For anyone wondering about the CryEngine corrupted files, it's an issue relating to the recent downtime of Crytek's domains. The server are offline and so you can't login on the SDK.
mmg007, great texture work on the outer columns. Is that painted by hand or with the help of photo reference?
Ziegel999: great start. Also, watch out for the tiny extrusion that is like a band on the outer railing of the platform.
I forgot to post an update last week. Since then, I've scaled it down twice and started working on finished assets. Right now, I've got 2 test normal maps in basic shaders that I've splashed over areas which will show seams between the rocks/tiles.
@Ziegel999
Hi there !
One thing i would advice is to make a screenshot from max in somewhat the same angle as the concept, get that on top of your concept in photoshop and compare. As i see it, you need to work a bit on the shape and size of your models. Get the proportions right and go on from there.
@InProgress
Hi, you should double check that your scene follows the concept. Most of he pieces in your scene are way off. Check :
- the size of the middle platform compared to the hole
- the size of the rail of the center platform compared to the rail that surrounds the hole
- the size of the pillars and most important the shape of the pillars
- the size of the hanging ... stuff compared to the center platform
- compare the pillar in the concept, its position relative to the round strip and how much it takes, as surface, from the floor, then go in yout scene and check yours
- the height of the rail on the center platform
This one has been a bit of a fail. Bad decisions lead to me redoing the high and low poly model several times. Ohhh well, live and learn. Here's what I do have...
Texture still WIP at the moment. I also need to reduce the polycount as it is rather high considering it's just a pillar.
You guys have some really good starts so far. Here's a concept/scene analyzation if anyone is interested. Looks like most of you already have a solid understanding of the layout.
You guys have some really good starts so far. Here's a concept/scene analyzation if anyone is interested. Looks like most of you already have a solid understanding of the layout.
I'm a little late on my update but better late than never.
I spent most of my time this weekend getting everything in UDK as good as I could. I wanted to get started lighting the scene (which I did), but ended up spending a lot of time tweaking the lightmaps and materials.
Also, I had time to do a few quick stone sculpts for a few pieces I planned out. Maybe went a little overboard with some of the damage :]
I did some work on the pillars. This is what I came up with so far. Complex modelling is still very difficult for me tho. Suggestions or critics please!
Looks like good Progress! Those pillar-rings is a difficult shape to model, you have some nipping between the rings that's going to show in the bake. To save time(there's A LOT of props in this scene) I made floating geometry for the highpoly (as in not merged at all, just individual meshes duplicated around) The bake from doing floating can sometimes be indistinguishable from actual solids, it all depends I guess. Keep at it!
The inside tiles are looking good, but there is a lot of negative space in your exterior and bridge tiling texture, which is showing the repetition in your texture. I feel its letting the other great work in you scene done as it is drawing the eye towards these, if it was sculpts I would try using the tile sculpts and using ZB and its MRGBZ Grabber to get the tiling texture for this one.
Went back through the thread looking for how people tackled the stone chandelier piece, totally missed this post the first time around, the input is very much appreciated I haven't sculpted many tiling textures before so I'll try to do another iteration in the next few days.
Redhonour: you need to get more light in that scene, at the moment we can hardly see any of the of your awesome work. JamesArk: I'd reduce the noise on your floor tiles to better suit the over all style of the scene. The style is strong sharp shapes with minimal damage/dents/noise. At the moment it seems like the crystal is meant to be in another more styled scene compared to the rest. Your scene could also benifit from stronger lights and softer lighter shadows making the noise more prominent. Selwyn369 : That pillar is looking sexy, hurry up and get it into a scene!
The trick with round floors and tiling textures is more polygons. It makes the floor texture skew less for the shape.
More doesn't always mean better!
Additionally, the best technique to get a unskewed, UV layout would be to modular these circular assets. By that I mean, use a quarter of a circle (45 degree angled piece) UV map this, and repeat this 4 times with it being placed close together.
1) This gives the impression it's 1 circle.
2) Theres less to model/sculpt as its being used 4 times over.
3) The textures would look much better due to more resolution being available for each quarter. Sure they'd be a few bits of noticeable tiling but you can blend this.
Additionally, the best technique to get a unskewed, UV layout would be to modular these circular assets. By that I mean, use a quarter of a circle (45 degree angled piece) UV map this, and repeat this 4 times with it being placed close together.
1) This gives the impression it's 1 circle.
2) Theres less to model/sculpt as its being used 4 times over.
3) The textures would look much better due to more resolution being available for each quarter. Sure they'd be a few bits of noticeable tiling but you can blend this.
ah i see, so there are few ways to do it, thanks for answering my question, it is really helpful
Yes, there are many ways to build modular assets.
If you want more information, Gears of War artist Kevin Johnstone explains the method I mentioned in a run down on his website, (on the "help" section. He explains the process of why its important to cut assets that are circular into modular pieces and what its benefits are.
At the start of this thread, I believe someone was mentioning the same thing; HAWK12HT on Page three has some helpful screenshots of his modular roof etc.
Just to contribute, I'll briefly explain how I did my floor, and note that I'm not working with modular building. I have too much on my plate right now to learn modular creation too
Anyway, the first thing I did was I went and made a blockout texture [2048x2048].
Currently learning in Maya but it should be more straight forward to do this in Max. Got a cylinder with 40 sides. Deleted 90% of them and only used the remaining 4 strips. UVing fairly simple, just flatten them into squares and sew the sides up, and matched the UVs according to my texture. Copyed them around 9 times.
Now this could be completely wrong, but from what I got out of it, was rather simple and quick!
TeJay, another way to get circular floors, would be to get a square piece and UV map that. That gives you a perfect map for tileable textures. Create a row of those and then use deformers to get them in a circular or half-circular shape. It's pretty easy and quick solution that has pretty decent results. Of course, more polygons always help.
You can find quite a lot of articles on the Polycount wiki about this.
Here is the tentative low poly layout in max. Time to start working on textures.
I could use some suggestions on how to get object positioning to replicate that which I have already when I port all the individual pieces to Cry3. Some parts should be straight forward, but others, such as the pillars, and the pieces in-between have nothing to snap too.
A little more progress, a lot of textures are still WIP/placeholder though. I changed a lot of the floor to make it less noisy but I'm still not sure if I like it. Also the lighting is still dreadful, if anyone knows of any solid UDK lighting tutorials I'd love to check them out. It's always been an issue for me regardless of how much I try to fix them.
As always comments/crits are very much appreciated
@JamesArk: Dude, that is sweeeeeet. That crystal is very eye-catching.
Some of the nicest lighting tutorials I've had in UDK are Hourences "UDK Lighting" and Eat3D's "UDK Lighting and Post Processing". But those are for cash money. Some o the good free lighting stuff i can think of be:
@redhonour - Awesome, will look at these tonight. Thanks!
@tkfxity - Woah that's super awesome, played around with that for 5 minutes and already have my scene's palette looking a lot closer to the concept. Much appreciated
@ tkfxity - That colour look up table is going to save me loads of headaches in the future. Nice one
@ JamesArk - Awesome stuff man
Everyone is smashing this, I need to catch up. Maybe take a day off work :poly142:
I started the ornate fencing piece today, playing with the UDK Mat editor and then experimented with more texture approaches. Still not sure which way to use and make them all consistent. Think the brick is too cartoony and the outer ring too realistic for the style I was aiming for.
I drew the crazy pave on paper and scanned it in to try that, but bad results. :whyme:
Fun thread to folllow! Really cool to see everyone´s progress and different versions of it
I got a bit of time this weekend to put into this project so I started blocking out textures and started painting the foliage.
I am going for a straight handpainted-wow version, no normalmaps - only diffuse and spec.
Gonna try and do something fun with the lamps and the crystal thou, but nothing over-the-top-shiny, just something nice and subtle that would fit in wow.
Here is where I am atm. Mostly untextured and unlit. @JamesArk - Cool! Lighting starts to look good, looks like the light is eminating from the crystal! Don´t forget to let some of that sunlight in, it is bright outside.
I'm loving that metallic/granite feel you got going on David.
I'm still super WIP on everything right now but i figured I'd post my first test in the udk + a little paintover to remind myself before bed. I'm taking a few liberties with the outside, as I like the idea of developing it into a larger dungeon set, and would really like to give the supposed player a feeling of walking up to this crystal shrine/ boss battle?
It's a bit on the dark side right now as I'm slapping down dynamic light sources strictly for quick testing purposes, and will do some proper lightmap UVs later on. I plan on going back over the assets + textures later on as not to stray too far off from the original concept. A little less barbaric/more magic.
Another update, with 100% more benches. I tried out the post-process color correction that tkfxity brought up but I may have overdone it - the crystal is looking pretty blown out to me at the moment. I also changed the lighting around so if these images are woefully dark I apologize (my monitor is old and doesn't properly display anything dark very well).
Next is foliage and more tweaks to the lighting/colors. Still can't get very nice shadows so that's a priority as well. Also the sizes of the brick walls aren't uniform so I'll have to fix that too.
@scapulator the deadline is the end of the month. However people still work on the projects after the deadline for their portfolio or such so you can still post your WIP in here, though the thread does die down after the month is over.
@StephLee there is a thread made every month for a month long challenge.
@JamesArk looking good so far. The crystal is a tad bit too bright but the overall colors of the scene look good.
Cryengine might as well not work, crydev just released 3.5.3 ? like 2 days ago. Their servers are getting pounded I think. Also, after several attempts to login I finally get in engine and it tells me my files may be corrupted, argh. This was my first serious attempt at an environment and learning a game engine. My biggest break through so far has just been getting geometry in with multiple materials from Modo without having to jump through other softwares. All this learning and cryengine has to be difficult on the last week >.<
Ziegel999, you've got some nice pillars And redhonour, neat sculpts. A lot of you have some really good models and textures so far.
Here´s what I have been doing. Starting to form. Not too many day left now, still a lot of texturing and lighting to be done. I'm saving the trinkets in the back rooms for later as they don't affect the overall scene as much as the rest of the stuff, I´ll make them if I have time to spare come deadline. Have a good weekend everyone!
Here is what i have done so far.
This has been put in to Unity. Lots of textures still to be done, and a few more models. The whole scene is using custom shaders with custom lighting models eg. Translucency, BlinPhong and Reflections. still have to tweak the lighting to get it looking right.
Now back to it.
Keep going people and they are looking great.
Here´s what I have been doing. Starting to form. Not too many day left now, still a lot of texturing and lighting to be done. I'm saving the trinkets in the back rooms for later as they don't affect the overall scene as much as the rest of the stuff, I´ll make them if I have time to spare come deadline. Have a good weekend everyone!
This is looking really good. Good job, can't wait to see the final product
Replies
Ziegel999: great start. Also, watch out for the tiny extrusion that is like a band on the outer railing of the platform.
I forgot to post an update last week. Since then, I've scaled it down twice and started working on finished assets. Right now, I've got 2 test normal maps in basic shaders that I've splashed over areas which will show seams between the rocks/tiles.
Hi there !
One thing i would advice is to make a screenshot from max in somewhat the same angle as the concept, get that on top of your concept in photoshop and compare. As i see it, you need to work a bit on the shape and size of your models. Get the proportions right and go on from there.
@InProgress
Hi, you should double check that your scene follows the concept. Most of he pieces in your scene are way off. Check :
- the size of the middle platform compared to the hole
- the size of the rail of the center platform compared to the rail that surrounds the hole
- the size of the pillars and most important the shape of the pillars
- the size of the hanging ... stuff compared to the center platform
- compare the pillar in the concept, its position relative to the round strip and how much it takes, as surface, from the floor, then go in yout scene and check yours
- the height of the rail on the center platform
Have a good one !
also played around with the outer pillar, giving it a worn look...
Texture still WIP at the moment. I also need to reduce the polycount as it is rather high considering it's just a pillar.
[ame="
Thanks,
This helped me quite a lot as I couldnt quite comprehend the concepts perspective. May I ask your size for the island and for the outter ring?
I'm a little late on my update but better late than never.
I spent most of my time this weekend getting everything in UDK as good as I could. I wanted to get started lighting the scene (which I did), but ended up spending a lot of time tweaking the lightmaps and materials.
Also, I had time to do a few quick stone sculpts for a few pieces I planned out. Maybe went a little overboard with some of the damage :]
Looks like good Progress! Those pillar-rings is a difficult shape to model, you have some nipping between the rings that's going to show in the bake. To save time(there's A LOT of props in this scene) I made floating geometry for the highpoly (as in not merged at all, just individual meshes duplicated around) The bake from doing floating can sometimes be indistinguishable from actual solids, it all depends I guess. Keep at it!
Went back through the thread looking for how people tackled the stone chandelier piece, totally missed this post the first time around, the input is very much appreciated
JamesArk: I'd reduce the noise on your floor tiles to better suit the over all style of the scene. The style is strong sharp shapes with minimal damage/dents/noise. At the moment it seems like the crystal is meant to be in another more styled scene compared to the rest. Your scene could also benifit from stronger lights and softer lighter shadows making the noise more prominent.
Selwyn369 : That pillar is looking sexy, hurry up and get it into a scene!
do i need to add more polygons or am i unwrapping it wrong ?
More doesn't always mean better!
Additionally, the best technique to get a unskewed, UV layout would be to modular these circular assets. By that I mean, use a quarter of a circle (45 degree angled piece) UV map this, and repeat this 4 times with it being placed close together.
1) This gives the impression it's 1 circle.
2) Theres less to model/sculpt as its being used 4 times over.
3) The textures would look much better due to more resolution being available for each quarter. Sure they'd be a few bits of noticeable tiling but you can blend this.
Hope this helps!
But this is a quick example result with a few more polys:
ah i see, so there are few ways to do it, thanks for answering my question, it is really helpful
Yes, there are many ways to build modular assets.
If you want more information, Gears of War artist Kevin Johnstone explains the method I mentioned in a run down on his website, (on the "help" section. He explains the process of why its important to cut assets that are circular into modular pieces and what its benefits are.
http://www.kevinjohnstone.com/
At the start of this thread, I believe someone was mentioning the same thing; HAWK12HT on Page three has some helpful screenshots of his modular roof etc.
Anyway, the first thing I did was I went and made a blockout texture [2048x2048].
Currently learning in Maya but it should be more straight forward to do this in Max. Got a cylinder with 40 sides. Deleted 90% of them and only used the remaining 4 strips. UVing fairly simple, just flatten them into squares and sew the sides up, and matched the UVs according to my texture. Copyed them around 9 times.
Now this could be completely wrong, but from what I got out of it, was rather simple and quick!
You can find quite a lot of articles on the Polycount wiki about this.
I could use some suggestions on how to get object positioning to replicate that which I have already when I port all the individual pieces to Cry3. Some parts should be straight forward, but others, such as the pillars, and the pieces in-between have nothing to snap too.
As always comments/crits are very much appreciated
Some of the nicest lighting tutorials I've had in UDK are Hourences "UDK Lighting" and Eat3D's "UDK Lighting and Post Processing". But those are for cash money. Some o the good free lighting stuff i can think of be:
World of Level Design: http://www.worldofleveldesign.com/categories/udk/udk-how-add-lights-dominant-directional-light-point-light.php
Hourences (free tuts): http://www.hourences.com/tutorials/
And ze Polycount wiki: http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryEnvironmentLighting?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryEnvironment%5Cb%29
Hope some of that stuff is useful to you!
3DMotive: [ame="
@redhonour - Awesome, will look at these tonight. Thanks!
@tkfxity - Woah that's super awesome, played around with that for 5 minutes and already have my scene's palette looking a lot closer to the concept. Much appreciated
Used the AO's as temporary diffuse. Still have quite a bit of modelling to do.
@ JamesArk - Awesome stuff man
Everyone is smashing this, I need to catch up. Maybe take a day off work :poly142:
I started the ornate fencing piece today, playing with the UDK Mat editor and then experimented with more texture approaches. Still not sure which way to use and make them all consistent. Think the brick is too cartoony and the outer ring too realistic for the style I was aiming for.
I drew the crazy pave on paper and scanned it in to try that, but bad results. :whyme:
I didn't spend much time on the correct pillar placement yet, I just wanted to post my progress
I got a bit of time this weekend to put into this project so I started blocking out textures and started painting the foliage.
I am going for a straight handpainted-wow version, no normalmaps - only diffuse and spec.
Gonna try and do something fun with the lamps and the crystal thou, but nothing over-the-top-shiny, just something nice and subtle that would fit in wow.
@JamesArk - Cool! Lighting starts to look good, looks like the light is eminating from the crystal! Don´t forget to let some of that sunlight in, it is bright outside.
I'm still super WIP on everything right now but i figured I'd post my first test in the udk + a little paintover to remind myself before bed. I'm taking a few liberties with the outside, as I like the idea of developing it into a larger dungeon set, and would really like to give the supposed player a feeling of walking up to this crystal shrine/ boss battle?
It's a bit on the dark side right now as I'm slapping down dynamic light sources strictly for quick testing purposes, and will do some proper lightmap UVs later on. I plan on going back over the assets + textures later on as not to stray too far off from the original concept. A little less barbaric/more magic.
Next is foliage and more tweaks to the lighting/colors. Still can't get very nice shadows so that's a priority as well. Also the sizes of the brick walls aren't uniform so I'll have to fix that too.
@Jamesark, try to match a bit more with concept colors/scale
here is some of my texture work
what's the deadline for this?
@StephLee there is a thread made every month for a month long challenge.
@JamesArk looking good so far. The crystal is a tad bit too bright but the overall colors of the scene look good.
Detailed View
Textured View
Ziegel999, you've got some nice pillars
This has been put in to Unity. Lots of textures still to be done, and a few more models. The whole scene is using custom shaders with custom lighting models eg. Translucency, BlinPhong and Reflections. still have to tweak the lighting to get it looking right.
Now back to it.
Keep going people and they are looking great.
This is looking really good. Good job, can't wait to see the final product