UDK environment: Remote Tower with day/night cycle.

ktacreations

Flyaround Video: https://vimeo.com/75297738
Its in 1080p so why not fullscreen that bastard huh.

All the everything was made by me in Maya, Mudbox, Photoshop, MSPaint, and xNormal. No photographs or textures from the interwebs cause that's how I roll. All lighting is dynamic, obviously, though no scripting was used cause I cant. Day/night cycle controlled entirely in matinee.

Material node trees are too embarrassingly cluttered to post but I will probably clean them all up and make a proper tutorial for some of the cooler things later on. FOr now, heres the footage out of UDK -dumpmovie. Ran relatively well on a GTX460 with 1 gigglebyte of vram.

BARDLER

I think you could benefit from using some photos in your textures to push the realism, or push the hand painted look more. You are sitting in this weird spot between stylized textures and realistic textures, but you should push it one way or another. The lighting in both the day and night sequence could benefit from some contrast because they both look very flat. There are not really any shadows anywhere which is what is causing this effect.

Hope that helps a bit.

ktacreations

Thanks for the advice. I'll look into more contrast in the lighting and textures.

WarrenM

Yeah, I like what you've got going on here but it would be nice to see those windows throwing more light around at night.

splitpiriform

very nice job! The day/night transition with the camera looking at the sky is a bit weird though. the rock texture gives it a lot of charm

Chronicle

I disagree that it needs either more realism or more handpainted of a look. I like where its at right now. It feels like its real but at the same time it gives it a fantasy aesthetic.

NomadSoul2501

The scene looks really good and I love the water shader (breakdown please)
I did not enjoy the presentation though.
Your camera is suffering by a severe case of flyby-itis
I feel you could strengthen your presentation by breaking it up into distinct shots with slightly less spline-y feeling and more traditional/simple camera moves.

ktacreations

Yeah I hear you about the camera. I definitely need to work on that. As for the water shader breakdown, that's next on my list. Speaking of which, whats the best method for taking shots of node trees that are larger than the screen can show at once? I see some people post them and I have no idea how they did it, so its probably something obvious.

Thank you everyone for the feedback!

locater16

The lighting seems very low contrast. It was hard to tell where there was supposed to be sunlight and where there was supposed to be shadow. The night section also suffers from "night is just like daytime but grey!" It looks too bright, I know it's cliche to have a bluish tint but that's really how humans see the world as we transition from cones to rods and the light goes down.

It also suffers from the always bizarre looking effect of your ground and etc. being much brighter than the night sky, even though there doesn't appear to be moonlight anywhere. Nice modeling and textures and stream though. I did cringe at the "sparklies" the way the tower seems to sparkle where wet. But that's a UDK limit, nothing you can do there except maybe switch to UE4.

tharle

totally agree - would love to see the water shader breakdown.

the drip particles you have around 0:25s seem to be missing a texture too - i know they're small but i can see that they're a flat textured square, rather than water droplets.

ktacreations

ah thanks for the heads up. i forgot to hook an elliptical mask up to their material.

ktacreations

Water shader, organized and commented: