Take what I say as being on the right track if not 100 percent correct . The first thing is to take into consideration that the concept art, while awesome, has some definite perspective and FOV flaws, so going in there and analyzing those first goes a long way. The FOV, which I would have nailed immediately instead of going back and forth was a big mistake on my part and a big time waster. I still don't have it right. The UDK FOV according to the Unreal Wiki is 90. Obviously your camera should match that FOV. I wouldn't try and get my camera to line up with the concept art in the viewport mapped to an image plane. I think you would drive yourself nuts. I would eyeball it, set your FOV to 90 in Maya or MAx, push in and out (in max it's zoom ) DO NOT change your FOV once it's set.
Would you guys recommend a sub to 3dmotive? is it worth it? Been meaning to get some good tutorials and I kinda wanna see the rest of that foliage tutorial...
I for one, massively recommend it. All really high quality tutorials.
I'm currently working through Damian Lazarski's foliage series and it has got to be one of the most informative tutorial's i have ever seen.
But i do wish i had saved myself some money. I've had a membership for 4 months now but i started on the monthly tariff thinking i'd work through a few and leave it. But I'm still paying because of the new UDK releases...
Makes sense to pay for it quarterly in my opinion...
Would you guys recommend a sub to 3dmotive? is it worth it? Been meaning to get some good tutorials and I kinda wanna see the rest of that foliage tutorial...
Hell yeah! I've subscribed twice in the past, and I'm a huge fan. There are a lot of tuts that are directly relevant to this scene--Foliage, the three part material series, advanced mesh painting, all the baking workflow stuff, and maybe even the cascade tutorial if you want to add some subtle animation.
I like em... I think the price is pretty reasonable and they have some really good stuff.
Hey Justin,Any observations on my blockout, really want c+c, thanks
@poopsterspappy - First of all, thanks for all those links dude. That Uncharted presentation was fun to click through!
I think it looks good so far... I like what you did with the elevation differences from the left to right. I'm sure you were gonna do this anyway, but you probably want to use a separate plane for the surface of the water since water shouldn't have any elevation changes like it does in your blockout.
Other than that though, I don't think it's a problem at all that your terrain is one contiguous mesh. I think most of us did it that way.
Oh, maybe you've noticed it already, but I think your path runs into the gate instead of going through it!
@airage - Gaaah that looks awesome already. I think the lighting has a really nice feel. How'd you do the dirt texture... I really like the way that turned out?
Could you post the texture for those rocks? That looks amazing.
I know they're not really much to look at, but here are those textures if you still wanna see them... haha my UVs are just terrible :poly136:. The first one is polypainted and the second one is photosourced, with normals and AO baked in Xnormal for both. Alright, I've been lazy the last day and a half, so back to work
Well I decided to handpaint my textures . I've been photosourcing my textures for so long this should be interesting trying to establish a less photreal look. I started this one today, got a ways to go on it.I want at least two or three to vertex paint the ground with. I'm thinking This one, a grass one and stone one. Thanks Justin for the observations
Well I decided to handpaint my textures . I've been photosourcing my textures for so long this should be interesting trying to establish a less photreal look. I started this one today, got a ways to go on it.I want at least two or three to vertex paint the ground with. I'm thinking This one, a grass one and stone one. Thanks Justin for the observations
I like it, but I noticed a few problems with the texture. For instance all the cracks are facing the same way and all look the same. Maybe changing the directions of some and changing the shape a little will make it look more diverse when tiling.
A little pet peeve of mine is to not have the same colored or shaped brick, crack or grass in the same row as another one. When tiling you would noticed these things and the gamer would too.
Thanks Josh. I agree I just tiled one of Jessica Dinh's textures and I see where I have gone awry. I will definitely work onit. Could you circle the issue with the rocks though? My rationale was through vertex blending with multiple textures any tiling would be a moot issue, but in principal the single texture should stand on it's own. Ah!!!! it just hit me..... my texture above is tiled four times, from that I can now go in and paint out those repeating elements right? (such a noob ...in a good way):)
Thanks Josh. I agree I just tiled one of Jessica Dinh's textures and I see where I have gone awry. I will definitely work onit. Could you circle the issue with the rocks though? My rationale was through vertex blending with multiple textures any tiling would be a moot issue, but in principal the single texture should stand on it's own. Ah!!!! it just hit me..... my texture above is tiled four times, from that I can now go in and paint out those repeating elements right? (such a noob ...in a good way):)
Yeah, just paint out the obvious tiling issues and you should be just fine. The only issue is the repeating rocks/cracks/grass that if you were to tile without vertex painting you would notice easily.
Easiest way is if you just stamp a different color rock or remove a plant where you can see them in a row but make sure its a hard paint brush to avoid distortion and blending issues.
Thanks for all the advice poopsterpappy and airage, your work is looking great so far. Cryengine definitely has the upper hand where lighting is concerned.
I've done my bsp blockout in UDK and I think it matches the concept pretty well, although the tower in background is a bit iffy.
I started to refine my gateway model, definitely needs a lot more work though!
Found this image and I thought it was cool , expressing the life cycle of a European Beech leaf. The paper was quite academic and spoke of particular pollutant effects on the aging process, but this is very expressive of the life cycle and depending on your season could be food for thought.
Wow, so many solid starts to this project! I'ts great to see different interpretations of the same concept. I'm particularly excited to see how the scenes with the painterly textures turn out.
@pooperspappy - I really like where that handpainted texture is going--I love that look. One of these days I soo need to try it. I think you could probably push it a bit more with a bit more definition in the highlights and shadows, but that's an awesome start.
This is all I've got for today... just a tiling dirt texture that I did in Zbrush.... I want to do a rockier variation, and obviously some grass. Really need to start getting stuff into UDK also.
]@JustinSlick, Thanks for the input I'm kinda confused about my light source right now so I'm holding off until I get all of my assets base textures painted. And I'm not sure how much lighting info to paint in. I really like where your going with your textures, the dirt feels very compact and dense. I can see the rocks embedded in it already in my minds eye. . Have you set up a color palette or do you just have it in your minds eye as to what your going for color wise?
@LankusMaximus, I never got around to thanking you for the response to my texture painting. Looking forward to seeing yours as well Is your dad really an arborist? My Father raised orchids as a hobby and somehow I could kill off a cactus from water deprivation...LOL
MDK and Luka. Thank you for the kind words and it is my pleasure to be helpful.Looking forward to seeing everones progress.
Also. I wanted to give props to Anastasiy on his new Color Picker + Magic Picker V.3
HAHA He is yeah. He works over in Spain somewhere now. He's probably more of a 'landscape gardener' now though. All looking good dude, i hope to post an update tomorrow when i get back to working on this beauty.
@JustinSlick. Awesome updates dude. Keep them coming. I keep hearing about Knald everywhere...
I need to check it out, as well as that handy colour wheel that poopsterpappy just linked
@ Animesh - Thanks for that. I've been working through a foliage tutorial series the past few days but i was still wondering how i would tackle the flowers.
@JustinSlick. Awesome updates dude. Keep them coming. I keep hearing about Knald everywhere...
Thanks! Yeah Knald is pretty cool.... I figured I might as well try it out since it's in beta. It doesn't really do anything that Crazybump or nDo can't already do, but it's really fast and easy for extracting a few extra maps out of your normals.
Finally can post some stuff. Should be racing through now that I have some free time. Broke up my bits for the pillars and walls.
And worked on my bricks for my brick texture (why did I do 10 bricks? headaches...) .
Textures and UDK set up soon.
UPDATE 1: Importing my stuff into the UDK I've realized ALL my sizes are waaaaaaay off. So time to rebuild everything.
UPDATE 2: Those bricks I made in zBrush? Yeah... I saved over the last five bricks... so half my work is worthless. I'll be using an older brick set up until I get this right.
JustinSlick - Thanks! The ground texture is really simple, I just put it together by sampling from a couple of photo textures and a little bit of painting, then made a quick normal map with ndo.
Here's the diffuse: http://rmgameart.com/stuff/ground_d.jpg
But I'll replace it once i have made the grass and stone / walkway textures like in the concept. This is just an older texture I use as a placeholder.
ArdentChimeral - Haha now this thing is huge
Still placeholder foliage from cryengine sdk, not my trees! I'm going to work on the terrain / water next.
airage is the reason why I gave up on this!
No, seriously, looks awesome airage!
I've accidentially deleted the package with all the stuff I've already did for this and have no time to start again so yeah...shit happens.
Great work so far guys!
@Akira - No way man that sucks!!! @Airage: Lookin quite slammin I must say @Ardent: Diggin the scale, lookin good @Lankus Maximus Good day sir, How's it goin? @Stepcil: Love those textures man!!
Well I got caught on the learning curve again. Man foliage is a pain in the ass. Here's my first go. It's got some major problems but gotta just work on it. The trees are next. I gotta say I really feel that I can get all of this done much quicker in Photoshop alone without all the baking. I figured out a great flexible method of making branches in PShop . If anyone wants a tut I'll make one Gonna do a handpainted set of foliage to compare to this method later.
I gotta say I really feel that I can get all of this done much quicker in Photoshop alone without all the baking. I figured out a great flexible method of making branches in PShop .
OK, that's pretty much exactly how I'm feeling right now! Haha, I'm going through the 3DMotive foliage tutorial, and the whole time I'm thinking "man I could probably just paint this in PS in like half the time!"
Can't argue with the result though, your stuff looks pretty great.
I'm interested in the branch workflow you worked out if you have time to show some images... def doesn't have to be anything in depth, just enough to get the idea across.
So here's my first tutorial ever :poly102: it's really bad, no sound but it shows you my branch technique. I find it alot easier than drawing them by hand as they demand alot of flexiblity to get proportions and shapes right. This lends itself to working with layers. I will eventually do a Tutorial on making a whole hand painted tree
@Lankus, Thank you good sir. Hope work is going well @ArdentChimeraI, Really developing nicely @Animesh, Thank you, I must give props to Akira, his cat tails inspired me
@joshschmitt : thanks for the help, i finally imported one object into cryengine, so that problem is resolved. @airage : man,, that looks nice, huge difference from what i see in my scene :P
AND NOW, unfortunately, the problem : i am using Maya and i just can't make the dirt layer to work in Cryengine.
It's a maya thing that i don't know because the material that i set up in the engine with the dirt map works on the assets from the Forest level but not on my imported model. Maya exports the vertex color information, because i can see the vertex color but it behaves just like vertex color and not like a mask.
Now, i'we read something about having to paint the vertex color in the alpha chanel of the vertex color set, but that makes the model in cryengine black.
Well, I finally started getting some stuff into UDK. I pretty much finished modeling the gate too, but it's still sitting in Maya. Tree is just a stand-in from the default package, and the ground texture obviously still needs work.
I pushed the colors in PS to give myself a target.... now I need to figure out how to get closer to this in-engine, because right now my actual lighting is super bland.
@poopsterspappy - Thanks for the tutorial! I definitely think that's faster and probably a bit more precise than modeling the branch. Are you hand painting the leaves as well?
That's looking really nice man. good scale. The rocks work really well too.
I'm currently working on the lighting in UDK too. I definitely agree with you on the 'blandness' in relation to the heavenly beauty that you can see in the CE3 scene's :P
Can't wait to use it for the first time on the next Noob challenge.
i am now in udk and put some things in already. But i have problems with udk.
I wanted to make the water. So i made a plane by brush und put a water-material on it, but i cant see it in the editor-view and not in game.
What shall i do? I made water-planes before, but i had never this problem.
And i put accidentally the water-material on the sky. Where can i find the udk-standard skies, to change this again?
Try pressing "Ctrl + Q", this toggles the BSP visibility, maybe you've accidentally disabled it?
The default skies are at Engine -> Content -> MapTemplates -> Sky, at least in my version.
Replies
Abracadabrah; Poof: Here ya go
https://www.3dmotive.com/f102101
Take what I say as being on the right track if not 100 percent correct . The first thing is to take into consideration that the concept art, while awesome, has some definite perspective and FOV flaws, so going in there and analyzing those first goes a long way. The FOV, which I would have nailed immediately instead of going back and forth was a big mistake on my part and a big time waster. I still don't have it right. The UDK FOV according to the Unreal Wiki is 90. Obviously your camera should match that FOV. I wouldn't try and get my camera to line up with the concept art in the viewport mapped to an image plane. I think you would drive yourself nuts. I would eyeball it, set your FOV to 90 in Maya or MAx, push in and out (in max it's zoom ) DO NOT change your FOV once it's set.
I for one, massively recommend it. All really high quality tutorials.
I'm currently working through Damian Lazarski's foliage series and it has got to be one of the most informative tutorial's i have ever seen.
But i do wish i had saved myself some money. I've had a membership for 4 months now but i started on the monthly tariff thinking i'd work through a few and leave it. But I'm still paying because of the new UDK releases...
Makes sense to pay for it quarterly in my opinion...
Hell yeah! I've subscribed twice in the past, and I'm a huge fan. There are a lot of tuts that are directly relevant to this scene--Foliage, the three part material series, advanced mesh painting, all the baking workflow stuff, and maybe even the cascade tutorial if you want to add some subtle animation.
I like em... I think the price is pretty reasonable and they have some really good stuff.
@poopsterspappy - First of all, thanks for all those links dude. That Uncharted presentation was fun to click through!
I think it looks good so far... I like what you did with the elevation differences from the left to right. I'm sure you were gonna do this anyway, but you probably want to use a separate plane for the surface of the water since water shouldn't have any elevation changes like it does in your blockout.
Other than that though, I don't think it's a problem at all that your terrain is one contiguous mesh. I think most of us did it that way.
Oh, maybe you've noticed it already, but I think your path runs into the gate instead of going through it!
@airage - Gaaah that looks awesome already. I think the lighting has a really nice feel. How'd you do the dirt texture... I really like the way that turned out?
I know they're not really much to look at, but here are those textures if you still wanna see them... haha my UVs are just terrible :poly136:. The first one is polypainted and the second one is photosourced, with normals and AO baked in Xnormal for both. Alright, I've been lazy the last day and a half, so back to work
Blocked out the main structures in UDK with bsp. Exported the scene and brought it into maya to refine the models.
Current WIP of the towers and archway.
I like it, but I noticed a few problems with the texture. For instance all the cracks are facing the same way and all look the same. Maybe changing the directions of some and changing the shape a little will make it look more diverse when tiling.
A little pet peeve of mine is to not have the same colored or shaped brick, crack or grass in the same row as another one. When tiling you would noticed these things and the gamer would too.
Yeah, just paint out the obvious tiling issues and you should be just fine. The only issue is the repeating rocks/cracks/grass that if you were to tile without vertex painting you would notice easily.
Easiest way is if you just stamp a different color rock or remove a plant where you can see them in a row but make sure its a hard paint brush to avoid distortion and blending issues.
I've done my bsp blockout in UDK and I think it matches the concept pretty well, although the tower in background is a bit iffy.
I started to refine my gateway model, definitely needs a lot more work though!
I agree with all of JoshScmitt's crit about the tiling issue. That aside, well done dude. Looks really nice.
Inspired me to go away and start working on my first hand painted textures...
Keep it going people. Awesome progress all-round
I think the trunk and style of branch spread is quite similar to that of a goat willow.
I don't really know anything on tree's :P
I asked my tree surgeon Dad and he thought it would be a good reference. Looks pretty similar.
This is all I've got for today... just a tiling dirt texture that I did in Zbrush.... I want to do a rockier variation, and obviously some grass. Really need to start getting stuff into UDK also.
Awesome progress everyone!
@LankusMaximus, I never got around to thanking you for the response to my texture painting. Looking forward to seeing yours as well
MDK and Luka. Thank you for the kind words and it is my pleasure to be helpful.Looking forward to seeing everones progress.
Also. I wanted to give props to Anastasiy on his new Color Picker + Magic Picker V.3
I fyou don't have it, o.m.g get it it's worth ever penny. http://anastasiy.com/colorwheel
@JustinSlick. Awesome updates dude. Keep them coming. I keep hearing about Knald everywhere...
I need to check it out, as well as that handy colour wheel that poopsterpappy just linked
[ame="
Awesome tutorial
I always fancied doing a Noob Challenge myself and so thought I'd take a stab at this one, 9 days late..
Just the central gatehouse done so far.
Thanks! Yeah Knald is pretty cool.... I figured I might as well try it out since it's in beta. It doesn't really do anything that Crazybump or nDo can't already do, but it's really fast and easy for extracting a few extra maps out of your normals.
And worked on my bricks for my brick texture (why did I do 10 bricks? headaches...) .
Textures and UDK set up soon.
UPDATE 1: Importing my stuff into the UDK I've realized ALL my sizes are waaaaaaay off. So time to rebuild everything.
UPDATE 2: Those bricks I made in zBrush? Yeah... I saved over the last five bricks... so half my work is worthless. I'll be using an older brick set up until I get this right.
Also, I did make the scale of mine larger intentionally... To make it more awe inspiring in game :P
The large scale gate works really well.
Here's the diffuse: http://rmgameart.com/stuff/ground_d.jpg
But I'll replace it once i have made the grass and stone / walkway textures like in the concept. This is just an older texture I use as a placeholder.
ArdentChimeral - Haha now this thing is huge
Still placeholder foliage from cryengine sdk, not my trees! I'm going to work on the terrain / water next.
Lookin heavenly airage
airage - Yeah, wanted it to look big and a little cartoony xD! Yours is looking great!
No, seriously, looks awesome airage!
I've accidentially deleted the package with all the stuff I've already did for this and have no time to start again so yeah...shit happens.
Great work so far guys!
Similar thing happened to me on one of my final University projects. The .upk curse lives on...
@Airage: Lookin quite slammin I must say
@Ardent: Diggin the scale, lookin good
@Lankus Maximus Good day sir, How's it goin?
@Stepcil: Love those textures man!!
Well I got caught on the learning curve again. Man foliage is a pain in the ass. Here's my first go. It's got some major problems but gotta just work on it. The trees are next. I gotta say I really feel that I can get all of this done much quicker in Photoshop alone without all the baking. I figured out a great flexible method of making branches in PShop . If anyone wants a tut I'll make one
Foliage is looking sweet. Really impressive for your first attempt. Nice colour variation
I'm working on mine atm. Got the terrain down, just trying to squeeze some details out of it.
I will update tomorrow once the hangover subsides
OK, that's pretty much exactly how I'm feeling right now! Haha, I'm going through the 3DMotive foliage tutorial, and the whole time I'm thinking "man I could probably just paint this in PS in like half the time!"
Can't argue with the result though, your stuff looks pretty great.
I'm interested in the branch workflow you worked out if you have time to show some images... def doesn't have to be anything in depth, just enough to get the idea across.
@airage - YESSSS!
Nothing grandiose, but finally reached a pause point on my other project so I spent a little while messing with a bsp blockout in udk.
After this weekend I should be able to get into this thing full swing.
So here's my first tutorial ever :poly102: it's really bad, no sound but it shows you my branch technique. I find it alot easier than drawing them by hand as they demand alot of flexiblity to get proportions and shapes right. This lends itself to working with layers. I will eventually do a Tutorial on making a whole hand painted tree
@Lankus, Thank you good sir. Hope work is going well
@ArdentChimeraI, Really developing nicely
@Animesh, Thank you, I must give props to Akira, his cat tails inspired me
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r2hGYDMDmA&feature=youtu.be
@airage : man,, that looks nice, huge difference from what i see in my scene :P
AND NOW, unfortunately, the problem : i am using Maya and i just can't make the dirt layer to work in Cryengine.
It's a maya thing that i don't know because the material that i set up in the engine with the dirt map works on the assets from the Forest level but not on my imported model. Maya exports the vertex color information, because i can see the vertex color but it behaves just like vertex color and not like a mask.
Now, i'we read something about having to paint the vertex color in the alpha chanel of the vertex color set, but that makes the model in cryengine black.
I pushed the colors in PS to give myself a target.... now I need to figure out how to get closer to this in-engine, because right now my actual lighting is super bland.
@poopsterspappy - Thanks for the tutorial! I definitely think that's faster and probably a bit more precise than modeling the branch. Are you hand painting the leaves as well?
That's looking really nice man. good scale. The rocks work really well too.
I'm currently working on the lighting in UDK too. I definitely agree with you on the 'blandness' in relation to the heavenly beauty that you can see in the CE3 scene's :P
Can't wait to use it for the first time on the next Noob challenge.
your works looks great. I am envious ^^.
i am now in udk and put some things in already. But i have problems with udk.
I wanted to make the water. So i made a plane by brush und put a water-material on it, but i cant see it in the editor-view and not in game.
What shall i do? I made water-planes before, but i had never this problem.
And i put accidentally the water-material on the sky. Where can i find the udk-standard skies, to change this again?
Try pressing "Ctrl + Q", this toggles the BSP visibility, maybe you've accidentally disabled it?
The default skies are at Engine -> Content -> MapTemplates -> Sky, at least in my version.
I hope this helps!