Forest Environment - Cryengine 3
polycounter lvl 4
An Environment I've been working on for a few months. First time using Zbrush to create textures and first real project working in Cryengine 3. All assets are my own. Would love to get some feedback from you guys.
Replies
another thing to is the insides of the tree don't seem to get much thicker in the tree as you start looking at the center. remember at the core of the trees canopy you should be seeing the thickest amount of leaves you will see on the tree as a whole.
Are you normal thieving from a volume shape for the tree as a whole?
tons of random questions i know but just want to get the ball rolling on how you put them together so we can make them look better than they already are cus man... they already look pretty dope
I adjusted the normals using a speedtree script that came with UDK to make the tree canopy normals emit outwards like a sphere. I also tweeked the cryenengine material so the backfacing shadows are more pronounced and it doesn't let as much light through.
Also added another branch to the tree to thicken it up a bit.
The textures are really nothing fancy. To begin with I made a base mud layer with some alphas. Then I grabbed a texture, say one with leaves and made a new tool in Zbrush with it. Grab a greyscale version of the texture and apply it as a displacement. Set the displacement quite high, will be important for the next stage.
Once you have two tools, a base mud layer and a detail layer with leaves or stones or whatever, drop the base mud layer to 2.5D and then simply draw in your leaves/rocks tool making sure to pan with @ key to get it to tile. Since the displacement is quite high on the leaves tool you will only get the very high bits of the tool showing through, which in this case would be the leaves. Very handy since it allows you to essentially add details to an all ready existing ground.
I make sure both tools are polypainted before hand so I'm not messing around trying to paint anything in later on since that would be a huge pain.
There is probably an easier way to do this but being new to Zbrush this was a way I stumbled into to get the job done
Made a little image that hopefully helps with the explanation.
Settings are default. I played around with it initially but textures are so dependent on the lighting conditions I found it best to work with default lighting to properly gauge how the textures looked in engine.
I'm possibly going to put this project on the back burner for now but keeps the crits coming if you have any.
I'm suggesting a little bit more color,
young plants a lighter fresh green,
some more brown yellowish from dead leaves and stuff,
the path is also very dark and grey,
like the image you used to sculpt, it has more color and color variation