Wintery environment (Unity) - work in progress, critiques please!

conghal

Hey hey everyone, this is my first showcase thread and I'm super nervous!

So I've been working on this for ages and I'm not sure what to do now. I'm probably going to add a nice stone bridge and some more rocks. Maybe it needs a building as well? Some small plants? Character animations? UI stuff? NPC-ish characters? Enemies? So many things. Also I've just noticed that the normal map I baked in zBrush is a bit distorted on the character's helmet, so I'll definitely be fixing that.

Anyways, here is a video of a super-simple UV animation script on the river: http://youtu.be/Gg9uDqhWqn0

And a bunch of screenshots of everything running in Unity:















So I would love to hear what you think of it and what you think I should do now. And, if you are feeling super generous with your time, I could really use some critiques/thoughts/advice about my portfolio ( conghal.com ).

Also, I've figured out loads of things that I'd love to share and break down if anyone is interested (river UV animation, fairly quick lo-poly trees, Unity terrain stuff, photoshop texture tiling actions, using vector shapes for terrain height and splat maps, zBrush noisemaker stuff, etc. etc.), so if you would like to know more, definitely let me know.

Thanks!

elsewhere

Try to get a snow blend texture for the trees, with so much snow on the ground there should probably be some accumulating on the tree trunks and branches. That was the first thing that came to my mind, good luck!

conghal

Hay, thanks for the comment!

I tweaked all the cutout leaf/branch textures to make them snowier and lightened the trunks a bit and I think this definitely looks a bit better:










Unfortunately Unity's special soft occlusion terrain tree shader is pretty strange/limited, so I tried adding snow to the bottom of the trunk and it just ended up looking super weird:




There isn't really a way to transition to the trunks from the terrain texture either; I wish I could get at the splat map or whatever it is they use under the hood to store all the tree positions so that I could tweak the textures and terrain height the way I did with the path and the edge for the river, but if there is a way to extract some kind of tree-position map I can't figure it out.

The best solution I've been able to come up with is pointing the vertex normals towards the bottom of the trunk down to darken the trunk where it intersects with the ground, but I might have overdone it a little so I toned it down a bit for these new screenshots.

Maybe I'll try doing some higher-poly non-terrain trees with normal and specular maps.. I kept these to fewer than 2000 triangles, since that is what the documentation says to stick to for reasons.

Cheeky_Pickle

Heya, looking cool but pretty simple. Perhaps add some rocks/foliage on the floor to break up the dense snow. As for the bottom of the trees you could try scuplting in some snow drifts etc?

taglol

Check this out man http://simonschreibt.de/gat/world-of-torch-siege-blended-trunks/

Maybe can be useful for you with the tree-to-ground blending.

Rawbert

The problem right now is lack of variation

- Everything is white
- The tree's are evenly spaced out

You should play with mountains
Try to create more variation in tree's / placements
What about some fallen trees / tree trunks at some locations
Maybe add something like a bridge
Falling snow
rocks
or maybe a huge castle in the background
or maybe make the scene more interesting by adding "some broken stuff" as in "something just happend here"
maybe some animals like bears / or a moose
what about a small camp?

You should try to look up for some reference images, it could help you out a lot!