[UDK] Medieval City
polycounter lvl 7
Current:
Hey guys, with all the talk on here lately of students needing to post and get feedback, I thought it'd be good to start posting here more. I'm doing an environment based on a concept by James Paick.
Concept: http://cghub.com/images/view/681349/
His website: http://www.scribblepadstudios.com/home.htm
Reference board for details:
Here are some textures I'm working on the for the scene, bottom two still need lots o' work I think
Hey guys, with all the talk on here lately of students needing to post and get feedback, I thought it'd be good to start posting here more. I'm doing an environment based on a concept by James Paick.
Concept: http://cghub.com/images/view/681349/
His website: http://www.scribblepadstudios.com/home.htm
Reference board for details:
Here are some textures I'm working on the for the scene, bottom two still need lots o' work I think
Replies
The volumes are really nice!!
Textures are not at the same level right now, brick are very dark and dull, and plaster is quite noisy. and as Seir said, too much brightness difference.
Also if it were me, I would make the towers on the background as just a couple pieces. They usually barely change in width, and right now each tower seems to have quite a lot of pieces. I would probably just make the top area as one piece, and the middle as another that you could just repeat (and make one side with window, another without, etc.. to get variation).
But anyway, right now the whole scene has quite a lot of detail and it's looking very nice.
seir and Boyo: Great point about the textures, I'll change them and keep that in mind in the future.
Mik2121: The reason I changed the windows was to give it a more interesting Venetian feel, but that's just IMO.
And good idea about the towers, what advantages are there to making the towers out of a few larger pieces vs. using the smaller pre-existing pieces?
IchII3D: Sorry about not mentioning that, the breakdown there is for the unit size of the assets. Right now I'm going off of 1024 pixels per 256 units because of the immense size of the structures, so everything in the blockout x4. Too high?
TheRealFroman: :poly124:
My professor did a paintover a little while ago on an older image, and I'm going to make props to break up dem straight lines
I.E. the wooden skyways seem to be a different constrution from that of the original builders, who only used wood for support rather than walls or anything else.
locator16: Yeah I tried to go for a lot of venetian influence with the medieval like in the windows and arches, but you are totally right the baroque-esque columns don't fit. I don't know what to change the marble column to, but I think the other column may still work with a little tweaking (tell me if I'm crazy). And the only reason I thought the original builders used wood in their structures as well was because I interpreted the piece at the top right of the concept to be a wooden wall.
Here's another update, tweaked the lighting and did some lightmaps and props.
How about a wire frame shot?!
I'm not sure what kind of wiggle room you have when it comes to matching your concept, so with that said, there's some things you could do with lighting to get it closer.
I think the two main points are color and light directionality.
To address the color, there's a lack of warmth in your scene that's very apparent in the concept. I think there's some texture tweaks that can be made to help this out, you'll notice that in the concept, there's a lot of earthy hues texturally that help to hold onto sunlight that your textures are missing. Also, as others have said, you're a little dark in the diffuse which is making the light have consistency problems - soaking into the lighter textures and getting sucked away by the darker ones. Try to balance your textures in relation to one another so that light disperses through your scene with more precision.
Depending on your diffuse map changes, I think you could afford a bit more warmth in your directional light.
A final note on color, the soft blue fog/atmosphere you have is continuing to distance your piece from the concept so trying something with more subtlety and density will help.
Finally, I think the directionality of your light is a bit off. In took the concept and exxagerated the shadows and highlights to hopefully give you a better sense of not only the directionality but how the light should bounce around the scene. You'll notice you're also missing the overhang from the suspended building that connects the suspended walkway. It's casting a shadow in the concept that you're missing.
This piece has great contrast and wonderful framing so I'd hope to see you get a bit closer to that. Might be good to work your directional light more. Maybe reduce the number of bounces but increase the intensity of the light and it's indirect scale? That might give you the higher contrast the concept has.
The facade from the center to the left is receiving more light than it should be. I think you'll need to also get creative here with some shadow casters off screen because when you look at the concept it's very clear that the furthest left portion is picking up shadow from something. You might need to introduce a blocker off screen to get a similar shadow footprint.
I'll keep my eye on this, it's looking really cool! Hopefully some of my critique was helpful and made sense. Hit me up if you have any questions.
Love,
-Jon
Been working on a statue too add in too, right now the one in UDK is just a proxy with the marble texture slapped on.
id start adding some of the Vine work(Plant-nes) on the pillars, it would be a nice splash of color.
Otherwise keep at it!
As John Howe (famous concept artist, LOTR movies and etc.) put it, art tells a story. I.E. "How did this get here, who made it any why?" etc. But other than that, fantastic work so far! Thought the lighting could be brighter EG:
Brightened up the mid to highs, threw in a slight bloom (guassian blur equivelant) and a basic hot/cool lighting for bright and dark areas, along with upping the saturation.
Some critique:
The textures look too blurry, try sharpening before exporting them.
The grass looks really jagged,here's a good tutorial for grass: http://www.crydev.net/viewtopic.php?f=315&t=100319
the circular window on the far left is too bright, it's drawing attention to the wrong area, and the bright bricks(?) around it as well.
My advice would be to do a load of small props to litter the floor. Obviously you arn't going to do the people, which in the concept art, ad a lot of character and colour to the image. to reclaim that, would be nice to have a couple props, maybe some more colour, deep reds could look nice. although not included in the most recent image, i would say the texture work on the statue needs a lot of work, but judging by the rest, i would assume you knew that.
good luck!!
There are also details like the white piece on the arches that is a lot thicker in the 3d version compared to the concept which makes it feel closer to the viewer, there are other details that are large in the 3d version. If you look at the tower in the background, above the wooden bridge, in the concept it looks like the wall is almost a flat colour because you can't see individual bricks whereas in the 3d version you can still pick out the bricks. Adding people could help though since they provide a good sense of scale. Regardless of the difference in scale, it's a really nice scene in my opinion, lovely mood and lighting.
Ill second penguin and say that the foliage is the sore thumb at the moment, but I really think its needed so give that a bit of love. Good work my dude.
@komaokc: great tut and advice man; changed up that window closer to what it is in the concept
@walklikethis: thanks for checking it out
@KazeoHin: changed around the sizing of everything, hopefully it gives it a more epic scale...plus BIRDS
@warby: thanks dude
@circle of friends: tried making the bricks even smaller than this, but they seem to lose almost all detail past the first column
@urgaffel: you're too nice :poly136: but yeah that perspective is crazy in the concept, so I changed the camera angle to push the 3-point perspective and re-did some of those details like the arches too
@PenGuin1362: desaturated that foliage and added in the new lighting
@SaboR1996: imgur be a gangsta, but there's no real secret to the textures, they're all mostly a mix of photos and hand painted details with crazy brushes, using Ndo2 for the normals (I personally love it)
@heboltz3: tweaked that lighting and the foliage, still choppy but sticks out less now I think, p.s. congrats on the new job bud!
I do have some crit.
I think you lighting is better in the latest post, and it definitely seems much more unified. Though I almost like post #23's more! I think you lost alot of your color which I preferred much more over the primarily brown scene in the latest update. I think if you found an in between that might be the best solution?
Same goes with the arches in the middle of the screen were better in the older post, but I think you can use your latest capitals.
just my 2 cents though. looks great regardless