Village Environment (WIP)
polycounter lvl 7
Hello all,
I decided to work on creating a village environment to work on my skills and get a finished piece for the portfolio. It's still very much wip but I think I have enough to share so far. I started off with a sole building as a template, and have begun building more variations off of it as I go. IE, started off with one simple window, created a larger one off of that, began adding shutters, etc. Basically adding more unique details the further down the line.
I've been doing a few things differently than how I usually work, namely working on some of the textures and UV mapping as I model rather than putting it off until the end, and I think it's helping with both my productivity and the goal of getting this sucker done.
I've also been switching between 3d studio max and marmoset toolbag 2 as I work to help me visualize how things are coming together, and am now starting the process of slicing and tiding up the assets into pieces to go into UDK.
The textures are a mixture of hand painting in corel painter using the oil brushes, and then doing some further work/sharpening and tightening in photoshop. I'll be doing a few more passes on each texture to layer in more color and tonal variety besides the usual dirt and scratches.
Anyways here's some pics from the development process in somewhat of an order:
started off with this humble garbage in the middle of the night:
Decided I'd make my trees by hand this time in 3D studio max instead of relying on speed tree. (will revisit the tree and the blocked in texture)
Started to work on a building variation. Bench needs more love/it's a bit uncomfortable looking atm
Started to add a little bit of value and color variation on the shingles. Will increase this further.
Just a little sample of a texture being blocked in for the shutters, I usually work larger than the size of what the final image will be as it allows me more freedom with my brush strokes.
texture blockin of the base wood plank
Started to bring in some of the assets into the UDK to see how they look currently out of the box. Notice the missing chimney textures and its a little bit too blue/I have a lot of painting to do!
Closer image of how some of the texture is coming together.
Will add in finer details such as an ornamental inlay to the chimney
Starting to break up the mundane architecture further, I plan on adding in a series of vaulted arches to the larger building with a corner twist to add some more florish and practice something a little more complex.
Anyways I hope you guys like seeing how this develops, feedback is always welcome!
I decided to work on creating a village environment to work on my skills and get a finished piece for the portfolio. It's still very much wip but I think I have enough to share so far. I started off with a sole building as a template, and have begun building more variations off of it as I go. IE, started off with one simple window, created a larger one off of that, began adding shutters, etc. Basically adding more unique details the further down the line.
I've been doing a few things differently than how I usually work, namely working on some of the textures and UV mapping as I model rather than putting it off until the end, and I think it's helping with both my productivity and the goal of getting this sucker done.
I've also been switching between 3d studio max and marmoset toolbag 2 as I work to help me visualize how things are coming together, and am now starting the process of slicing and tiding up the assets into pieces to go into UDK.
The textures are a mixture of hand painting in corel painter using the oil brushes, and then doing some further work/sharpening and tightening in photoshop. I'll be doing a few more passes on each texture to layer in more color and tonal variety besides the usual dirt and scratches.
Anyways here's some pics from the development process in somewhat of an order:
started off with this humble garbage in the middle of the night:
Decided I'd make my trees by hand this time in 3D studio max instead of relying on speed tree. (will revisit the tree and the blocked in texture)
Started to work on a building variation. Bench needs more love/it's a bit uncomfortable looking atm
Started to add a little bit of value and color variation on the shingles. Will increase this further.
Just a little sample of a texture being blocked in for the shutters, I usually work larger than the size of what the final image will be as it allows me more freedom with my brush strokes.
texture blockin of the base wood plank
Started to bring in some of the assets into the UDK to see how they look currently out of the box. Notice the missing chimney textures and its a little bit too blue/I have a lot of painting to do!
Closer image of how some of the texture is coming together.
Will add in finer details such as an ornamental inlay to the chimney
Starting to break up the mundane architecture further, I plan on adding in a series of vaulted arches to the larger building with a corner twist to add some more florish and practice something a little more complex.
Anyways I hope you guys like seeing how this develops, feedback is always welcome!
Replies
Tiny update, spent most of yesterday exporting the models from Max into the UDK and beginning to arrange them and mess around with the materials. I also started looking into creating some decals/started off with a simple poster drawing that I'll get back around to redesigning. (Basically everything is going to get more passes once I'm content with all of the UVs and geometry in the scene)
I also painted some pretty crappy grass!
Next up on the list is to take a short brake from the larger environment to relax and make a few little props for the scene/and for fun. (Namely that balcony could use a table, books in the middle of being read, and a pint to wash down.)
If I find the time I'd like to make the Red Robin Inn an actual interior tavern, although that may be out of the scope of this project. I think I'll have to use another material instance as that Fresnel got out of hand.
Rough draft of the path. I plan on placing the wagon in the center grassy area and close off the end of the street with some visual element. I'm playing with the idea of docks or a second layered level with city walls. Albiet that would probably lean more towards a small city than "village." I'll try playing around with some alternative textures, hues, and decals for the stucco walls to break up the monotonous white.
Said balcony that I'll be making some smaller props for.
You might want to try adding some empty alpha space between the blades of grass on your grass texture. As it is now the bottom of the grass texture is very thick causing the actual grass planes to be very noticeable and have an unnatural transition between the places where there are grass clumps and the areas without grass clumps. If you add some empty space between the blades of grass in the texture that should help blend in the grass better and help hide the actual planes of geometry as well.
You could also vary up the size of blades of grass on the texture and make several variations of grass planes using the same texture.
Not at the moment. I was doing some contract/freelance work making some 3d corporate videos/basic motion graphics stuff for an ad agency for a few months, made this thing and a few other projects. http://www.ca.com/us/devcenter/ca-lisa-release-automation.aspx Unfortunately I'm not sure if it's really portfolio worthy as the deadlines were super tight (one month from story boarding the concept to finish on that) and four days for this thing [ame="
@Tobbo, thanks for the suggestion, I think that should really help a lot.
Threw in a rough blockin of the wagon to get an idea for compositioning. Looks like I spent a little bit more time on the wheels than the actual wagon, whoopsie! (will continue)
And just to start adding in some more mid-ranged things I made some quick tables and a tiny little unoptimized no normals lets just throw a horrible shrinkwrap uv modifier on it for now apple. (I'd thought there would never be a day I'd use shrinkwrap)
Oh and I ended up changing the material lighting on the grass from phong to uniformly lit and that seems to have taken care of my old backfaces being way too dark from the opposite side of the sun problem, and I shrunk it down to make a little bit more sense now that I've got more than a barrel for relative scale.
Anyways time to make some more coffee and get cracking on this thing.
That should also help with the constant visual fighting of objects with more of a natural light bleed
I also switched to unreal engine 4 (the latest version seems to run much much better on my laptop than the first release, joy!)
Tempted to make atleast one of the smaller houses have a bit of an interior. (I like lighting
Spent alot of time flying around the map getting some ideas (does anyone else do this? Sometimes it feels like I spend 25% actually working and 75% flying around, damn level design habits die hard
Mostly been focusing on figuring out how I'll be handling the visual treatment of the castle walls. (Pretty important part since ultimately it'll wrap around most of the environment and help block off vis compositionally and if it were an actual game) It's not anywhere near done (missing windows, basically nonexistent trim thrown in, will have segments of wall that curve, small stone models for extruding at the edges and closer to the player, etc.)
Added in a little wall banner. I basically made the shape as it would be perfectly flattened out in 3ds max, screenshotted from front perspective, brought it into corel painter and did a quick symmetry black and white doodle design on it, and then layered it in photoshop on some texture fabric with a plain multiply for color. I then UV mapped it, sliced up the basic shape some more, and then did a few slight manipulations of the vertexs by hand so its a little less straight. I'm digging this process so far as the fabric's uvs stretch appropriately, rather than making the fabric imperfect and then UVing it.
I did a little texture test on the castle wall to see if I can pull off having everything handpainted while using normals for certain textures rather than the wow route of pure diffuse and spec. I basically kept my brush strokes really loose in corel painter while using a few of the oil brushes so my marks could still be seen, and then made a very low intensity normal map from it which seems to have picked up the overall shape and bristles. Kind of gives it an impasto impression rather than blurred when your right next to the wall which I'm liking so far.
Anyways back to work, I'm hoping to get a set of these walls completed and everything made so far reworked and lightmapped this weekend.
Overall I really like the shapes you're using, but I'd recommend to use some single shingles to place around the roofs to get a little more geometry there.
The diffuse for the grass was simple to make, just a few brush strokes with some alternating colors. I used to do all of my painting in photoshop but I found it to be kind of a pain having to constantly resample colors and opacity to get blending.
Nowadays I use corel painter x3 whenever I want to paint something, which I (personally, not sure about what other people use) recommend if you want to do alot of digital paintings that have a more traditional feel to them. (basically when you paint with an oil brush, it mixes close to how oil would, as well as acrylic, watercolor, etc.) Ive basically just been switching between the oil brushes with a high opacity and ones with a high blend factor.
Not to mention, well.. painting in corel painter is just so much more fun!
I still use photoshop though and switch back between the two often. I find photoshop still remains king when it comes to the power of its layers/masks/selections/color correction, and I'll usually tighten up the painting in there as well.
It's not really evident in the new images yet, but I made a duplicate of the entire texture with just a slight change in hue and saturation, and used that as a separate instance model in the unreal engine's foliage placer with a slightly lower painting density to add some further color variation to the grass fields as a whole. Sort of mimicking how you'll find spots of grass in reallife in one area that are a little deader in other spots which so far I'm finding to be a vast improvement over my old giant green blobby field of doom.
Had some quick fun in corel painter painting a little rug, although I think it'll look better with an opacity fringe rather than straight circle mask. (Found out Unreal 4 doesn't really support solid decals yet, oh well planes work better anyways) Probably going to end up making more kinds of different shapes and sizes, as right now the project is starting to feel like "Let's see how many freaking times I can reuse the same tiling wood texture over and over again." Not sure if that's a plus or minus
Here's just the rough beginnings of an interior, going to start adding back in the supports and trims to the walls and ceilings, and the stairs could use a little warp to them. I gotta say, working on an interior is pretty relaxing and fun after dealing with the exteriors for a long period. Not sure if it's a large house/home or a bar/tavern yet though... I'd like to model a bar for fun.. but a bedroom would be fun too. (Chests and paintings and textured bedsheets oh my) Second floor?
hmmmmmm
The not so fun part of chopping up the model and deleting all of the faces/adding in the seals. Although now that I have blank space to fill that's always nice
Quick painting in corel painter (Symmetry radial x8 while painting quick strokes = my idea of fun)
Damn I've been reusing that wood texture alot..
I also turned the directional light/sun down a tad and messed some more with the exposure settings to get some of those darker tones in the interior. I think it's working alot better as it seems to be allowing the color saturation of the diffuse textures to breathe a little more/I think the brighter sun was sucking the life outta them.
Hard edges can be boring!
I've done a quick paintover to better illustrate what I mean by the hard edges, and how you can add a bit of interest - and remember this is just MY interpretation.
I definitely have it in the works to go back over everything and add in a few additional loops and vertex manipulation to give it that less than perfect feel/ease out them hard edges.
I've been sort of waiting more towards the end in my workflow when everything is more or less built, as I find it's easier to do all of my uv mapping and major modeling changes (like carving out the interior) while everything is still relatively straight if that makes any sense.
Tweaked the static dynamic directional light's bias, distance, and fade out to baked lighting agaain. It's kind of a pain finding the right balance between switching between the dynamic shadows and baked shadows, especially when outdoors and having both big and small objects at different distances but I think it's working a lot better now. It also doesn't look too shabby away from the main screenshot taking direction!
Spent some more time on the interior though I still have a lot more to do (both inside and out) with both the structure +support walls/beams and the props that go with them. (Need more tapestries/rugs!!!!!) Also.. god that table texture needs to get updated sometime this century.. Painted a horrible door texture thats placeholder for now that'll be more than a 2001 flat textured plane.
I'm starting to think a little bit more about where the sun is going to be hitting the models/where the shadows will be casting as I continue the project. IE knowing that if I carved out the tall windows on the interior the directional sun should come through and light the floor (it did! yay)
I'm going to bet that if I curve the castle walls more I'll be able to introduce some of how the bricks seem to be acting when covered in the blue shadow. (which for some reason I really am drawn to)
Also.. maaaay have to cut back on filling up a fable sized castle... at least for now.
Just a bit of where my mind is going as I work on this thing.
Anyways, sleep time
Even though the style of your environment does not match Gothic 2's, but some of the angle shots remind me of its' "cosy" environment I loved so much.
This is in UE4, right?
Ideally I'd eventually fill in the whole castle walls with exterior house models (would love to add in a second level platform for the "upperclass" and some shadier allys with run down versions, although for now I'm focusing on this main road and the interior.
Not much work done today (decided to take a short brake/rest) but hopefully I'll get a lot more done tomorrow.
I did have a little fun last night in zbrush though. I built the low poly quickly in Max and then did some very subtle radial strokes on the model with the hpolish brush with square alpha to bring in some slight bevels. I could do with a few less loops in the low poly though, they're left over from fixing my baking errors in xnormal on the 90 degree splits. Still have one annoying seam that didn't appear in marmoset but does in UE4..bah. Messed around with a little ddo and made the candle itself separate so I can raise or lower it inside the holder for quick variety.
Started working on some simple books too. I'll be adding in some more edges to add some additional roundness to the binding, and make the straight edges not so straight. The bottom part of the unfinished texture is being reserved for a version where the book is open. Ideally I should be able to use this to paint a lot more variations of the same book model and scale them a bit for quick prop clutter.
Spent yesterday working on a larger rock model, I think it's the first time I've made a rock that didn't look like complete garbage. (thank you trim dynamic, planar, hpolish, and orb cracks!) Decided to use a little ddo with it for practice and then adjusted it a bit more in photoshop until it fit into my environment a little better.
And for some strange reason I thought I might as well see if I can squeeze in a gargoyle today, because.. zbrush fun!. That and something a little different from the whole barrel, table, furniture routine. I'll have to think of a place to fit him in, I was considering adding in a little graveyard section although he might work on some castle walls. (researched my art history a bit just to make sure gargoyles were in more than just the gothic period, although I do enjoy mixing in some slight victorian-inspired shapes.
I still have to do some more work on the body (especially hands+feet), add in wings, maybe some horns and cracks and the base platform. Then doing more of the smaller normal details with quixel suite and photoshop as I find it just works faster for me to separate the tiny stuff from the medium/large. Something tells me uv wrapping this guy since he's built like a one piece statue minus the teeth is going to be fun..not
Sorry I don't have better reference, but a set similar to something like this:
yet, in the shapes described above....
This is looking good btw.
Designed a concept of a sword prop quickly this morning in corel painter with symmetry on/off and the oil brushes. I thought it would work better (for painting in details) and faster (for modeling) if I painted it at a high resolution using powers of two so it'll easily translate into a good starting base for both the texture map of the sword and the reference sheet for modeling. When it's all done I can downsize as needed.
Started off as a plane with the concept applied and sliced it up into loops to rearrange the vertices over the curves of the texture, and began extruding to give it depth. Included a little image of the w.i.p. model that shows the steps together. (will be adding in the handle, trimming/beveling some of the edges, and then make the UVs for the sides of the blade/handle to finish the texture.
full scale painting of the sword if people care about brush strokes for some reason http://i.imgur.com/dXHtFCZ.jpg
I think you need to fix the direction of the vertex normals on your leafs for your tree though.
Here's an example by Eric Chadwick.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1149155#post1149155
Also I would try and manually edit the vertex normal direction on your grass planes as well. I know you basically made the lighting uniformly lit on them. But try having all the vertex normals point straight up and try the phong lighting again.
See if that doesn't make it look better. If it doesn't you can always revert back again.
Is it just not compatible with 3D Studio Max 2014 or am I doing something wrong? I read something about setting up a hotkey in Max but I can't seem to find it. I'd really like to be able to get the trees like how you posted as the normals are really killing the trees/sooo ugly right now and I'd like to model them by hand than rely on speedtree.
I would of set them to uniformly lit to counteract a bit but it appears Unreal Engine 4 doesn't have that option yet.
Cant wait to see more!
Keep it comin!
1. Try putting the script in your Script directory folder
2. Go to Customize > Customize User Interface
3. Click on the Toolbars tab
4. Scroll until you find SlideNormalThief
5. Drag it from the list on to your toolbar
6. Run it from your toolbar
This should work. Let me know if you still can't get it to work.
Stranger still, it appears that the grass is properly covered in baked shadow underneath the tree shadows also placed by the foilage painter.
Any idea why/how to fix this annoying thing? I'd prefer not to have the grass fade out so close as a hack to avoid this problem.
[EDIT] I seem to have found on the epic forums that lightmapping for instance shadows is not in UE4 yet, any confirmation?
I have the same Problems with UE 4
I can probably get away with it now by increasing the dynamic shadow range a bit and having the grass fade out/break the line of sight/etc. It's not really noticeable unless your flying high in the sky which wouldn't be the case anyways for this scene. Still, hopefully they get around to it in the next update or so.
Did a really small quick test on how I might possibly sprucen up the cobble roads. Trying to find a nice inbetween that let's me get the freedom of painting different height variations directly in the editor as part of the landscape, and a little bit more geometry. Just made one of the bricks from the texture so far and placed it as a static mesh that's then hand placed around. I think it might work with a few more of the bricks modeled and alot more placed in a way that smooths the transition. I think it's a low enough poly that alot of them can work without causing a drop in fps, and worse comes to worse I can always fade out the models.
Goblin statue added in an early stage. I did a rush job on the texture and uvs, and he's missing the teeth so it's mostly a stand in for now. Will have to sprucen up the cobblestone wall to match and make less angular.
And to mix things up spent the last hour painting this little possible book illustration/poster.
Queue the fake book language.
Resisting the urge to make houses in the Sims 3 and actually model something to try and land a new job. (yes I like the sims and bought all of their expansions, don't judge! I love the animations
Painted and modeled a tombstone this morning for a future grave yard either inside the village or on the outskirts. I have probably too much empty UV space in there though (started from painting and then modeled after it/tweaked back and forth) that I can fill with some more different types of trims or convert the current trim/border wrap into a few unique solid strips to paint on.
Not too crazy about my crappy handwriting though.. could use some more love on the actual face of the tombstone. Added in the usual subtle 2px smart sharpen in photoshop to bring out the strokes a bit more.
Included an image of how it was modeled from a plane split in half with symmetry so I don't have to keep reselecting more than one vertex at a time, and then the whole make it actually optimized using the cut tool and target weld rather than leaving it edge looped spam to all hell.
I ended up adding a little FFD 3x3x3 modifier action at the end to exaggerate the form just a bit and make the sides a little more interesting.
-I focused a bit more on the large scale today, starting to add in the rough roads and (quick!) pass on the terrain blends. The outside is super duper rough, though not too shabby for one rock model rotated and rescaled to all hell and back. I'll definitely be creating a sand/mud texture next to have a transition into the water.
-I decided to increase the whole layer upon layer with the roads for that section which I think adds some nice additional depth to it all.
-Totally need some flowers to mix up the grass, and probably another grass texture variation for the terrain to have a further color interest a bit more at medium and long distances.
Oh, and I didn't forget the previous critique to make the buildings and lampposts less straight, that shall be moving up the list!
Anyways, back to work!
Was wondering.. did you exactly plan out your landscape + buildings or are you kind of creating everything as you go with some amount of planning? I mean was the design and the placement of everything really thought when you started this?
Things are coming along very nicely, starting to become a cosy environment.
I have soo many ideas what you could add to this environment (caves, fishing boat, port, small market) etc etc.
Maybe I kind of miss an agricultural,farm area. Like the people provided somewhat for themselves... that would be an awesome way to show off even more your awesome foliage creation skills. Just an idea though
I`m really loving this! Keep it up!
Interestingly enough, I've been working in a very reactionary manner throughout the process (which I know is probably the bane of life in a studio production environment with multiple people working
I also do probably an unhealthy amount of time of flying around in the level editor (picked up from when I used to make some levels in the ole' Half-life 2 hammer editor) trying to get a feel for the spacial relations going on, and imagining things like hey if I carve out this mountain here it'll create a nice focal point there, if I create and place a red banner here it'll lead the eye in an down-up left right position due to the saturation and the whole complementary colors of the green grass and the red wood base, and the whole tinted slightly orange windows leading up to the sky. Basically all that art theory stuff they tried to cram into my head in fine arts lol.
Scale wise, I always find it adds more depth to a 3d environment to use generally recognizable objects of size at different distances to establish a better sense of scale, since ultimately we're staring at a flat screen. Just like how a dragon doesn't really look massively big in a drawing until you put in a tiny little human shape at his feet and all of a sudden whoa.
But yeah that's mostly just what's floating about in my head, not sure if it's interesting but hey you asked
Since the last update I started with a bit of shrubbery and some simple roses (that really need to get replaced with more geometry, not a fan of how the flowers turned out on flat planes)
I did a rough base paint of some muddy sand, I think when I polish it up I'll add in some sort of multiply material/texture variant that's darker/wet to sell the stream a bit more. I'll probably be adding in a few more varients as well for the grass, cliffs, and such to mix up the color and help fight the repeating nature of tileable textures a bit more at distances.
I started playing around with a rooough rough blockin of the castle today, messing around with different shapes and seeing how it might fit in with the rest of the environment. Basically a lot of moving things around to try and find the right composition.
I had some fun figuring out how to make that trim pattern around the round castle turrets without having to select a ton of pieces. First I tried a bunch of different symmetry layers in 3D studio max in a radial pattern although that wasn't working too well. Finally I went with making just one little segment of it (which I UVed before the next step to save what probably would of been a painful amount of time), copying and pasting 24 of them in a linear line and welding them together, and then doing the good old bend modifier on it.
And lastly, I extended out the landscape again and did another rough pass on it, throwing in some place holders for a possible farm extension (if I do a farm I totally am making a windmill!)
I may do some research into making the river more rivery instead of a giant flat plane, especially since the large mountain accidentally hit the highest point the terrain can go (note to self, make the lowest point and highest point before starting a project to know how much wiggle room I have... oooops ), and it looks like I have plenty of vertical space to play around with below the water level.
Still have a lot of polishing to do as I keep adding in stuff, but feel free to critique/give feedback and I'll throw it on the change list!
I feel like you need to lower your overall noise-level right now to make it look more consistent. The houses look really clean whilst the big wall look too contrasty for its own good. The same goes for the gargoyle , it feels too noisy in comparison to the rest of the environment.
^ you can totally pump up the saturation another notch as well.
For the castle walls I would make a less tiling and less noisy texture and rely on either a secondary mask in the shader to add some variation or actually just go ahead and use decals to add variation.
When you look at the walls from far away they take away from the scene.
I love how this is looking and it could be really good.
I'm a little iffy on upping the saturation too much, esp since the red wood kind of gotten blown out. (probably can fix that in the texture import settings). It doesn't look bad from outside, but the interior's saturation looks pretty red now (probably from all the global illumination going on in a tight space). Preferably I would of had the interior and exterior using the same global process, but I think ideally (and probably in a real game development) there should be separate post-processes blending between the inside and out.
I do think it's making the scenes look more interesting, I'll probably just have to solve the saturation changes on a texture by texture basis than a simple global processing fix. (oh, and fix those darned barrels
Started working on the windmill a little bit although it has a loooong way to go proportions and blockin-wise.
And lastly, I mixed things up a bit tonight and painted a couple of textures for a plate and a steak for the inevitable dinner table props. (the plate could probably use a couple of scratches here and there)
Anyways back to doing what I love. Converted the steak drawing into more of a texture map and modeled it out. I threw in a couple of forks and knifes for some low poly prop warmup, although I still need to do a lot with the textures/materials for them. I'll probably be adding in some sort of drinking tankard and wine bottle assortments and revamp the table/apple texture blockin as well while I'm in tiny prop mode, and then it's back to the larger building stuff. (EDIT)Woops forgot to reimport the plate texture change. Image is fixed now.
I went ahead and painted a new cobble texture to replace the stone wall texture that was originally being reused for the road, keeping it within the same color palette but some more cobbly shapes and a little bit of "dirt" using some watercolor brushes in corel painter. I finally got around to fixing up the old stone wall by adding in a few edge loops to pull out the shapes a bit, as well as subtly to the books so they don't have those awkward perfect edges anymore.
I did a little bit of rearranging and lighting tweaks as well, and added in some fences and bottles today. (fence is a little too noisy with the strokes on the sides, so hopefully I'll go back and repaint that/make a couple of different modular pieces so it's not such an obvious prop reuse) +a few more lightmap fixes.
And of course, I couldn't resist turning the outside tables into a little still life of the smaller props. Yay still lifes!
I totally need to make that castle something more than a blockin and fix that horrible goblin texture though... bah