Wip. Antarctic
polycounter lvl 7
Hi folks, long time on forum, but most probably have no posts)) Anyway why not to share something I working currently, this scene is sort of remake of my old test scene on udk, which I made about 4 or 5 years ago in one week or so. Back then it was small simple scenery which I made to test Dominant light, this time it transforms to something larger an more interesting, It still WIP, and as I see will be for quite a long time))) as far it goes further I need more things to sort out.
Partly portfolio piece, partly test polygon for everything, from workflow to Lighting and Shaders. Therefore most all content is in progress and some things most probably transforms to something different..)))
Currently working on some rocks meshes and need to finalize my custom BRDF shader and make shading consistent across all meshes and landscape, so then I would b able finally fix my ocean surface.. It was better with blurry reflections, but had issue with flickering due kernel blur on scene capture actor(((
[vv]61491488[/vv]
Latest shader
https://www.dropbox.com/s/d54zakjjw94j38m/anty_ShaderPack.upk
https://www.dropbox.com/s/u3sjyrmnu7qha5g/anty_ShaderReferenceMap.udk
And some simple manual -
Partly portfolio piece, partly test polygon for everything, from workflow to Lighting and Shaders. Therefore most all content is in progress and some things most probably transforms to something different..)))
Currently working on some rocks meshes and need to finalize my custom BRDF shader and make shading consistent across all meshes and landscape, so then I would b able finally fix my ocean surface.. It was better with blurry reflections, but had issue with flickering due kernel blur on scene capture actor(((
[vv]61491488[/vv]
Latest shader
https://www.dropbox.com/s/d54zakjjw94j38m/anty_ShaderPack.upk
https://www.dropbox.com/s/u3sjyrmnu7qha5g/anty_ShaderReferenceMap.udk
And some simple manual -
- Grayscle sky lighting,
- Set Spec and Roughness values = 1 if use SRO (Specular, Roughness, Other) (Sample in MI folder)
- Fresnel controls for metals face=1. 90 = 1 - (sample in MI folder)
- Experiment with mixing base layer and coat layer.
For instance blurry base layer and light, more sharp coat layer for plastics.
Semi reflective and gloss main layer, and only on grazing angles coating with max blur for Velvet like effects, etc.
Replies
Those glaciers are incredible, and the terrain and lighting is phenomenal. I want to see where this goes. Show us some breakdowns of how you did the ice, and maybe the terrain!
That sound track sounds so similar to the "the seventh and the third" video.
Terrain - World machine- UDK sculpting- World machine.
codyaq2
Music is short version of Arriving by Michael Nyman, from Gattaca.
Tell us about your approach to the landscape, the snow chunks, the ice, the water. I'd love to hear about it. (In greater depth then what is above.)
Water and terrain are actually same landscape mesh. I create a shader which in procedural way apples water on surface bellow specific height + add some tint gradient on water edge.
So then was pretty easy to tweak shapes of -ice water just with flatten brush.
I tried different ways with the water, like making it with the mesh for water plane and displacement animation ( It was pretty ok, but reflections are dependent to low poly mesh normals, so was no really visual feedback from tessellation. Maybe will try it ones again with cubemaps later.
Ice - there about 3 basic models currently. One for small cracked bits, and 2 models for glaciers ( I made them friendly for scaling and rotation)
World machine
this is great, excellent job
Can't wait to see the finished result.
I can't wait for watching final version of this!
So normally I prefer to make shaders which do things for me as procedural as possible. Especially when you limited in resources))
Thats mean I want to have as much simpler controls for as much things, and use tech to help me out.
First two pics. are about my hight driven Water/Ice selection. Almost like in world machine)) I have one value for height, and one value for gradient from this height, to make my ice slightly darker on bottom, like it wet or so. Same parameters in shaders for ice. I just share settings and colors of water between terrain shader and meshes ( Ideally I need some procedural link between all shaders)
Third picture about my sharpening for imported terrain masks. In fact this is just an UV distortion, which texture shifting I compensate with vec2.
And the last one are two meshes which mostly responsible for all ice around. There 3 extra meshes, but more on support roles.
1 Fake cloth simulation - In fact vertex animation combined with scrolled displacement texture. Vertex alpha as the mask
2 Vignette effect
3 Depth driven color correction - pretty useful thing sometimes
4 Depth value - the same, good for tweaks for brightness based on depth
1 Clouds, with texture driven erosion, currently sky pretty simple, just UV distortion and alpha erosion. Will add fake directional lighting. Due using texture projection have to disable it from dominant light, so have to compensate it with textures and gradients based on world space UV.
2 And lighting on terrain. Shadow material pretty simple but similar to clouds. But with additional mask for points of interest. To keep some areas always less covered by shadows.
First two looks boring but has some cool trick
What is on screen is Sine based world space vertex coloring mask.Could be used to add random ( bit with the pattern) vertex colors on meshes ( as masks for textures blending) and as simple vertex displacement for any instance which adds some light variety to surface of meshes
And last one is test of shaders. I trying to make some IBL lighting in my scene by using few cube maps in custom lighting shader.
Sky currently primitive, just some panned cloud textures with UV distortions+ additional texture directly connected to Power value node, and affects alpha erosion of visible clouds. IWant to make more accurate masking for horizon area and add fake lighting on clouds. Most probably by duplicating clouds layer and inserting it inside of current cloud with some blue color tint and slight shift from Light direction. Problem is I cant use dynamic light to affect clouds due problem with shadow projection. As soon I enabled light function in light source my dynamically lit sky (I had proper horizon fog driven by aerial lighting around sun disc) received shadows from light, what forced me disable dome from dynamic lighting. Problem wass that i thought that I could use 1 directional light for world and copy for sky, but using second dominant light corrupted my scene file, thanks to recovery files, and regular direct light after bake become inactive for sky dome.
Chandler Ice on terrain just a white color and cube map blurred in ATI cubemap tools, it blends with scene reflection from water on some height. Overall blending is based on world vertical position till some hight water, above - ice and snow. Because water still part of terrain I have no problems to tweak any place I need.
only bit im not crazy about is the blowing snow effect near the end. seems too regular, big, consistent in an environment that is very organic, random looking, and irregular.
But is this supposed to be based off a real life place? I doubt polar areas are so mountainous.
It's a pretty geologically active place, with a huge mountain range running right through it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transantarctic_Mountains
maxivz Honestly I need to fix and finish it first. There nothing really special, I just use cubemaps in Diffuse component( Lighting dot normal) of custom lighting. At least for metal - reflections are only one input. But I want to play around with spec component (Lighting dot reflection) and maybe use only diffuse reflections in lighting part, and whole range of reflection roughness in specular.
GAFBlizzard Hmm, can't really say, about 2-3 hours maybe om production, cant remember. But most of smaller ice meshes are pretty low res, and terrain itself if not so long task to bake. I had more problems to bake scatter in one of level iterations, seems like even if I add extra virtual memory to lightmass, my 16 gigs ram were not enough to bake pretty small amount of scatter meshes (16 lightmap size) without build error. Currently I have no scatter in world, but naturally I would prefer to place cracked ice by scatter layer rather by hand as I did))