wow, amazing block-outs guys, i'm really getting into this. I'm a little late to the party but i have every intention of actually finishing this by the end of the month, & if not at least i'll try and have something to show!
now here's my attempt at some crits:
Ryandec: I feel like your front building with the pool might be a little too wide, the windows are kinda short as well but it could also be due to the horizontal stretching. otherwise i love how the rest is coming, the sheet-metal bridge is looking great!
Jaysmitt: your blockout is near perfect so far, especially the tallest building with the balconies. my only crit is it seems u forgot the indent in the front building on the bottom left corner, i'm not sure if u see what i'm talking about, but the area between the two pillars seems to be extruded inwards in the concept.
Terebellum: wow i'm blown away with how much you've blocked out so far. That angle really IS tricky though; it seems from that position you've placed the front corrugated metal sheet you can't see the windows on the front face of the main building, if it even matters.
Rawbert: i gotta say you've got the camera angle perfect, nice water tanks too! I like how u can see the interior of the main building. my crit would be to have that thin horizontal bottom window on the apartment complex wrap around the side instead of sitting where it is.
sk8erseth: lookin' good so far! good idea using the photo in the bg. If possible i'd make that fire escape hatch thingy a little bigger, but it seems like the latter might be in the way. Try scooting the apartment complex over to the left a little maybe? :O
I was gonna try and crit everyone but that'd take up the entire page XD
Anyway, here was my start yesterday:
today at work i blocked out some of the scene, mostly the first building. (it's excruciatingly slow where i work, the mall is a ghost town)
I'll wait till i get more of the scene blocked out before i post screens of that.
Some really nice stuff being created here, I've been working on the roof top scene myself and as it's the first bit of work I'm putting up on polycount I've been a bit hesitant but figured what the hell and best get stuck in, it's also my first time following a workflow through to game engine so I have a steep learning curve to climb.
As and when I can I will offer any advice but as of yet I have nothing extra to add to what has already been said
Im adding 2 wip shots, one of the scene, and one high poly of the water tank... all and any crits and advice are welcome would be greatly appreciated
i love where this is going u two!
Lokidottir: great progress on the blockout so far, the tank is looking incredible. If u don't mind me asking, what was ur workflow for making those bolts wrapping all the way around the tank? also what modelling program u using?
Mr.Fido: wow, gotta be my favorite weapon so far! i'm suprised u were able to accomplish that look as a nice somewhat low poly Only crit i can conjur is, the process u used to paint within the warped confines of that UV, is it possible to hide that seam on the handle or would it be difficult with the way it's mapped?
i feel i might as well show my futile attempt at blocking & texturing so far:
i have some vertices on the orange building to the right that don't influence the silhouette, but i felt they'd prevent ugly stretched normals or something. What do u guys think, is this unnecessary in most cases?
Lokidottir: great progress on the blockout so far, the tank is looking incredible. If u don't mind me asking, what was ur workflow for making those bolts wrapping all the way around the tank? also what modelling program u using?
Thank you, I'm using Max at the moment, and with the rivets I just got the first one in to position at the bottom of the tank and arrayed up then using the top and bottom ones polar arrayed from origin point around the tank. I had tried a path deform before hand which worked fine but I had to remodel a couple of bits and found the array tool easier to use, hope that makes sense
It has worked out the lens = 47.527mm, Field of view = 41.486, and the screen ratio is 1.25. Used this info to match the camera in UE4.
I was imagining a scene for a point'n'click/adventure game - with minimal camera roatation and movement. But maybe with zooming in for areas of interest n stuff.
Here are the separate objects being referenced in the main scene.
Anyways, thanks for reading, will post some feedback innabit
I guess this month i join even if its a bit late to start.
This is my first blockout version straight out of softimage. I need to tweak some proportions. I want to put this piece into Unity 4. So the next step for me would be to export the whole scene and start with some lightning tests inside of unity. Then i move to create the tiling textures.
The only unique objects are the watertanks, the flowerpots, duck and the antennas. For some grime and grunge i want to overlay decals the way bethesda did it in fallout 3 .
...Some critiques! @RyanDec - Looking nice and tight man, lighting n placement looks bang-on. As a crit I would question creating whole loops to create more geometry, for example on the main roof there are quads where there aren't really needed - increasing the triangle count and processing overheads. Try and target weld the vertices or collapse rings.
Saying that I realise it is a nice workflow and you can create good high-poly models without pinching from a having a load of triangles and such by using the add loops technique you and others are. So I guess is up to the individual and your workflow.
@Jay Smitt - Another nice blockout, however I think you could do with thickening the tree and bush trunks maybe, and rotating the light to match the reference might help a little.
@Minor Threat - Cool name/Band Also cool workings out, shows a good eye for detail, looking forward to the production. Looking at your second post I would say the topology on the oragne building is just bad - You don't want lots of lines going to one point normally, and avoid pointy triangles where possible. Maybe stick to squares for now?
@Lokidottir - Very nice... Maybe thicken out some of the assets maybe to suit the style of the concept - Personal taste though I guess?
The high poly looks really nice, but is a lot of detail - Is the player going to get close to it? Do you have time to match the fidelity with all the other assets? It does look real nice still
@Mr Fido - Really like the axe As a crit I would say you can push the values of the diffuse to create more contrast and make an easier read. it seems a bit grey & murky at the moment - especially around the shaft. Also looking at the wire-frame I would say loose some loops on the shaft, you really dont need many on a cylinder if you dont see its tips (which would reveal its low-polyness). Maybe use separate elements and close of the holes edges next time (like having the grip and pommell separate here).
@Dethling is anotther nice low-poly axe I would say maybe add more shadows to the rest of the axe to match the blades, which have nice cast shadows n stuff. Possibly a bit more hue variation as well would be nice and add a little more depth to the diffuse.
Here's my modular breakdown of all the assets, minus the background which I think will be planes or low poly - Pretty happy with the topology and breakdown, I should be able to create scene variations maybe.
@Tom Mackie - thank you for the crit, I will have a look at the assets in comparison to the concept more closely and see what I can come up with... and as for the water tank I agree that I went a tad ott with the detail, I'm hoping to use each piece in the scene to really push what I can and can't do within environments, modelling I can do ok to a point (always more to learn) but everything beyond that I have little knowledge of, so what you said helps me a great deal, cheers.
Enjoying seeing the good work here. Here's my effort so far.
Started Damage Sculpting, UV Mapping, and Texture Painting.
Making progress on building texture painting. The distant ones need more work. I used sculpting for the damage on the first building. Big mistake. It now has over 600K polys and was hard to UV map. I'm trying some different techniques on the other buildings. I fixed the pinching in my water. The water is a subdivided mesh with displacement modifier. But I had made the bottom just a big ngon. Now I have the bottom a proper mesh like the top. That cleared up the pinching.
Most of the modeling and texturing is done. Still some small objects to model. Probably will not make it into a game engine because of the high poly sculpted damage on the buildings.
Modeled in Blender, rendered with Cycles (1000 samples), and composited in Blender.
My attempt at the axe, also my first ever hand-painted model! So forgive it for not looking as professional as other attempts - considering I haven't picked up a paint brush in 10 years I don't think it's too bad!
So I made some progress with the blocking and I actually want to start working on the details. I adjusted the camera angle a bit but I'm still struggling
with getting it perfectly
Some building placements feel abit "off" But in overall I'm happy with the result I have so far!
@Ryandec
Good start, but your camera angle could use some tweaks, although I dont even know if you already started playing with it.
Keep it up
@JaySmitt
Not much I can add, your camera angle looks really solid!
Keep going
@minorthreat
I personally dont have the patience to actually grab a book and start making breakdown drawings, which is actually pretty usefull. Im not really sure in what program you're working but it feels that your orange building on the right is a mess when it comes to having clean lines, maybe you should try clean it out abit.
Other then that, keep it up!
@Lokidottir
I just love the waterbarrel, although now it almost feels that I have to come up with a different waterbarrel design simply because your waterbarrel almost
looks the same as I was planning to make
Great blockout with the buildings, although it feels that the platforms on
the big building on the left are lacking height, as in they need to be thicker.
I also think that the bridge has a to high angle downwards, so maybe u should
have a look at that.
@Mrfido
Great looking weapon!
Not much I can add to it
@Tom Mackie
Great video, I personally haven't tried to fix it but I should because I'm starting to have some matchup problems compared to the drawing.
Keep it up with the blockout
@Riveter
I cant believe you already created this amount of objects and already started creating textures!
Personally I would give the waterbarrels some more texture love instead of the grayish color
Keep it up!
@blendermonkey
Good start but personally I dont like the green color you started using, it feels too dark and it really feels flat.
It also seems like there is a lot of noise on the roof
or is it just me? Also try to create the cracks / holes on the edges of the roof!
Hey guys, I am back from holiday and getting back into making this environment Proving to be challenging but a great learning experience for sure! this is where I have got up to so far. Feedback welcome
You guys are really hitting the blockouts on the head of the nail. I am really excited to see what's to come from this month.
@minorthreat - I love how you took the time to plan out most of the props like that. Good job.
@Lokidottir - That model you got there looks really clean so far, keep going.
@Mrfido - That looks really close to the concept. I was going to model that exact axe and you pulled it off perfectly, in my opinion. Nice work.
@riveter - Nice progress shot you got there. I don't know what's up with the water texture you go there but it seems like there is stretching around the edges? I can't really tell.
Hey guys, I am back from holiday and getting back into making this environment Proving to be challenging but a great learning experience for sure! this is where I have got up to so far. Feedback welcome
Nice start, you got the basic shapes nailed down.
Take care of your proportions. Compared with the balkony of the left house the glass walls of the fronthouse are really tiny. Same goes for the windows on the right. But the best solution for this would be to lower the balkony height of the left house a bit .
Here´s my current progress. I´m doing this beside my daily work but i hope that i have enough time to finish
As you can see i extended the set to the left and right and adjusted the background scenery. I did this to be more flexible with the camera and to get a nicer, portfolio friendly aspect ratio.
My current plan is to only use tiling textures on this one. Currently there is only one normalmap in the scene for the water. To achieve nice "rounded" objects i manipulate the vertex normals by hand.
@.Wiki: ooh nice job! I love seeing color in these, nice color u picked for the stucco on the front building, i was wondering if i picked the right color, but it also seems everyone else is picking up on a greenish beige. How did you end up handling the cracks on the front building? It looks sculpted. yours has gotta be one of my favorites so far, i love how you added unseen detail, especially on the apartment complex. i might actually draw inspiration from this perspective.
@ross185: your blockout looks great so far, i love the blocky style on the tanks, the pipes & conduits also lookin good.
@riveter: also one of my favs, yours is really coming along. I like the metal shader ur using.
Hi y'all here is my first post entering the challenge. I chose to do the demon ax and what I guess would be a dwarf styled ax.
This is my first complete pass on the textures and I can see I need to push my highlights a bit more in the lava and meld the shading on the dwarf ax a tad.
Any and all critiques are welcome!
@Dethling- I love your combination of the two axes! It really gives the weapon a new personality than the two originals. I know you said you were finished but if you want a small critique I'd say add some highlights around the inner indentations. I feel it would really push the indents back and give is a great feel of depth.
@jacksterooney- Great work for your first hand painted prop! If you're look for a critique I'd recommend expanding your color pallet. Right now it looks rather muted. Painting some yellows in the wood or some blues into the steel could really make it more appealing to the eye.
When is modular pieces/texture important ?? Like, I notice previous months many of you seem to start from the ground up with seamless textures and all that, then this month it seems to be going from top down, blocking out all pieces first instead. I'm kind of confused here
thought I best add an update on where I am, been banging my head against a brick wall with trying to get the buildings spot on to the concept, I still haven't quite got my head around it but this is pretty much the final block-out, I've started having a bit more fun with some of the component parts and embellishing them a tad...
everyone's work is coming on really nice, looking forward to seeing developments over the next week
When is modular pieces/texture important ?? Like, I notice previous months many of you seem to start from the ground up with seamless textures and all that, then this month it seems to be going from top down, blocking out all pieces first instead. I'm kind of confused here
Note: I'm, more or less, a 3d character guy.
sorry I don't have an answer for you as this is the first time I've done anything like this (especially form start to finish) but I am interested to see what others have to say on this
@.Wiki: ooh nice job! I love seeing color in these, nice color u picked for the stucco on the front building, i was wondering if i picked the right color, but it also seems everyone else is picking up on a greenish beige. How did you end up handling the cracks on the front building? It looks sculpted. yours has gotta be one of my favorites so far, i love how you added unseen detail, especially on the apartment complex. i might actually draw inspiration from this perspective.
Thank you The cracks are all modeled by hand with simple cut in edges. There is no sculpting involved and i don´t want to sculpt or use highpoly meshes for this challenge.
On all the "hard edges" of the closer buildings i added a bevel to give that nice round edge. Then i manipulated the normals of the edges by hand to make the transition smoother.
I know what you mean - I think with this project there really is too much unique screen-space to modularize. Basically 80% of it is unique, and mostly walls, of which only a couple can be repeated. Here we can repeat the bushes, one bottle, glass walls, and maybe the roof trim/border(you have to flip it and change its colour though). Even most of the pipes are going off at different angles so is hard to repeat.
So I would say the reason I am personally doing it this way is as its easier to problem solve and experiment with the assets from the view to see where you can cut corners and make efficient.
I would say the concept art selected is probably not most ideal for game-art concept for the above reasons. I think it is one of the more challenging Noob-Challenge environments I've seen so far.
When you give texture to, say, walls, or floors, or stuff, how do you decide what texture size to use for each of em ? I imagine walls and floors gonna require big texture size (unless modular) in case character/camera moves in for close up ? So one scene is like, loads and loads of big 4096x4096 textures ??
@PyrZern
Depends I guess - I think the technical term is "texel density". The UE4 guidelines suggest 1 tile for every metre.
Personally for this project I am not going over 2048px... But what I will do is overlay tiling textures in UE4, so when you are close it hides pixillation and adds detail.
There's 4 main texture sheets at the mo
1 for buildings
1 for metal stuff
1 for props
1 for the background
Will be another for masked foliage, one for clouds, then general noise for detail maps - Think I can cram characters onto the props, but saving for last
You can use 4K textures for each individual item, and as many polys as you want, but myself I'm aiming for compatibility with mobile devices - pushing myself with the technical crap rather than modelling. Should hopefully have a scene in UE4 later today with base colours and everything unwrapped.
I'm interested too in seeing how others are tackling this - Is not so straight forward. *makes a coffee
You don't actually know when you want to make a 4k texture or just a 1k texture
Obviously the higher the resolution, the more details you can see.
It's a big puzzle that you need to solve and eventually you want to create a scene
that is effici
@.Wiki: I like seeing your scene in the Unity Game Engine. I am not familiar with that workflow, but will look into it. But I think I will have to avoid sculpting the damages on my mesh due to high poly count.
But I think I will have to avoid sculpting the damages on my mesh due to high poly count.
This is how i did the cracks in the walls. Pretty simple but i like the effect. Also i changed the distance of the bevels in some areas to give the walls a more irregular look.
Oh wow, I just (nearly) finished one of these axes last week. I love these concepts. I'm tempted to try a second one now!
Might as well post my first axe, it just needs the little ribbon knot and it should be done.
564 tris, 512x512 diffuse texture
did you just project the concept onto a mesh? if so... don't be lazy.
Woo, latest to the party, everyone is doing great work and I am super excited about this. I've been doing 3d stuff for a little while ago but I just started learning 3ds max this week, so this is where I am at
(Unfortunately I'm still figuring out how groups/pivots/transforms/instances/etc work in 3ds and for now it's all a bit broken when I put it in Unity... )
Okayy, I will be back with lots of comments in a bit, I wanna read through everything again and make sure I don't repeat stuff that has already been said a bunch.
Woo, latest to the party, everyone is doing great work and I am super excited about this. I've been doing 3d stuff for a little while ago but I just started learning 3ds max this week, so this is where I am at
Make sure you apply the transforms if you have scaled or rotated the objects.
My attempt at the axe, also my first ever hand-painted model! So forgive it for not looking as professional as other attempts - considering I haven't picked up a paint brush in 10 years I don't think it's too bad!
You model some this that did not needed to be modeled like the cloth or the grip can be made with the normal map. So don't be afraid to use the power of the normal!!
@riveter - do you mean reset xform? I googled a bunch but I can't find anything about applying transforms. I know in Maya I'd just freeze all the channels and delete the history, but reset xform just seems to break things differently : http://i.imgur.com/TmDUwpp.png
It's definitely something to do with all the mirroring, I'll figure it out eventually.
edit- oh cool, just closing/exploding all my groups seems to get it to show up right in Unity. I guess it's something to do with groups, then.
Okay, comments and critiques:
@Lokidottir - that's looking pretty good, you shouldn't worry too much about matching the concept perfectly, it's all looking pretty good where it's at. Maybe try focusing more on the feel of the concept, you could try blocking in some more colours, I think that'd go a long way. Softening the shadows might help a lot as well, if you're using a directional light, try having another one with much lower intensity coming in from the right.
@SomethingFishy - Those axes are looking really nice, your topology is looking very efficient, too, definitely nailed the silhouettes. Your interpretation of the demon axe texture is super cool, it looks a lot juicier than the concept, I think, more like lava than coals. The dwarf axe is also looking excellent, but I think you could use a bit more contrast where the handle meets the blade, in the illustration the middle bit is a bit wider, the engraved detail hits it at a slightly sharper angle, and the line between the two is stronger, but I think that darkening the blade a bit or giving it a bit more texture could make it pop a bit more with way less effort. Actually, having it right next to the super contrasty demon axe probably makes it look a lot flatter, too.
@.Wiki - Looking good, I'm excited to see what you do with textures. You might already be on it, but the metal water tanks and pipes look pretty dull as is, a lighter specular material might work better. Also, if you're up for it, you could try using one of these glass shaders to make everything else a bit shinier, too: http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/Glass_Shader
@ross185 - I really like how your props are coming along, the satellite dishes and the water tanks are great and the pipes are pretty spot-on, I'm excited to see how it looks with some colour.
@Rawbert - Don't worry about getting the camera to match perfectly, the perspective is definitely a bit weird in the concept. I think your version of the yellow building in the middle could be a bit wider and longer, as well as a bit further back, but it is definitely the most skewed in the illustration and I think yours is fine as is if you don't wanna have to rework it again.
Thanks for the feedback so far guys. Everyone is doing really well so far! Good stuff, hopefully I will be able to finish this within the time frame as I have a feeling texturing will take some time!
They just did a really good job with Max's concept. If you look more closely you will see lots of differences in the texture. At most they color picked. Let's not go throwing plagiarism around. We are trying to learn in here. :thumbup:
When is modular pieces/texture important ?? Like, I notice previous months many of you seem to start from the ground up with seamless textures and all that, then this month it seems to be going from top down, blocking out all pieces first instead. I'm kind of confused here
Note: I'm, more or less, a 3d character guy.
Modular pieces/Textures is all about planning. Potentially any scene can be done modular and its up to the the environment artist to decide if they want to use it or not. Modular stuff is usually used for a professional pipeline for massively sized games. You choose to do modular stuff so you can cut your work load down. For example, if you were to build a town i would make modular set pieces, windows doors, buildings, etc. This will add the illusion that each building in this town is different.
did you just project the concept onto a mesh? if so... don't be lazy.
I didn't project the concept, I did this axe as an exercise of handpainted textures and put a lot of effort trying to match the concept as precise as possible. I did use colourpicker whilst painting like kmactastic said.
I can see where you're coming from though, especially because I painted in the highlights, but I didn't want to put any lighting in the scene and without it looks kind of flat.
But here's some of my psd layers in a gif. I don't have all of them because I tend to keep painting over the same layer until it looks good. Also I made a rough highpoly version to render Ambient Occlusion from. I rendered two AO-maps, a regular one and once with a half dome around the bottom of the model, to give it a bit of a gradient from down up. It gives a good head start in your texture.
I chose this particular one to start with because I thought it would be the easiest of the 5. I still want to do one of the others for practice but it seems like I won't be able to find the time this month.
I didn't project the concept, I did this axe as an exercise of handpainted textures and put a lot of effort trying to match the concept as precise as possible. I did use colourpicker whilst painting like kmactastic said.
I can see where you're coming from though, especially because I painted in the highlights, but I didn't want to put any lighting in the scene and without it looks kind of flat.
But here's some of my psd layers in a gif. I don't have all of them because I tend to keep painting over the same layer until it looks good. Also I made a rough highpoly version to render Ambient Occlusion from. I rendered two AO-maps, a regular one and once with a half dome around the bottom of the model, to give it a bit of a gradient from down up. It gives a good head start in your texture.
I chose this particular one to start with because I thought it would be the easiest of the 5. I still want to do one of the others for practice but it seems like I won't be able to find the time this month.
Your texture/Uvs are really nicely done. Please post the other axes if you do them.
I am joining very late but here is what I have so far...
I can definitely give feedback when people start texturing. So far everyone's blockouts are really great imo (:
@Pyr: When I did the June challenge Bunker I put everything into unique sheets, knowing I had one room with concept art (like this month) that is simply one camera shot. It had several individual pieces that needed wear and tear unique to them so that can't just be tiled. However with the environment you might have seen me working on now, Its a huge scene with several repeating elements. The size of huge bare surfaces alone is enough for me to say that I couldn't possibly put it all in one unique sheet. Also as an aspiring environment artist, They like to see that you get the workflow and can do it.
If I were doing this month's the big question I would have is about the wear on the sides of the buildings. With a single shot like most people are doing, you might want to go for it and paint the details directly in the exact placement. Making a huge actual environment to walk around in though, that simply would not be efficient. Skyrim for example took years to make with a couple people making assets like crazy and a few level designers placing them over and over again into a ton of levels, reusing the same pieces over and over again. Without that, the game would never have finished!
Okay boy have I been busy at work this month I haven't had any time to get on with this but I am going to try as do do as much as I can this week. So I finally managed to get the right camera angle (well as best as I could). To get the perspective to work I had to use a 7.5mm lens on the camera so it's uber wide. Anyways.
I have modeled all the basic elements and I now want to move onto the next stage which would be sculpting in the details, and unwrapping everything etc. I am not sure I am going around this in the best manner. I had to add a load more edge loops to my model to then get it into Mudbox to then start sculpting in the details. My aim was then to take the low poly mesh from mudbox back into my 3D package unwrap it and then take it back into mudbox to bake out the normal maps.
I am having a lot of trouble getting the normal map to not look absolutely awful once I bring it back into my 3D package to render it (Look at final image below). Should I just split the mesh into individual elements and sculpt them separately? Or is it just that I need to sort out my edges on my mesh?
Thanks a lot for the feedback.
I'm just back from vacations and have to say: I totally missed the shadows on the hilt.
So I will bring up the file again and add them.
Also I have to fix the lighting of the blade indentations, right now it seems like the blades have a 100° angle to each other rather then 180°
CatalystFlyer
Are your edges beveled at all (that should help)? Looks like your sculpt isn't lining up with your lo-res or something. Maybe try taking your lo-res subdivide it once or twice and project it to your hi-res in zbrush (whatever you are sculpting in) and I bet you will get a better bake to then put on your lo-res.
Replies
Progress from last night
Just got back from work so time to get cracking.
now here's my attempt at some crits:
Ryandec: I feel like your front building with the pool might be a little too wide, the windows are kinda short as well but it could also be due to the horizontal stretching. otherwise i love how the rest is coming, the sheet-metal bridge is looking great!
Jaysmitt: your blockout is near perfect so far, especially the tallest building with the balconies. my only crit is it seems u forgot the indent in the front building on the bottom left corner, i'm not sure if u see what i'm talking about, but the area between the two pillars seems to be extruded inwards in the concept.
Terebellum: wow i'm blown away with how much you've blocked out so far. That angle really IS tricky though; it seems from that position you've placed the front corrugated metal sheet you can't see the windows on the front face of the main building, if it even matters.
Rawbert: i gotta say you've got the camera angle perfect, nice water tanks too! I like how u can see the interior of the main building. my crit would be to have that thin horizontal bottom window on the apartment complex wrap around the side instead of sitting where it is.
sk8erseth: lookin' good so far! good idea using the photo in the bg. If possible i'd make that fire escape hatch thingy a little bigger, but it seems like the latter might be in the way. Try scooting the apartment complex over to the left a little maybe? :O
I was gonna try and crit everyone but that'd take up the entire page XD
Anyway, here was my start yesterday:
today at work i blocked out some of the scene, mostly the first building. (it's excruciatingly slow where i work, the mall is a ghost town)
I'll wait till i get more of the scene blocked out before i post screens of that.
good luck everyone!
As and when I can I will offer any advice but as of yet I have nothing extra to add to what has already been said
Im adding 2 wip shots, one of the scene, and one high poly of the water tank... all and any crits and advice are welcome would be greatly appreciated
You can see all the photo here
https://www.behance.net/gallery/19682513/Hand-Painted-Ax
Lokidottir: great progress on the blockout so far, the tank is looking incredible. If u don't mind me asking, what was ur workflow for making those bolts wrapping all the way around the tank? also what modelling program u using?
Mr.Fido: wow, gotta be my favorite weapon so far!
i feel i might as well show my futile attempt at blocking & texturing so far:
i have some vertices on the orange building to the right that don't influence the silhouette, but i felt they'd prevent ugly stretched normals or something. What do u guys think, is this unnecessary in most cases?
I call the axe finished now.
Thank you, I'm using Max at the moment, and with the rivets I just got the first one in to position at the bottom of the tank and arrayed up then using the top and bottom ones polar arrayed from origin point around the tank. I had tried a path deform before hand which worked fine but I had to remodel a couple of bits and found the array tool easier to use, hope that makes sense
Here's an early block out, using 3DS Max's Camera Match
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKTFoY1SQUY
It has worked out the lens = 47.527mm, Field of view = 41.486, and the screen ratio is 1.25. Used this info to match the camera in UE4.
I was imagining a scene for a point'n'click/adventure game - with minimal camera roatation and movement. But maybe with zooming in for areas of interest n stuff.
Here are the separate objects being referenced in the main scene.
Anyways, thanks for reading, will post some feedback innabit
I will move on modeling the stuffs.
Good job guys, keep it up.
This is my first blockout version straight out of softimage. I need to tweak some proportions. I want to put this piece into Unity 4. So the next step for me would be to export the whole scene and start with some lightning tests inside of unity. Then i move to create the tiling textures.
The only unique objects are the watertanks, the flowerpots, duck and the antennas. For some grime and grunge i want to overlay decals the way bethesda did it in fallout 3
@RyanDec - Looking nice and tight man, lighting n placement looks bang-on. As a crit I would question creating whole loops to create more geometry, for example on the main roof there are quads where there aren't really needed - increasing the triangle count and processing overheads. Try and target weld the vertices or collapse rings.
Saying that I realise it is a nice workflow and you can create good high-poly models without pinching from a having a load of triangles and such by using the add loops technique you and others are. So I guess is up to the individual and your workflow.
@Jay Smitt - Another nice blockout, however I think you could do with thickening the tree and bush trunks maybe, and rotating the light to match the reference might help a little.
@Minor Threat - Cool name/Band
@Lokidottir - Very nice... Maybe thicken out some of the assets maybe to suit the style of the concept - Personal taste though I guess?
The high poly looks really nice, but is a lot of detail - Is the player going to get close to it? Do you have time to match the fidelity with all the other assets? It does look real nice still
@Mr Fido - Really like the axe
@Dethling is anotther nice low-poly axe
Here's my modular breakdown of all the assets, minus the background which I think will be planes or low poly - Pretty happy with the topology and breakdown, I should be able to create scene variations maybe.
Hoping to post an update soon-ish
Started Damage Sculpting, UV Mapping, and Texture Painting.
Making progress on building texture painting. The distant ones need more work. I used sculpting for the damage on the first building. Big mistake. It now has over 600K polys and was hard to UV map. I'm trying some different techniques on the other buildings. I fixed the pinching in my water. The water is a subdivided mesh with displacement modifier. But I had made the bottom just a big ngon. Now I have the bottom a proper mesh like the top. That cleared up the pinching.
Most of the modeling and texturing is done. Still some small objects to model. Probably will not make it into a game engine because of the high poly sculpted damage on the buildings.
Modeled in Blender, rendered with Cycles (1000 samples), and composited in Blender.
Almost done with the main house.
[sketchfab]444e7bbf7f15406db6bb986c817147ac[/sketchfab]
Crimson Axe by adlerljack on Sketchfab
with getting it perfectly
Some building placements feel abit "off" But in overall I'm happy with the result I have so far!
@Ryandec
Good start, but your camera angle could use some tweaks, although I dont even know if you already started playing with it.
Keep it up
@JaySmitt
Not much I can add, your camera angle looks really solid!
Keep going
@minorthreat
I personally dont have the patience to actually grab a book and start making breakdown drawings, which is actually pretty usefull. Im not really sure in what program you're working but it feels that your orange building on the right is a mess when it comes to having clean lines, maybe you should try clean it out abit.
Other then that, keep it up!
@Lokidottir
I just love the waterbarrel, although now it almost feels that I have to come up with a different waterbarrel design simply because your waterbarrel almost
looks the same as I was planning to make
Great blockout with the buildings, although it feels that the platforms on
the big building on the left are lacking height, as in they need to be thicker.
I also think that the bridge has a to high angle downwards, so maybe u should
have a look at that.
@Mrfido
Great looking weapon!
Not much I can add to it
@Tom Mackie
Great video, I personally haven't tried to fix it but I should because I'm starting to have some matchup problems compared to the drawing.
Keep it up with the blockout
@Riveter
I cant believe you already created this amount of objects and already started creating textures!
Personally I would give the waterbarrels some more texture love instead of the grayish color
Keep it up!
@blendermonkey
Good start but personally I dont like the green color you started using, it feels too dark and it really feels flat.
It also seems like there is a lot of noise on the roof
or is it just me? Also try to create the cracks / holes on the edges of the roof!
@minorthreat - I love how you took the time to plan out most of the props like that. Good job.
@Lokidottir - That model you got there looks really clean so far, keep going.
@Mrfido - That looks really close to the concept. I was going to model that exact axe and you pulled it off perfectly, in my opinion. Nice work.
@riveter - Nice progress shot you got there. I don't know what's up with the water texture you go there but it seems like there is stretching around the edges? I can't really tell.
@Rawbert - Very clean man.
Take care of your proportions. Compared with the balkony of the left house the glass walls of the fronthouse are really tiny. Same goes for the windows on the right. But the best solution for this would be to lower the balkony height of the left house a bit
Here´s my current progress. I´m doing this beside my daily work but i hope that i have enough time to finish
As you can see i extended the set to the left and right and adjusted the background scenery. I did this to be more flexible with the camera and to get a nicer, portfolio friendly aspect ratio.
My current plan is to only use tiling textures on this one. Currently there is only one normalmap in the scene for the water. To achieve nice "rounded" objects i manipulate the vertex normals by hand.
@ross185: your blockout looks great so far, i love the blocky style on the tanks, the pipes & conduits also lookin good.
@riveter: also one of my favs, yours is really coming along. I like the metal shader ur using.
This is my first complete pass on the textures and I can see I need to push my highlights a bit more in the lava and meld the shading on the dwarf ax a tad.
Any and all critiques are welcome!
@Dethling- I love your combination of the two axes! It really gives the weapon a new personality than the two originals. I know you said you were finished but if you want a small critique I'd say add some highlights around the inner indentations. I feel it would really push the indents back and give is a great feel of depth.
@jacksterooney- Great work for your first hand painted prop! If you're look for a critique I'd recommend expanding your color pallet. Right now it looks rather muted. Painting some yellows in the wood or some blues into the steel could really make it more appealing to the eye.
When is modular pieces/texture important ?? Like, I notice previous months many of you seem to start from the ground up with seamless textures and all that, then this month it seems to be going from top down, blocking out all pieces first instead. I'm kind of confused here
Note: I'm, more or less, a 3d character guy.
everyone's work is coming on really nice, looking forward to seeing developments over the next week
sorry I don't have an answer for you as this is the first time I've done anything like this (especially form start to finish) but I am interested to see what others have to say on this
On all the "hard edges" of the closer buildings i added a bevel to give that nice round edge. Then i manipulated the normals of the edges by hand to make the transition smoother.
I know what you mean - I think with this project there really is too much unique screen-space to modularize. Basically 80% of it is unique, and mostly walls, of which only a couple can be repeated. Here we can repeat the bushes, one bottle, glass walls, and maybe the roof trim/border(you have to flip it and change its colour though). Even most of the pipes are going off at different angles so is hard to repeat.
So I would say the reason I am personally doing it this way is as its easier to problem solve and experiment with the assets from the view to see where you can cut corners and make efficient.
I would say the concept art selected is probably not most ideal for game-art concept for the above reasons. I think it is one of the more challenging Noob-Challenge environments I've seen so far.
That's my opinion anyways
When you give texture to, say, walls, or floors, or stuff, how do you decide what texture size to use for each of em ? I imagine walls and floors gonna require big texture size (unless modular) in case character/camera moves in for close up ? So one scene is like, loads and loads of big 4096x4096 textures ??
Depends I guess - I think the technical term is "texel density". The UE4 guidelines suggest 1 tile for every metre.
Personally for this project I am not going over 2048px... But what I will do is overlay tiling textures in UE4, so when you are close it hides pixillation and adds detail.
There's 4 main texture sheets at the mo
1 for buildings
1 for metal stuff
1 for props
1 for the background
Will be another for masked foliage, one for clouds, then general noise for detail maps - Think I can cram characters onto the props, but saving for last
You can use 4K textures for each individual item, and as many polys as you want, but myself I'm aiming for compatibility with mobile devices - pushing myself with the technical crap rather than modelling. Should hopefully have a scene in UE4 later today with base colours and everything unwrapped.
I'm interested too in seeing how others are tackling this - Is not so straight forward. *makes a coffee
You don't actually know when you want to make a 4k texture or just a 1k texture
Obviously the higher the resolution, the more details you can see.
It's a big puzzle that you need to solve and eventually you want to create a scene
that is effici
This is how i did the cracks in the walls. Pretty simple but i like the effect. Also i changed the distance of the bevels in some areas to give the walls a more irregular look.
did you just project the concept onto a mesh? if so... don't be lazy.
(Unfortunately I'm still figuring out how groups/pivots/transforms/instances/etc work in 3ds and for now it's all a bit broken when I put it in Unity... )
Okayy, I will be back with lots of comments in a bit, I wanna read through everything again and make sure I don't repeat stuff that has already been said a bunch.
Make sure you apply the transforms if you have scaled or rotated the objects.
You model some this that did not needed to be modeled like the cloth or the grip can be made with the normal map. So don't be afraid to use the power of the normal!!
It's definitely something to do with all the mirroring, I'll figure it out eventually.
edit- oh cool, just closing/exploding all my groups seems to get it to show up right in Unity. I guess it's something to do with groups, then.
Okay, comments and critiques:
@Lokidottir - that's looking pretty good, you shouldn't worry too much about matching the concept perfectly, it's all looking pretty good where it's at. Maybe try focusing more on the feel of the concept, you could try blocking in some more colours, I think that'd go a long way. Softening the shadows might help a lot as well, if you're using a directional light, try having another one with much lower intensity coming in from the right.
@SomethingFishy - Those axes are looking really nice, your topology is looking very efficient, too, definitely nailed the silhouettes. Your interpretation of the demon axe texture is super cool, it looks a lot juicier than the concept, I think, more like lava than coals. The dwarf axe is also looking excellent, but I think you could use a bit more contrast where the handle meets the blade, in the illustration the middle bit is a bit wider, the engraved detail hits it at a slightly sharper angle, and the line between the two is stronger, but I think that darkening the blade a bit or giving it a bit more texture could make it pop a bit more with way less effort. Actually, having it right next to the super contrasty demon axe probably makes it look a lot flatter, too.
@.Wiki - Looking good, I'm excited to see what you do with textures. You might already be on it, but the metal water tanks and pipes look pretty dull as is, a lighter specular material might work better. Also, if you're up for it, you could try using one of these glass shaders to make everything else a bit shinier, too: http://wiki.unity3d.com/index.php/Glass_Shader
@ross185 - I really like how your props are coming along, the satellite dishes and the water tanks are great and the pipes are pretty spot-on, I'm excited to see how it looks with some colour.
@Rawbert - Don't worry about getting the camera to match perfectly, the perspective is definitely a bit weird in the concept. I think your version of the yellow building in the middle could be a bit wider and longer, as well as a bit further back, but it is definitely the most skewed in the illustration and I think yours is fine as is if you don't wanna have to rework it again.
Here is a little update of where I am at!
Modular pieces/Textures is all about planning. Potentially any scene can be done modular and its up to the the environment artist to decide if they want to use it or not. Modular stuff is usually used for a professional pipeline for massively sized games. You choose to do modular stuff so you can cut your work load down. For example, if you were to build a town i would make modular set pieces, windows doors, buildings, etc. This will add the illusion that each building in this town is different.
I will have to see if I can join up next month or not...
I didn't project the concept, I did this axe as an exercise of handpainted textures and put a lot of effort trying to match the concept as precise as possible. I did use colourpicker whilst painting like kmactastic said.
I can see where you're coming from though, especially because I painted in the highlights, but I didn't want to put any lighting in the scene and without it looks kind of flat.
But here's some of my psd layers in a gif. I don't have all of them because I tend to keep painting over the same layer until it looks good. Also I made a rough highpoly version to render Ambient Occlusion from. I rendered two AO-maps, a regular one and once with a half dome around the bottom of the model, to give it a bit of a gradient from down up. It gives a good head start in your texture.
I chose this particular one to start with because I thought it would be the easiest of the 5. I still want to do one of the others for practice but it seems like I won't be able to find the time this month.
Your texture/Uvs are really nicely done. Please post the other axes if you do them.
I am joining very late but here is what I have so far...
I can definitely give feedback when people start texturing. So far everyone's blockouts are really great imo (:
If I were doing this month's the big question I would have is about the wear on the sides of the buildings. With a single shot like most people are doing, you might want to go for it and paint the details directly in the exact placement. Making a huge actual environment to walk around in though, that simply would not be efficient. Skyrim for example took years to make with a couple people making assets like crazy and a few level designers placing them over and over again into a ton of levels, reusing the same pieces over and over again. Without that, the game would never have finished!
Okay boy have I been busy at work this month I haven't had any time to get on with this but I am going to try as do do as much as I can this week. So I finally managed to get the right camera angle (well as best as I could). To get the perspective to work I had to use a 7.5mm lens on the camera so it's uber wide. Anyways.
I have modeled all the basic elements and I now want to move onto the next stage which would be sculpting in the details, and unwrapping everything etc. I am not sure I am going around this in the best manner. I had to add a load more edge loops to my model to then get it into Mudbox to then start sculpting in the details. My aim was then to take the low poly mesh from mudbox back into my 3D package unwrap it and then take it back into mudbox to bake out the normal maps.
I am having a lot of trouble getting the normal map to not look absolutely awful once I bring it back into my 3D package to render it (Look at final image below). Should I just split the mesh into individual elements and sculpt them separately? Or is it just that I need to sort out my edges on my mesh?
I'm just back from vacations and have to say: I totally missed the shadows on the hilt.
So I will bring up the file again and add them.
Also I have to fix the lighting of the blade indentations, right now it seems like the blades have a 100° angle to each other rather then 180°
Are your edges beveled at all (that should help)? Looks like your sculpt isn't lining up with your lo-res or something. Maybe try taking your lo-res subdivide it once or twice and project it to your hi-res in zbrush (whatever you are sculpting in) and I bet you will get a better bake to then put on your lo-res.