[A Gentlemans Rest] Diorama in UDK

gartht3d

***UPDATE***
SCENE COMPLETED






ORIGINAL POST BELOW

Hi again,

I've got this little diorama to a stage where I am ready to show some progress. I've been working on it slowly over the last couple months and am at a point where I'd like some fresh eyes to see it and hopefully give me some good feedback, crits and ideas. It mainly needs work on post processing and lighting. I haven't done a lot on that yet:P

Cheers

Garth

SHEPEIRO

nice little scene top of the tree sticks out to me as a touch sparse and polygonal could do with some love to stop it distracting from the quality of the scene elsewhere

gutty333

Wow, holly molly amazing quality. Can tell you put great attention to details even to the beer cans.
My comment, would be to maybe increase the contrast on the wood grains, to my eyes it still looks a little bit like a stone rather than wood, especially the two wooden post by the corners. Also careful with the placement, you have some leaves intersecting through the umbrella. Overall awesome work

alexrcinta

Hi!

I've got this village scene about Skyrim Fan Art (Riverwood). I've been working on it around three months. I hope your comments, reviews and ideas to improve.

Regards!

Here is my personal works: http://alexrcinta.blogspot.com.es/

alexrcinta

I'm Sorry Gartht3d. I didn't want to post my works here. I do not know very well use polycount yet.
Whatever, your work it´s very very nice man. The quality is amazing. I'd like to see more of your personal works. Great Work!

gartht3d

Thanks for the crits!

@Shepeiro
Yeah that is annoying:) I'll just try rotating the tree it usually looks good, must be a bad angle.

@gutty333
Thanks for your kind words. I didn't notice that the wood looked like stone but your right. I'll run another detail ao in ndo and see what I get

@alexrcinta
Thanks. I'll check out your scenes when I finish work:)

gartht3d

hmmmmm. so played with some post processing today and got smashed by some issues. I added a vignette, chromatic aberration and a dirty lens blur as well as changing a bunch of the standard PP stuff. Anyone know why when doing a 'tiledshot 8' you get this strange tiling of one of the effects?

tiledshot_8 (resized)


Heres a simple print screen of the editor giving a better idea of what It's meant to look like so far (anyoneknow of any good post processing tutorials?)


Also, I stole the camera dust blur effct texture from somewhere. Anyone know how to make one of these? Beyond me:)

hollandje

This looks awesome!

gartht3d

^^^^
Thanks man:)

Rhesyuzz

Very good.
I think there is a turorial on eat3D focused in post process.

CarlCraft

tiledshot repeats some effects, like lens flares. thats what's going on, and it's super annoying. dont' know if there's a fix for it though.

BTW your scene is super rad!

DougClayton4231

Love the scene!

gartht3d

callebo wrote: »

tiledshot repeats some effects, like lens flares. thats what's going on, and it's super annoying. dont' know if there's a fix for it though.

BTW your scene is super rad!

Cheers. Man that is really annoying:( How do people do high quality screenshots with post effects then? Surely it's possible.

ZacD

Yeah screen effects are always going to be broke with tiled shots, just because how it works, you can add it in post, I feel it's fair if they are limiting post work to what can be done with screen effects.

gartht3d

So we are restricted to print screens? I'm gonna do some searching and see if there's some tweaks (other than creating your own pp chain) to maximise quality in the editors viewport. Fingers crossed.

gartht3d

Did some more renders. I managed to get most of the post processing to work with tiledshot. Some just worked, some didn't. The lens dirt is tiled in these shots but it isn't too noticeable. I tossed up whats better, HD render or screenshot with working screen effects and decided, HD render. I added the same sort of effects in photoshop. Some crits on the above would be nice.

Also, what angle do you prefer?

Bigglesworth

Grass and flowers are awesome!
And I like composition. Nothing to add, nothing to remove. Everything on it's place.
May be you can add butterflies flying above the flowers? It will be cute:)

Bigglesworth

for example:

Brandon Kern

I like the first angle, but the extra grass on the right side thats covering the lawnmower makes for a weird composition and it makes the lawnmower harder to read.

Great work though, I love this

gartht3d

@ Bigglesworth

I was totally going to do butterflies but forgot. thanks for reminding me. Alos, that butterfly image is super nice. U got alink to it you can share? I'll use it.

Bigglesworth

@gartht3d

gartht3d

Ok I'm done. Thanks for the crits guys. A lot of them helped:)

mospheric

Really love the composition of this scene. The attention to detail is fantastic. Great job and creating this!

My only crit is more of a personal preference. Right now the scene looks to be about midday or a bit later. I think if it was closer to sunset with a yellow/orange light angled lower that it would add more to the story you've created: Someone who has worked all day and finally gets 5 minutes to sit down.

Definitely saving this into my inspiration folder

nickzucc

Quick question about grass cards. I am setting a landmass and placing grass cards and flowers using the foliage tool in UDK.

The problem that I am running into is the lighting on my grass cards. There is very dark shading on the back of the cards in many cases. I have given all geo a separate UV channel just for light maps and I have tried exporting normals so the are straight up as well.

I was wondering what your options are for your grass cards to get them to render correctly.

I am very new to the "Environment Art" thing (I have always made characters),so any tips and tricks I could get for the vegetation from anyone would be awesome!

Sorry, I don't want to hijack your thread but your work is amazing and I am sure there is a simple answer for what I am looking for.

Again, beautiful work!:)

Surfur

Awesome scene man! what's the resolution of your props? and did you do any tricks to get the lighting so accurate?

gartht3d

@ mospheric
Thanks, glad you like it. Regarding the afternoon lighting, I did try that first it was what I had in mind but I quickly changed it. The grass and foliage colours I chose don't go well with a more orange lighting setup. It all looks too warm.

Also, the scene was created to represent my emotions on being a recent father and how that responsibility restricts the freedoms that your used to having. So its not (to me) related to any time of the day.

I had a nosey at your work, great stuff.

@nickzucc
You need to change the direction of the normals on the cards before putting a bunch together. in Max it's edit normal modifier and some manual tweaking. It takes no time at all. There is a 3d motive tutorial on foliage in UDK that is a must watch. It will teach you how to change that before exporting your meshes. Watch that its all anyone needs to get started with foliage.

@surfur
Resolution varies. Its obviously high, this scene was never intended to be running in a game, its a diorama for my folio. Most large objects are 2048 and a few are 4096 and all small are from 1024 to 256. Also, there's a ton of 1024*2048 as I was using that method a lot.

Poly count however, is respectable. Theres nothing there that is what I would call high or over done.

For lighting, I make and add my own post processing chain and do all my tweaking from that. With that, you can add AA, control the AO, SSAO and add screen overlays plus a bunch more.

Hope this helps

Tits

This is looking amazing! Very impressive work, the lighting is great.
Saved in my inspiration folder right away

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

mutatedjellyfish

It looks great, and the detail is great. I would make some changes to the art direction a bit, though. All of the colors are very samey and there's no clear focal point. My eye travels all over it and never settles on any one thing. Everything seems to demand equal attention so it's actually somewhat tiring to look at, if that makes sense. Something as simple as making the lawnmower a more vibrant orange and putting some more saturated blues into the chair would do a TON.

Again, though, really stellar craftsmanship on this.

Dazz3r

Wow, really well executed, and not only that, really creative detail touches! My favorite is the book left openside down to keep the page Tells a little story, the dude probably just got up to see what his wife is nagging at from the kitchen window or something like that lol.

Autocon

Really love the scene, its a great small little contained piece that has all the story and character you could ever need. It works so well as a diorama.

One critique is that it feels a bit flat and washed out of color. The flatness coming from how desaturated everything is. I dont think it needs to be heavily saturated to work, but I feel it could use a boost to give it a bit more pop and a bit more life.

Here is just a quick saturation increase to show what I mean. Things like the grass/foliage have a bit more life too them now, the chair and other objects pop out and read a little better all the while still having that sunned look as the umbrella still looks like it has seen sometime in the sun.

Great scene though

gartht3d

@ Tits - Im happy your into it. Cheers
@ TeriyakiStyle - Thanks a lot!
@ mutatedjellyfish - Cheers for the crits. I'm gonna do a bit of a colour grade at some point. For now, I felt pretty good posting a final image. Maybe for my folio. I totally agree with your opinion though. I did add more colour to the mower, but for some reason, it made the scene look a bit too happy and kiddy....if that makes sense.
As for the colour/contrast composition, your right, but I spent most of my PP time altering that exact feature and it bugged me how it was distracting from the initial feeling I got when looking at it. It was a hard choice. Hopefully I'll come to my sense and change it:P
@ Dazz3 - LOL. My wife loved that comment. But yeah, not much to do with that but I like your imagination.
@ Autocon - Hmmmmm. I like your suggestion. The chair looks better. Dont know if its my monitors (I have art monitors) but my version suits the emotions I was going for perfectly. I can't do much more than that:) But thanks so much for suggesting an improvement.


Thanks all for your comments again, makes the end the best part

Mrpopo

Bravo Garth. Bravo.

nickzucc

Garth, thanks for the reply. Per the 3dmotive UDK foliage tutorial I needed to have my UVs facing up and build custom phong and specular lighting. I was a bit surprised about having to build custom lighting for grass cards. I was hoping there was a less complicated way to deal with this, iy isn't all that complicated but you do need to know enough to build the shading network. Thanks for steering me in the right direction. And again, great looking piece.

gartht3d

@nickzuc - Its a good thing to build the custom lighting because it does look good on a lot of vegetation. I use the same material I made whilst doing the tute for all scenes with foliage so you only have to build it once. I dont use it all the time though, for close to the camera stuff I use a really simple material with its own spec map to get better specular results, with some transmission. I find it looks a lot better. Also, the normals on the cards may need to face upwards but when theres a bunch of cards together like for a tree, its different. I usually just tweak them until it looks good from all angles regardless of their direction.

@Mrpopo - thanks man!

brenly

Garth .. excellent composition and beautifully textured.
Only thing I would say is the layout doesn't lend itself that well to the story of the piece. Looks like the guy who was sitting at the chair just got up and walked away (book on chair indicates that) but the mower feels like its in the way. Just nit picking.

Brilliant piece!
Cant wait to see more.

Snight

Love this! Excellent work.

gartht3d

re-posting so no one has to go back a page

@ Brenly - thanks for the cirts. You could be right, I didnt think about that. Could of had the lawn mower out of the pathway for sure. These are all great crtis but I'll have to use them as knowledge and reminders for my next scene. I think this ones as good as done.

@ Snight Thanks a lot for commenting, glad your into it

silver_hoodlum

this is sick, one of the best diorama projects ive seen. some wireframe shots would be gr8, tentative to start a similar project