[CE3] Viking Island
polycounter lvl 12
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In the last couple of days I've been starting this new project, where I'm trying to create a viking era island with some pine forests, mountains, a village, etc. I've been doing some vegetation first, just basic vegetation. Next steps are to do some X-Trees and fill the far-away zones with them, and then move on to modelling some rocks.
This is a very early WIP, many of the assets are just placeholders until I make my own. Basically, everything that is not vegetation/terrain are default freesdk assets.
Critiques are really appreciated, so don't be shy!
--END OF LATEST WIP--
In the last couple of days I've been starting this new project, where I'm trying to create a viking era island with some pine forests, mountains, a village, etc. I've been doing some vegetation first, just basic vegetation. Next steps are to do some X-Trees and fill the far-away zones with them, and then move on to modelling some rocks.
This is a very early WIP, many of the assets are just placeholders until I make my own. Basically, everything that is not vegetation/terrain are default freesdk assets.
Critiques are really appreciated, so don't be shy!
Replies
Not bad for a couple of days
Good suggestion shakeyyjakey, I will try to add some snow on the mountains.
More images:
image1
image2
@Xendance: Good suggestion, I will add some smaller spruce trees near the village so it looks more natural.
Can you give me some tips on how you did the houses? I am attempting to model my own but finding texture like what is on yours (What im after) is proving rather diffucult!
I am doing a similar style think in UDK,only a village and not a island.
Keep up the great work!
For the houses the most important thing IMO is the planning.
When you build the house, pay special attention on how you will be unwrapping it, so you can reuse some textures. For the enitre house I have 3x1024 textures, one for the main structure, one for the roof and one for misc things, like the alpha planes on the roof.
All my textures are from cgtextures, and since they are quite flat I've used crayzbump for the normals. Generally you want to avoid noisy/too contrasty textures and pick the ones with interesting details/flat lighting.
Also, keep in mind that is not individual textures that make a great looking object, but how well all the textures work togheter and react to light. Being able to edit in-engine the textures brightness/color values is a great help to make all textures more consistent.
Here are the textures that I've used on the house, if you want to take a look: link.
As you can see, they are quite boring individually, but all toghter on the model+the normalmaps and some detail maps (which are also really helpful), reacting to light, they look nice.
Hope this helped!
I like it. I have a boner for noise.
This will be really nice, good luck
You're an inspiration to many of us
@dissonance I'm using X-Trees for the areas that are not near the village/main road. They are basically just two billboards with a 'complete tree' texture, placed liked this, viewed from above: +. I could further optimize the level by setting those X-Trees as a LOD for all the the trees, but I'm not paying much attention to the optimization right now since I'm still changing lots of things.
I was having a bit of trouble yesterday LoDing the stock trees that come with CE3; do I have to un-pak them to do it, or do I need to make my own meshes?
Well, time to make some trees!
no srsly great scene dude.
could use some higher rez on the groundtextures and larger tiling. also some more layers.
but its already looking great.
still messing with the colors, also added new fences and smaller trees near the village+some more work on the village.
Just some random ideas for you; drift wood along the beach, large mushrooms might add some subtle fantasy characteristics to your scene.. if you want to take it that way. Birds circling around the sky, burning campfire..
Anyway, the scene is looking awesome, nice work!
@serriffe thanks! glad you like it!
I do think you could push the spec map of your rock alot more, i feel your loosing alot of detail from your hires zbrush sculp
Could you put up some images of close ups of the stuff you've made similar to what you did with the rock
I feel I could give a better critque that way
the enviro isn't done yet, I still have to add some things, but it's approaching the end (finally xD)
a story behind this is starting to shape-up too: this is a viking village after succesfully resisting an invasion by another viking tribe. The villagers are now burning the enemy's sails, banners, there are enemy shipwrecks on the beach etc.
next thing I'm planning to add are shields on the boat and scattered around the village, maybe some weapons, etc
I bumped the contrast with a levels, added a hint of yellow to the light areas, and a lot of blue to the shadows.
Overall it is looking really nice dude! Good job.
Thanks for your 'paintover' bardler, it looks really nice, but I'm trying to avoid using strong colors on this piece.
Anyway, I think I'm done with it. I've worked quite some time on this now, time to move to another thing. There's a more detailed explanation/images of this piece in my portfolio, if you're interested. Feedback is still welcome though.
And some breakdowns:
boat#1
boat#2
tiling texture#1
tiling texture#2
Finally, I also made a gif of the progress, to see the progression on this environment: gif
The horizon and ocean don't meet right in this shot. Generally water, just like any other materials, becomes more reflective the sharper the viewing angle. And at the horizon here, with such calm water, the horizon and ocean should be blending into each other fairly well. Instead there's a sharp cutoff that looks weird.