Mountain Environment Project

crisco2192

Hello Polycounters, I'm currently working on a 3D environment project in my graduate program, and I wanted to share my journey through this project with the Polycount community!

I work a lot with Maya, but I have used very little Zbrush and Unreal. I hope to use this thread as an opportunity to better my skills with Maya, Zbrush, and Unreal.

So here we go.

I fell in love with this concept art done by Matthew Rodgers, and I'm using it as my primary source of reference for this project.



First, I started a break down of the environment. Simple breakdown for right now. It doesn't include all the little details, but it breaks down the main elements used.



And here is my progress in blocking out the shot in Maya. Once I finish the blocking out, I'll throw some low poly structures of the mountains into Zbrush and work on getting some detail in.



If anyone has any feedback on my work and process, please please please feedback away!

Thanks everyone!

crisco2192

visoutre

The wooden structures look awesome! Are you still going to add to it? Feels like you could put more rocks in the foggy areas cause there's a huge open space in your version compared to the concept. The birds add life to the concept so try to add them in as well.

BARDLER

You are missing a lot of form, silhouette, and detail on those rock spires. They have really chunky shapes and big deep crevices in some areas in the concept. I would really go back and nail that since they are going to be the largest and most detailed part of your scene.

Flat Face

"So here's a cube, I'll start work on something soon"

Next post

"Yeah and here's an entire high definition completed product"

JamieRIOT

Like BARDLER said, the rocks need reworking. Nail that first and then once you get back to the texturing stage, you will need to work up a new rock texture, because the current one is very low-res and has stretched UVs in areas (especially image 4).

crisco2192

visoutre: Thank you so much! Yeah, I definitely want to add more to it. I agree that the rocks do need some work. And I'm not quite sure how to do the birds. I'm still very new to the Unreal Engine. Would you use a particle system? Anyway, thanks again for your feedback!

BARDLER: Yep, I totally see that. I'm thinking of tweaking the low poly model in Maya to hopefully get some of that silhouette back. However, some of those large cracks may need to be cut out in Zbrush. Thanks for the feedback!

Flat Face: I wouldn't call this a "completed product", but yes, you're right, I could have been updating my post more often. Thanks.

JamieRIOT: I have a confession... I tried to hide it instead of fixing it. I learned the hard way, I should have just fixed it. Now that I'm remembering, I don't think I smoothed the UVs after the cylindrical mapping in Maya. So everywhere the faces on the model start to go horizontal, all the UV mapping gets stretched. Now I just need to fix it. Thank you for your feedback.

visoutre

I'm not sure the best way to do birds, but somebody put a video on Youtube using the static mesh morph target workflow to get simple animation with no joints necessary. [ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSHlKxqoc9s[/ame]

Seems you need a script which no longer ships with UE4 but they have a link here https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/59320/static-mesh-morpher.html

But the pathing for that many birds may be difficult to do so if you're just taking still images of your enviro, the animation shouldn't be a big deal. Have them static. But other issues probably a priority to do first, birds would just be the icing on the cake.

crisco2192

I completely redid the lighting, some of the textures, and fix some of the object placement.

Doxturtle

your rocks are very smooth compared to the concepts. The concept has a lot jagged edges and sharp rocks sticking out of the structure, looking really good so far though

Tobbo

Sculpt those rocks! There's no way around it. Pay attention to your silhouette and negative space. You can and probably should take a modular approach to it.

1. Make a few unique sculpted rocks.

2. In the editor, rotate, scale, and place them intersecting each other to make it seem like larger rocks.

Here's a video of Ben Burkart doing just that.

[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=67NToSkW2vs[/ame]


I personally would take out the birds they're just distracting and really don't add any value to your work.