ESCAPE - Where Do You Go? - BobbyB
polycounter lvl 8
Hi All!
Not sure if i'm going to have time to finish this, but it's been so long since there's been a really awesome environment art competition that I thought I should at least try!
I sketched out a couple of ideas earlier today which have been bubbling around my head.
Both have the theme of escaping work/life/reality, if only for a few moments, to relax and forget the worries of the world. Below are two of my favorite concepts, very rough sketch at the moment, I might fill them out a bit later on, but i suck at drawing. These are really to just give me ideas on composition, layout and a rough visual theme.
Concept 1 - Through the looking glass
The first concept is of a homeless orphan boy living in an abandoned house where he discovers a beautiful old painting of the countryside. His escape is to imagine himself off into this place leaving the hardships of his real life behind, if only for a while.
I really like this one, but I'm not a character artist and I think it relies a little too heavily on the character being present.
Concept 2 - A Little Haven
The second is of a young girl escaping from the her life in industrial urban sprawl that she lives and works in.
This one is going to be a lot more work, but environmentally it is much stronger and doesn't rely on the character so much. I think there is a lot of story I could portray through this image.
Not sure if i'm going to have time to finish this, but it's been so long since there's been a really awesome environment art competition that I thought I should at least try!
I sketched out a couple of ideas earlier today which have been bubbling around my head.
Both have the theme of escaping work/life/reality, if only for a few moments, to relax and forget the worries of the world. Below are two of my favorite concepts, very rough sketch at the moment, I might fill them out a bit later on, but i suck at drawing. These are really to just give me ideas on composition, layout and a rough visual theme.
Concept 1 - Through the looking glass
The first concept is of a homeless orphan boy living in an abandoned house where he discovers a beautiful old painting of the countryside. His escape is to imagine himself off into this place leaving the hardships of his real life behind, if only for a while.
I really like this one, but I'm not a character artist and I think it relies a little too heavily on the character being present.
Concept 2 - A Little Haven
The second is of a young girl escaping from the her life in industrial urban sprawl that she lives and works in.
This one is going to be a lot more work, but environmentally it is much stronger and doesn't rely on the character so much. I think there is a lot of story I could portray through this image.
Replies
Any feedback is much appreciated!
First off, I should probably post my mood board I'm referencing; I really like the idea of it being a hobbled together shanty town type place, dirty, claustrophobic with not much room for personal space. I also have decided to go for a hand drawn/painted style, something I've dabbled with in the past but never quite finished a whole environment with:
I think a environment such as this would benefit greatly from being modular, and so the first thing I did after making the basic block-out was to identify some of the most common shapes and building assets to begin creating a highly flexible set of models. So far I have managed to keep it down to 8 pieces, however I think the end amount of pieces will probably be somewhere around 16-20 in the final piece:
The thing I wanted to avoid most of all when building this environment, was to avoid any repetition and stretching of textures. To do this I have created a base texture which gives each asset basic details and shading and layered that with another texture which is applied via worldspace UVs (projected) which gives the models extra detail and colour variation outside of the models' UV space. It also helps to create the impression that the modular pieces are one big model when placed together:
Here you can see a quick test I put together to put the material and models to the test. So far I'm pretty pleased with the results and I think the hand painted style is starting to come through:
Finally, for those of you who are interested, here's the shader I made for the modular pieces. I tinkered this evening with adding another feature to bring in some subtle variation/noise into the geometry to further enhance the hand-painted look (see 'vertex variation'):
I think I can make this even cheaper if I simplify the lighting model a bit, but I will look into that another day.
Note that I'm using different channels of two textures to save on texture lookups/draw calls, right now there are 3, but they will all be merged eventually!
Here I just made a simple plane, with the pivot and position aligned to that of the building modules. I placed the plane mesh one unit away from the mesh and then exported it. This way I can easily place windows copying the building I want to place it on and swapping the mesh for the window model.
I then made up a cheap bump offset material for the window using an unlit, modulated shader which saves on a ton of shader instructions but also blends nicely with the lighting of the building underneath:
again, to save on draw/texture calls and memory, I merged all 4 textures into the RGBA channels.
Overall I'm pretty pleased with the results:
I also spent a bit of time making some extra props and tomorrow I think im going to be ready to start working on the final scene with the pieces I have:
As always any questions or feedback is welcomed!
Keep it up!
EDIT: Spent the last few days playing around with the WorldAlignTexture function some more. Got some decent stuff out of it and learnt a bunch of things, kinda answered my own questions (below), thanks for sharing.
And you have two textures (one which you've split via a component mask) that you multiply and add together - I presume these are different layers which you are combining but its hard to tell what the layers are - the wooden boards, painted patches, and then added colour variation?
Also those windows work unbelievably well!
I'm a fan of you work and followed your blog while you were developing DearEsther (Which can't receive too much praise, its beautiful). I loved seeing your process and look forward to seeing your work here too.
I have no idea why UDK insists on using a texture object, but it certainly doesn't seem to like anything else being used for some reason, sorry I cant help you on that one. In regards to the second question, yes exactly, I'm saving texture space by using RGB layers for various different textures, paint patches, metal texture, base diffuse, etc and multiplying them together in the shader, it's cheaper than using different textures in terms of memory, texture calls and draw calls.
I've been working on the main scene the past couple of days, putting the modular pieces I made to the test and trying to find some sufficient lighting to get started with.
I've had to rework a lot of the textures due to noise/detail issues over such a large scene, so what you see now is very WIP
Hopefully I can finish the right side this week and start adding in some more modular pieces to bring more variation to the scene. I think I might have to work on the composition a bit in the end too, but we'll see.
Finally, the smoke effects are place-holder too, just made them quickly to get a better idea of how the scene might eventually look.
Can't believe I missed it
Lovely idea and the progress is looking really great. One thing that stands out for me as something that could use some fixing is the blue of the sky. Your ambient light color is more violet which is consistent with the sunset theme. But it has to be reflected in the atmosphere color, because that's basically where the atmosphere color comes from.
Oh and kudos for sharing the mats. That window is thing a freaking awesome idea, man.
Looking forward to seeing this evolve
Cheers!
I really love this work though, the hand painted textures are a delight, my only gripe with the scene as it, is that to me it seems to lack a focal point.
Can't wait to see how this develops though, awesome work as always!
I blocked out the right hand side today and worked on the lighting and smoke effects a bit to try and bring some depth into the scene. I think I might have gone a bit overboard with the smoke, but that can easily be tweaked later on. Haven't worked on the building textures at all today, might have a tweak at them over the weekend if I get time.
The focal point is the ocean in the distance which will become more obvious when I get the details on the roof in the foreground sorted (and hopefully a character model)
As for the sky, it's just a crappy placeholder atm, I want to hand paint something properly when I have the lighting and composition sorted
Still fiddling with the lighting and camera angle & smoke effects:
trying to decide between these two angles for the second shot atm:
For those who are curious here is the scene without lighting, as you can see my textures are mostly monochrome with the lighting primarily being used to colour the scene.
My only critique (though probably more like a personal taste thing), I think it could use a bit more color. Not too much though, and in the right places. Perhaps a bit more of that blue in the background and particularly, I think the child's area in the foreground would look great with a ton of color. To emphasize that escape from reality to a child's imagination.
I really hope you finish. Can't wait to see it!
Anyway here are some of the latest shots: (still debating between angles on the first two shots)
Still have a few tweaks i'd like to do, hopefully I will find the time to finish it.
Great job, Rob, keep it up