Grand Meteora, UDK Environment

Subtle 1rony

Hey guys. Figured it was time to pimp my stuff I've been working on. This is my very first level in UDK, for a university project. We were given about 8 weeks to propose our own project and complete it. If we don't complete what we originally said we would, our grades suffer. As you can image, its easy to think big in the beginning and wish you hadn't near the end:)

I was originally inspired by this image:


It is a garden within Grand Meteora, which is part of a cluster of 11th century Greek monastaries, built atop sandstone cliffs. I liked that it had a lot of old structures and bare rock walls.

I collected as much reference as I could of the area, its surroundings, and similar structures:




then I came up with a top down layout before starting anything. Of course the reference could only take me so far, so there was lots of room for interpretation. I tried to stay as true to the layout as I could imagine:



I learned a ton through the creation process. Many mistakes were made. Most everything was custom meshes and I was regretting this towards the end. Ironically, I studied up quite a bit on modularity in my spare time. I appreciate more its usefulness after this project.




Was able to get some cool results playing with ivy Generator. Here is a screen cap of my settings:


Rendered out cards in maya, normal map from crazy bump:


in game ivy:

I really like how it looks

In game screen grabs, so far:



(a less interesting shot, but hopefully you can see how the overall layout came out)

I welcome feedback and critiques. This isn't due yet til wednesday, so its in progress til then:)

ambershee

It's pretty reasonable - the layout itself is nailed quite nicely and the composition isn't too bad. My major critiques would be:

1) The wall meshes are very uniform (on top in particular), despite being constructed of large stones. I would genuinely have used real geometry on the tops, and sides of the walls, as the silhouettes don't match with what my eyes expect to see. Alternatively, in your reference material the tops of the walls are somewhat flat - casual observation suggests that that's because of how the walls have been built. You'd probably want to use a non-vertically-tiling texture to replicate that effect. You may also want to use much stronger normals, or more likely a parallax effect on that stonework.

2) Your lighting is incredibly uniform and it's actually harming the scene's composition - at present it's very flat, leaving the scene with little depth. Ignoring the washed out sky and tower in the background, this was a good reference for lighting. The lighting has better contrast with the environment since the light source is somewhat blue instead of yellow. Given the colours in the environment, I may have personally considered using UDK's night scene instead of the afternoon or whatever it is that you are using.


3) Colour! The brick and stone work in your references consists of a much broader variety of tones than your current work. There are reds, oranges and yellows at work in the reference, whereas you're using only yellows and browns. This makes a fair bit of difference.

4) Foliage. The ivy and trees are a reasonable start - but I would include more, like the potted plants, as they add much needed contrast to the scene, both geometrically and in terms of texture / colour. I would look into using transmission to brighten up the leaves where light would scatter through them.

5) Decals or noise. Use decals or noise maps to help break up the flat surfaces a bit more.

Subtle 1rony

Thank you for the feedback ambershee. I can't believe I forgot about the parallax offset in my rock wall texture, I'll have to test it out and see how it looks. I do agree with you that the colors are off from the reference. I redid the texture itself about three times. One of the biggest challenges I had was trying to hide the tile breakup and evenness of it all. I didn't consider a horizontal only tile, I could see how that might help. Bigger stones on the bottom, slightly smaller on top, etc.

As for the transmission you mentioned, I'm not familiar with that, is that part of material attributes?

ambershee

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/MaterialExamples.html#Transmission

UT3 used it on a lot of it's foliage meshes. I suspect the Day / Night demo in UDK does the same.

Subtle 1rony

Hello, I finished this up a while back, but here is the result of my first udk project. Feedback more than welcome.

[vv] 67702141[/vv]

LANKUS MAXIMUS

Nicely done dude, congratulations on completing your first UDK project.

It has come a long way since the initial designs.

Only major crit i would give is that some of the shots have a lot of open sky in them. I think the overall scene could be strengthened quite a lot by some basic background detail's.

Maybe a few low poly towers of building tops? Even a few mountains or trees by creating some simple alpha cards?

Again, well done!

Subtle 1rony

Thanks Lankus! I agree about the open sky part, thanks for the tip. I did a lot trial and error learning with this one and there are still a number of issues that could be improved I believe. Now I can begin to apply what I've learned to upcoming projects, which are in the works:)

LANKUS MAXIMUS

That's good to hear. I look forward to seeing your future works.

All the best