joshschmitt : Yes , I have done all that, from the highlights and tone in the postproccess volume to the specs and diffuse in the material , it may be some import error or it could be the shadow res, in any case I manage to brighten up a bit.
Also the grass still has some issues , Im gonna redo the planes.
Here is my first post for this, I still need some work but tell me what you guys think. I plan on finishing before the deadline. Now off to make a grass texture from my grass model.
So I made many changes to my scene based on the awesome feedback and suggestions. Here's the result:
Best terrain so far, loving it
The wall texture needs more work, i thing the brick size is too small. Although you have some variation on the wall, it fades out from distance because of the small size of the bricks. You could make them larger or try and get some large color/damage variation on it so it's stil interesting when viewed from a distance.
@joshscmitt Really liking the trees but there's something about the scale of the damage on the walls that bothers me. It may just be a personal preference though. @Rockguy,
I hope you don't mind an observation, your reeds/grass on the left side feels too straight to me. I like your foliage but it seems that gravity would weigh on those a bit.
After dealing with some annoying relearning and medical issues, I realize my project is nowhere even near completion. I'll show what I have by friday. So disappoint
I really didn't have a lot of time for almost two weeks, so there wasn't really much progress... But I finally did the foliage yesterday, and I guess it looks okay for now. I will do some tweaks if I have a little time left before the next challenge starts. The water will hopefully get a less wavy normal soon But today, I will finally do the textures for the buildings, I guess this is more important
Does anyone know what's going on with the self shadowing of my wall? Escpecially the "line" on the rightmost wall and the sewer are looking pretty wrong. The only light source that casts shadows is the sun. It would be really great if anyone had an idea what the problem might be.
Thanks for the quick reply! Well, I'm working with Maya, so there's no such thing as smoothing groups.
But like everytime I ask for help, I figured it out myself withing minutes The lighting in UDK doesn't work correctly with single sided planes and I only forgot to set the material to two sided. My problems always seem to have to do with some stupid little checkbox :poly131:
Aaaaand another problem.
This is my vegetation side by side with the one that cames with the engine. THAT one receives shadow from the wall while mine doesn't, any thought ?
1. I'll be bold....Can I get some comments, and critiques on this ?, It's my first environment,1st hand painted assets , and first time in UDK. SO I am really in a vacuum here. I know about the tiling issues, that need to be fixed ,stretching,cleanup, and getting my trees in , but overall how does it work as a environment, is it cool, does it suck, do things work well together? I've just been looking at it way too long.
2. I am only using a dominant directional light in an importance volume. What are you guys using as far as lighting goes? and why does my grass become transparent in front of the water and not in front of the wall? Is it an order issue i guess
Thank you guys I really appreciate it and congrats on all of your efforts. It's almost over and it's been fun getting to chat a bit
poopsterspappy : the hand paint is good , although the walls could have some variation with the tiles, some decals or tiled material grunge could help.
Your lighting dosent seem to be that much present , move the angle of the light source and check that your ambien dosent cast shadows.
Im using a domain directional light as main light and a massive point light as ambient. also changed the highlights a bit.
As for the ghostly plants , it could be a problem with your alphas or the setup of the opacity in the material editor , changed to masked and connect the white node of your diffuse to the opacity channel.
1. I'll be bold....Can I get some comments, and critiques on this ?, It's my first environment,1st hand painted assets , and first time in UDK. SO I am really in a vacuum here. I know about the tiling issues, that need to be fixed ,stretching,cleanup, and getting my trees in , but overall how does it work as a environment, is it cool, does it suck, do things work well together? I've just been looking at it way too long.
2. I am only using a dominant directional light in an importance volume. What are you guys using as far as lighting goes? and why does my grass become transparent in front of the water and not in front of the wall? Is it an order issue i guess
Thank you guys I really appreciate it and congrats on all of your efforts. It's almost over and it's been fun getting to chat a bit
Even if it's very different from the concept, i like it, but i feel that you must do things the way they should be made and only then to try and go your own way. This is good if you are sure that you can do the original image and style or if you just wanted to learn the engine.
As for the result, i like the painted bricks and wood, they look great. The problem i see is that there is a difference between the gate and the walls, you could borrowed some colors from one to the other, you have blue on your wall but you dont have any red/browm on the gates so right now there is a split there between the two.
The grass terrain texture could have used some variation, i see there a need for at least 5 layers (grass, underwater mud, grass near the water, the tiles and some grass variant)
The last thing is the grass, you need to have more variation and more coverage, use it to lead the "player"
Overall, this is very different and with a bit more timme on it could be awesome
joshschmitt : Is going good , the grass looks great ,but the the arc's geometry looks weird , also in the walls there this weird like sand texture, I'm guessing is grunge , but needs more detail, I like the flags good choice withe yellow border, as for the lighting it needs more contrast, try some ambient lights and up the intensity of the main light.
I finally manage to fix the walls , tweaked the lights and fixed the vegetation , replaced the trees with new alphas ,only thing left is finish the background buildings and putting them in the scene.
@rockguy Firstly, thank you for your input I had my foliage set up wrong you were right and now things are looking better. I also switched to Dominant Directional that did the trick after much frustration. Regarding your image I think it looks very good but I feel your shadows are far too dark it's making your grass look burnt, your archway looks really good. Very atmospheric , really liking your brick textures
@shosh, Thank you so much man all of your input is on point and I'm going to work on all the things you enumerated . I new I was gonna get busted for deviating too far from the concept but I had to. I come from a portrait painting background, and I spent the last five years catching up on digital techniques following tutorial after tutorial trying to match what others were teaching. I've haven't done anything from my imagination for sooo long so I went ape on this..lol
@joshscmitt It's looking great, I was wrong about the right wall but I damage do agree with rockguy about the shape of the arch. Really sweet foliage man:)
A Question. Did any of you guys use the landscape system, or terrain system or did you go back and forth between udk and exterior packages?
How would you go about adding more contrast in UDK? I am going to mess around with the process chain in a bit to see if I can get darker shadows like you have. I also think you should break up some vegetation with flowers in your scene.
Well, this is so far, too bad my terrain colors will be deleted when i save the level . I have the buildings done (without the flags) but i have no trees so ... yeah , cryengine took a lot of my time destined for textures and modeling. The good thing is that i hit a lot of problems, that was kinda my goal here, that means i learned a lot and on the next challenge i'll focus a lot more on textures, modeling and fine tuning done in engine
Thanks !
Hmmmmm, looking at this i think i need more variation in the grass
I am not a master with cryengine SDK, but I can relate to those issues.
The issue with the bleeding of terrain might be because you are maybe controlling the diffuse through the material editor. Also always helps to generate terrain and proper folder structure is critical, could be reason not all your content is loading
For the grass make sure you have that specific vegetation instance with cast shadows enable, from the properties.
Well after alot of frustration I finally figured out the first steps regarding trees and lighting in udk, gotta figure out why my shadows are not looking like leaves and develop some material instances...back to bangin my head against the wall..what a day....:poly116:
@poopsterspappy : thanks mate, i was in a doubt : muddy with a more wild vegetation or clear with some nicer vegetation
@gutty :
- the terrain transition problem i solved, i had to put 255,255,255 in the color slot of the material, cut the outer values out of the textures in PS and paint with darker colors.
- yeah, my folder structure ... doesn't exist
- everything was copied from their material and mine had the same things checked from the properties tab. It does work with their material and my textures so it's ok for now. Thanks for the answers man
@joshschmitt Your nailing it man, the third one looks the best. Still not crazy about the arch shape( but whatever that's so incidental and per individual taste). Very moody.... just great, really like the pathway texture alot. Congrats on this .
@Poopsterspappy Just realized that your name is funny and I started loling.
Thank you, you mean the archway for the gate? I see that its too wide like stretched because I "might" have done that ;p. I will have a look to see if I can make the archway more normal.
Hello everyone, I don't know how many are still in this thread considering that the new challenge is about to start , but I wanted to submit my final screenshots of the scene.
I have to cut a lot of corners due to starting the project very late, almost 2 weeks left, so couldn't put everything I wanted In the scene, at least it gave me the opportunity to gain experience with landscape , foliage and light models materials as well as lighting witch is also my personal pain.
Not going to be able to finish this one in time =( I have a lot of texture work done but I got caught up with another project. I'll still post when I finish though.
Ok, this is driving me mad, Cryengine just didn't want to open my saved level so this is all i could do in a couple of hours and all i will do for this. I learned a lot about the things i wanted to learn and i'll take the next challenge too so i can apply everything.
Replies
I see a giant seem that would probably be in the best interest to fix for a portfolio piece.
Your water is noisy, but I don't feel there are wind here. Wall would block wind, and I think the pool is too small to get that noisy.
Otherwise, it's beautiful!
Also the grass still has some issues , Im gonna redo the planes.
Best terrain so far, loving it
The wall texture needs more work, i thing the brick size is too small. Although you have some variation on the wall, it fades out from distance because of the small size of the bricks. You could make them larger or try and get some large color/damage variation on it so it's stil interesting when viewed from a distance.
Oh, and when i paint a terrain layer with color, after i restart the level the textures and layers are there but the color is gone
@myaj looking great man, the water is bangin
@joshscmitt Really liking the trees but there's something about the scale of the damage on the walls that bothers me. It may just be a personal preference though.
@Rockguy,
I hope you don't mind an observation, your reeds/grass on the left side feels too straight to me. I like your foliage but it seems that gravity would weigh on those a bit.
Yeah I forgot to mention that I just streched the image cause of laziness at 7 am before I went to bed.
Heres what I have so far , still need to add the background buildings and decals to the walls also fix the tree leaves.
I kinda have a lot to do :
- decals for the wall
- second texture for wall
- trees (don't think i will)
- roofs
- flags
Well, GOGOGO!
Does anyone know what's going on with the self shadowing of my wall? Escpecially the "line" on the rightmost wall and the sewer are looking pretty wrong. The only light source that casts shadows is the sun. It would be really great if anyone had an idea what the problem might be.
Is it a single smoothing group or 2? Possible solution is to make the entire wall 1 smoothing group.
Thanks for the quick reply! Well, I'm working with Maya, so there's no such thing as smoothing groups.
But like everytime I ask for help, I figured it out myself withing minutes
But thanks a lot anyway!!!
Looking better imediately:
This is my vegetation side by side with the one that cames with the engine. THAT one receives shadow from the wall while mine doesn't, any thought ?
Thanks!
Did you go through and turn on all shadows for the grass texture? Maybe you dont have lightmap for them?
Thanks for answering, unfortunately i have no ideea how to modify what you said in Cryengine. I can't seem to find a good tutorial on this anywhere.
The texture is ok, it works on their vegetation material so there must be something with my material, i just don't know
As a work-around i aplied their material and switched to my textures, but i have to see what went wrong after this ends
1. I'll be bold....Can I get some comments, and critiques on this
2. I am only using a dominant directional light in an importance volume. What are you guys using as far as lighting goes? and why does my grass become transparent in front of the water and not in front of the wall? Is it an order issue i guess
Thank you guys I really appreciate it and congrats on all of your efforts. It's almost over and it's been fun getting to chat a bit
Your lighting dosent seem to be that much present , move the angle of the light source and check that your ambien dosent cast shadows.
Im using a domain directional light as main light and a massive point light as ambient.
also changed the highlights a bit.
As for the ghostly plants , it could be a problem with your alphas or the setup of the opacity in the material editor , changed to masked and connect the white node of your diffuse to the opacity channel.
Even if it's very different from the concept, i like it, but i feel that you must do things the way they should be made and only then to try and go your own way. This is good if you are sure that you can do the original image and style or if you just wanted to learn the engine.
As for the result, i like the painted bricks and wood, they look great. The problem i see is that there is a difference between the gate and the walls, you could borrowed some colors from one to the other, you have blue on your wall but you dont have any red/browm on the gates so right now there is a split there between the two.
The grass terrain texture could have used some variation, i see there a need for at least 5 layers (grass, underwater mud, grass near the water, the tiles and some grass variant)
The last thing is the grass, you need to have more variation and more coverage, use it to lead the "player"
Overall, this is very different and with a bit more timme on it could be awesome
[IMG][/img]
Here's what I have so far, still got loads to do though
@shosh, Thank you so much man all of your input is on point and I'm going to work on all the things you enumerated . I new I was gonna get busted for deviating too far from the concept but I had to. I come from a portrait painting background, and I spent the last five years catching up on digital techniques following tutorial after tutorial trying to match what others were teaching. I've haven't done anything from my imagination for sooo long so I went ape on this..lol
@joshscmitt It's looking great, I was wrong about the right wall but I damage do agree with rockguy about the shape of the arch. Really sweet foliage man:)
A Question. Did any of you guys use the landscape system, or terrain system or did you go back and forth between udk and exterior packages?
How would you go about adding more contrast in UDK? I am going to mess around with the process chain in a bit to see if I can get darker shadows like you have. I also think you should break up some vegetation with flowers in your scene.
poopsterspappy: Your are welcomed , I think is the light model material of my grass that making them too dark, will fix that. Thanks.
joshschmitt: If your already added your post process volume , you can always modify the midtones , highlights and shadows of your scene.
EDIT : post process tutorial ----> http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/UT3_Post_Processing.html
Thanks !
Hmmmmm, looking at this i think i need more variation in the grass
I am not a master with cryengine SDK, but I can relate to those issues.
The issue with the bleeding of terrain might be because you are maybe controlling the diffuse through the material editor. Also always helps to generate terrain and proper folder structure is critical, could be reason not all your content is loading
For the grass make sure you have that specific vegetation instance with cast shadows enable, from the properties.
@poopsterspappy : thanks mate, i was in a doubt : muddy with a more wild vegetation or clear with some nicer vegetation
@gutty :
- the terrain transition problem i solved, i had to put 255,255,255 in the color slot of the material, cut the outer values out of the textures in PS and paint with darker colors.
- yeah, my folder structure ... doesn't exist
- everything was copied from their material and mine had the same things checked from the properties tab. It does work with their material and my textures so it's ok for now. Thanks for the answers man
I really like this one, might say this is the one but want to add some more color variation.
Thank you, you mean the archway for the gate? I see that its too wide like stretched because I "might" have done that ;p. I will have a look to see if I can make the archway more normal.
Thanks for the feedback.
Hello everyone, I don't know how many are still in this thread considering that the new challenge is about to start , but I wanted to submit my final screenshots of the scene.
I have to cut a lot of corners due to starting the project very late, almost 2 weeks left, so couldn't put everything I wanted In the scene, at least it gave me the opportunity to gain experience with landscape , foliage and light models materials as well as lighting witch is also my personal pain.
Thanks to Alex for this challenges and as well a thanks to poopsterspappy, mjay85, joshschmitt , sipher3325, richwderby for your feedback.
Have a good weekend.
Thanks guys !