[CE3] Banana Farm Environment
polycounter lvl 7
Hi everyone,
After been quite absent from the boards in recent months mainly due to the birth of my second child and starting Ubisoft Reflections. I'm finally ready to get back into the swing of things. This is the latest environment that I'm working on and it's based on a piece of concept art by Victor Jonsson. It's still super early, but I wanted to start posting right from the start so people can hopefully learn from it and realise that environments don't necessarily look great from the start.
Goals of the project:
- Improve at asset creation and texture work in general
- Tackle some foliage. I personally think this is one of my weaknesses
- Take on feedback and suggestions earlier rather than waiting till I’m 90% finished
- Further improve on my CryEngine knowledge
As always feedback and crit is welcome and thank you for your time
Current Progress: Currently on blocking out the environment. Road and mountain are temp CryEngine assets at the moment and will be replaced.
Concept Art By Victor Jonsson
After been quite absent from the boards in recent months mainly due to the birth of my second child and starting Ubisoft Reflections. I'm finally ready to get back into the swing of things. This is the latest environment that I'm working on and it's based on a piece of concept art by Victor Jonsson. It's still super early, but I wanted to start posting right from the start so people can hopefully learn from it and realise that environments don't necessarily look great from the start.
Goals of the project:
- Improve at asset creation and texture work in general
- Tackle some foliage. I personally think this is one of my weaknesses
- Take on feedback and suggestions earlier rather than waiting till I’m 90% finished
- Further improve on my CryEngine knowledge
As always feedback and crit is welcome and thank you for your time
Current Progress: Currently on blocking out the environment. Road and mountain are temp CryEngine assets at the moment and will be replaced.
Concept Art By Victor Jonsson
Replies
awesome concept and your blockout looks solid. terrain and such look sufficent enough for now, the only thing that stands out to me right now is that the fov in the concept art was probably more narrow and the camera further back, but that's just presentation!
looking forward to your work on this! and congrats on child #2 and the new job!
@e-freak Haha I knew he was at Crytek, but it never occurred to me that the concept might have been from Crysis. Totally agree about the FOV and camera position, it's something that I'm looking to correct asap. Actually you may be an excellent person to ask about this, do you know of anyway of exporting a camera from max and matching it in CryEngine because I've got the Camera pretty much spot on in max. (See Image Below)
One thing that I liked about the concept is that the dirt road leads into the ocean, are you going to keep that in yours?
yeah there is, but its been a while since i've done it - i will investigate
The CryEngine expects Collada files to not use a unified Matrix and to have FOV values in y-FOV (the height of your screen is important, not the width).
So before exporting anything, go to your camera profile in max and switch the field of view to vertical:
You might also want to change your aspect ratio to 16:9 (any resolution) in the render settings!
Now you get to Export your Collada. Select the camera, and go to Export Selected - Collada DAE:
When you import this into CryEngine's Trackview it will now already produce correct Translation and Rotation, but you will miss FOV. You can now do two things, depending if you need animation or not.
To import to Trackview, create a camera with the same name as the Camera in MAX in CryEngine. Add that Camera to a Trackview Sequence and right click on the Node in Trackview and click: Load from Collada File.
If not - just go to the roll-up bar in MAX and copy and paste the y-FOV value into an FOV key in Trackview. This is WAY easier than what I'm about to propose
Option Nr. 2 requires you to do a bit of XML hacking. CryEngine expects the FOV information to come after the Translation information in the Collada File so here's how it goes: Max doesn't format XML to nice it seems, so i usually do a small hack: I rename the new collada to .xml and open it in internet explorer, where I click on the text and display source code.
This gives a nicely formatted version of the Collada file which I then Copy and Paste into a new file (that ends on .dae).
The collada file starts with a header wrapped in the <asset> tag, which we can ignore.
Next up comes the camera's animation wrapped in an <animation> tag with id and name of the camera. Inside of the first animation tag are now <animation> tags for the individual channels that are keyed. Select the entire first <animation> tag (from <animation> till </animation>) which should contain 'Camera1-lib-yfov-animation-input' and similar <source> nodes.
Cut that and go to the very end of the main animation tag of the camera itself, which should be two </animation> tags and paste inbetween those two the text you just cut. Now the FOV information is at the end of the camera's animation node.
Last but not least: search for <instance_camera url="#"/> and add your camera in there so it looks like this: <instance_camera url="#Camera1-lib"/>
Now further up in the DAE file should be a line <library_cameras> with an empty <camera id="" name="">. Here you fill in: <camera id="Camera1-lib" name="Camera1Mesh">. "Camera1" being your Camera Name in all of these. What this does is just connecting the Camera's FOV values with the correct conversion from Max Render Settings'.
Save the DAE, import and you should have beautiful FOV keys in Trackview!
I suppose these last steps could be automated and I will see if I can do something in the future about it, but I hope it will help you getting your cameras in from Max for now!
Sorry that it's taken me so long to reply to this thread. Almost a year in fact :O. Wow, how time goes so quickly these days.
Anyway I just wanted to let you know that this project is still alive but it's had some complications over the last year that had forced me too put it aside and concentrate on different ventures.
This was mainly due to getting CryEngine working on both my home computer and work computer. Ubisoft has so many network ports blocked that it makes CryEngine unusable.
I've finally given up on CryEngine for this project and switched over to UDK, so expect this thread to become more active again.
Anyway here is what I've got so far. It's pretty much as I left it but I've refined the blockout a bit and added average colours to everything to get an overall feel. I'm about done with the blockout now so I'm looking forward to getting started with the asset creation.
As always feedback and crit is welcomed.