separate texture files? If they're the same texture, what do some of your settings look like that helped you eliminate texture seams?
The only critique that I have for you is on the large wall, the partial pilaster things along the length of the wall has some funky UVs that I can see in some of your archive shots. It looks good from a distance, and I don't expect the player to really ever get that close, but it may be worth fixing that eventually.
Otherwise this is utter perfection!
dissonance: I will defiantly keep it!
Makkon: Thanks! yeah you are right the uvw's are lazy on the wall
I did this in 3d on a basic plane, dynameshing as I went, flipping between perspective and ...not, i used orbs racks brush alot, trim dynamic and clay with a noisey alpha. All with the curve setting in the brushes options set to 2 so it tiles as I sculpt, then I would export that, bake the center part in max and offset it in photoshop, fix any tiling issues there may be. Bit of a redundant way but I am comfortable with it so it works for me.
I experimented, switching them out for others and finally ended up with these:
Their shapes read the best on the cliff.
It's 1 diffuse, rgba - each channel being a greyscale diffuse and then 4 normal maps that go with each diffuse., then over the top is the macro normal map from zbrush with its alpha channel housing the edge highlights to slap over the diffuse. colour for rocks comes from another small tiled texture, it having the gradient in its alpha to mask out the z-up grass closer to the base of the cliff.
I will upload the shader for this at some point, when I have finished this at the very latest!
Thank for checking it out
I took a short video of the ocean shader and will post pics of the shader / upload it once I have cleaned it up at the end of this project
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I'm really excited for your progress!
Progress has been slow this last week / weekend. Here are some shots of it's current state:
I have been playing with the sky, lighting and look up table. I'm not too sure if I have gone too far with the levels of everything. Any suggestions would be welcome!
serriffe - its a mix of 2 tileable 512*diffuse/normals and 1 512 overlay for all the dripping details. I will scale the tieables down to 256 at some point!
Here are some updates, I have strayed even further from the original concept - adding an elevator for a king / nobles to escape through if they need to. As well as some variants to the towers and a lot more block outs. All of this is based on a paint over a friend did for me (much love seany bighams):
paint over:
block outs:
Please let me know if I have gone overboard as I often tend too!
Cheers
Do you plan to add some wooden structures on the wall like the ones used to drop projectile and fired oil? It may add some variation