Newb starting an environment for Blizzard's Contest
Good afternoon, Polycount!
I have been a lurker in the website for a while and decided to finally try my chances here. I am -very- new to the whole realm of 3D, it has been a very head-cracking but fun experience. Back in November I wanted to partake in Blizzard's student art contest, and I made a character entry which can be seen here.
I felt like I didn't get time enough to develop and tweak everything, which is why I am making an early start this year, in which I will give a shot at environment modeling. The thing is, finding tutorials for this matter in particular has been hard, I dig through polycount's fascinating compilation thread of world building, but it is often stuff a newcomer like me can barely understand. I have been trying very hard, though!
Which is why I would like to set up this thread with my current progress and ask questions as I go.
I am making an environment where my previously mentioned character belongs, still situated in the Warcraft universe. Here are my current references. It will be a temple situated in an island. So far this is what I have got:
My current questions are:
What is the best way to simulate WoW's water engine in Maya?
And also, in terms of texturing, I am a big big fan of Fanny Vergne's work and tutorials, but I don't think they use the same tiling method for primordial terrain (I could be wrong). Therefore, What is the best way to get a handpainted terrain with a WoW feel?
I will keep this thread updated! Thank you for the attention.
I have been a lurker in the website for a while and decided to finally try my chances here. I am -very- new to the whole realm of 3D, it has been a very head-cracking but fun experience. Back in November I wanted to partake in Blizzard's student art contest, and I made a character entry which can be seen here.
I felt like I didn't get time enough to develop and tweak everything, which is why I am making an early start this year, in which I will give a shot at environment modeling. The thing is, finding tutorials for this matter in particular has been hard, I dig through polycount's fascinating compilation thread of world building, but it is often stuff a newcomer like me can barely understand. I have been trying very hard, though!
Which is why I would like to set up this thread with my current progress and ask questions as I go.
I am making an environment where my previously mentioned character belongs, still situated in the Warcraft universe. Here are my current references. It will be a temple situated in an island. So far this is what I have got:
My current questions are:
What is the best way to simulate WoW's water engine in Maya?
And also, in terms of texturing, I am a big big fan of Fanny Vergne's work and tutorials, but I don't think they use the same tiling method for primordial terrain (I could be wrong). Therefore, What is the best way to get a handpainted terrain with a WoW feel?
I will keep this thread updated! Thank you for the attention.
Replies
Btw, to add pictures properly upload them to Imagur and use the BBcode for forums link
People are less likely to comment on your work if they don't see directly the images on your post ( how lazy have we become ? ).
Getting the terrain right... I decided to use a blinn for the water and am currently using one of maya substances maps for the terrain so far. Will probably begin modeling the assets until my research shines some light on those terrain matters. Opinions and suggestions are very much appreciated!
Do you plan on rendering everything in Maya?
Why not put it into a game engine? Always a good skill to be able to show your assets in-engine, and now that for example unreal 4 is free...
Also, I can highly recommend this tutorial by Jamin Shoulet for texturing, not 100% sure but I think he also shows how to create mud/ground texture.. definetly worth a watch
[ame]
All of these support landscape height-map painting which is pretty easy to sculpt out with in the actual engine, is performance friendly due to the way they handle LODs (terrain's geometry automatically gets swapped out with less geometry for parts at a distance/more subdivisions up close, less from afar), and you can import bitmaps for the height from something like Maya or world machine (at least in Unreal, unsure about the others but probably as well) if you're doing something that would be too large to hand-sculpt everything by yourself.
I'd also probably recommend using one of the engines above if you're working on piecing an environment together, since they're actual real-time engines being used by game studios versus a cpu-based render, which is mostly used for architecture firms or film.
Basically you'd build all your props out as well as any modular bits or things like buildings, and export them to a game engine. There you'd rehook up your materials/bitmaps to the models, and work on the composition and lighting.
Water can be usually something like a flat plane with a reflective material, possible caustics or a looped wave animation in a normal map, transparency depending on the zdepth, or the more complicated tessellated oceans with vertex displacement going on (so they're "actual" waves that break the silhouette of the plane, it's nice to look at but kind of a bitch to do versus the flat plane water with either an animated color or normal map. Some of these engines also have their own water materials/systems included by default which can provide a good starting point to work from in achieving the look you want)
You can definitely keep with the blockouts in Maya though and even make terrain in it, was just offering some alternative suggestions. Some people prefer to block everything out as simple objects and compose them in Maya or Max first to roughly figure out the composition and spacing. Keep in mind though you'll probably want to import your blockouts into your game engine as you're working, as the perspective, Field of View, and sense of scale can greatly change in an engine versus in a 3d modeling application.
You can also do the reverse and actually block everything out using simple objects or bsps in Unreal (and others? Not sure about unity for this one, as if I recall correctly it doesn't actually have any BSP tools), and then export pieces or even the whole scene into Maya as an FBX to break it down into separate models that make sense and detail it from there, then import back in.
The one issue you might run across with height map-only terrain that most game engines use, is that you can only add details in the z-axis = you can have plains, hills, mountains, beaches, oceans, ditches, etc but you won't be able to have any landscape overlapping such as a tunnel, cave, or rock outcropping/lips on a cliff, etc. The way people usually get around that is to basically place models such as rocks or parts of a cliff so they intersect the landscape and have it so the textures blend nicely. Any seams that are too distracting from the intersection are usually covered up with additional models like rocks or foliage.
Fallout 3/New Vegas/Skyrim should provide some nice examples where you can spot the whole this mountain outcropping is technically a model blended into the terrain. Unreal engine's foliage tool can cover up this trick even further, since their foliage tool can "plant" grass on models as well as terrain.
All of that is pretty general advice as I'm unsure how much you already know or don't know, so sorry if I said anything that is obvious to you or I assumed something wrongly.
Best of luck!
I spent the last week going crazy crazy trying to figure out a few things about terrain textures, more specifically WoW terrain textures (which are my study focus for this project).
They seem to tile pretty easily sometimes, but then, as I tried to simulate that in my project, I couldn't get it to work. Because the terrain textures doesn't really work like the textures you'd see in a character, I realized they'd overlap and even have procedural things such as the patches of grass popping here and there...
As I went over richer areas, I couldn't tell what was going on anymore, they were so many things going on. I could definitely see the tiling of textures, but it wasn't as simple as just different faces assigned to different materials with different diffuse maps.
I finally realized my current approach was incorrect. I even thought of going as far as exporting my mountain plane into Zbrush and painting over where I wanted the trails, and rocks, and grass and sand, etc. But then that'd leave me with a single, un-repeated texture for the whole scenario. And that's not really what I wanted.
That led me to my first handpainted texture test for this environment, which I really gotta say thanks to Shyralon for showing me the video. Here it is, along with its normal and specular maps:
I tried tiling them too (respectively: 1x1 repeat, 2x2 repeat, 3x3 repeat, 4x4 repeat):
As you can see, the tiling didn't really work out for me, I was under the impression that by using the cloud render filter in PS I would get seamless results, but it seems all of the information I added on top of that obviously didn't tile. So I will probably have to re-paint the sand texture from scratch.
I reached the conclusion that I could either: a) "Cheat", keep it all in Maya and instead of using the right techniques I would just go for what would get me good renders for the contest submission; b) Actually learn the techniques and deploy everything into an engine. (Which I have to thank Deathstick for explaining to me)
For now, though, I will shift my focus to assets. I need a break from trying to figure out how to make (playable) terrain in Maya. I had sketched a few structures derived from everything that is into my reference folder that I linked in my first post:
I will get started in picking which of these I will model. I also want to try both the "using handpainted textures to create the illusion of depth" seen in Jamin Shoulet's workshop and also the "next gen highpoly sculpting with handpainted finishes" that Fanny Vergne shows on Vertex magazine. Choices, choices...
Once again, I would be delighted in hearing what you guys and any critique is very appreciated!
You're on the right path with your terrain textures, and making tiling textures. Once thing it seems like you maybe aren't getting, though, is blending terrain textures together. If you know how to use masks in photoshop then you've already got the basics. Blending two terrain textures is done by using a third "control" texture. For instance you could set it up so that when the control texture is black, the terrain is rocky. When the control texture is white, the terrain is sandy. When it is grey, they get blended. Most game engines have built-in tools for setting up terrain textures. They usually allow a designer to plug in one or more textures, then paint on the terrain which textures they want to show up where. The designer never even has to look at the control texture - the engine handles it all for them.
You can probably accomplish the same thing in Maya, but it might take some shader-knowledge (which, sadly, I cannot help you with).
Something to note, instead of using a control texture, a lot of people will use vertex colors. Vertex colors are where you paint the actual vertices of a mesh different colors, with no texture involved. You can do this easily, in Maya (go to Geometry > Color). This is useful because it allows you to paint directly on the mesh, and you don't have to be referencing another texture to control texture blending.
So just doing a straight blend between two different textures usually looks like butt. And it's not what Blizzard is doing. You noticed this ("even have procedural things such as the patches of grass popping here and there"). Those probably aren't procedural, and they're not really patches of grass. They're actually two different tiling textures that are blending in a special way. A lot of time, people will use a separate texture which controls how the blending occurs. One common way of doing this is using a height-map.
Let's say I model a rocky floor. Some rocks are high, some are low, some are at weird angles. I can render shots of this floor to use as a tiling texture, and one of the shots I can use is a height-map. This is a greyscale image which shows how "high" elements are. Objects which were rendered closer to the camera will be white. Elements which were farther away will be black. This texture can allow me to modulate the blending of terrain textures.
When I use a heightmap, and I paint on the control texture (or vertex colors), think of it like I'm layering on a certain material. If I'm painting snow onto rocks, the snow will show up in the crevices first, and then spread until it eventually completely covers the rocks. Using this method you can get very good looking results.
Here's an example of a tiling moss texture, and the very simple heightmap that I created to go with it.
And here's an example from the Unreal Engine of the moss being painted onto a brick wall, using vertex colors and the heightmap to blend.
Hope that clears things up.
The moss texture there was from a photo so I couldn't render out a heightmap (I had to create one by messing around in photoshop, which is also an option).
Here's a tiling grass texture I made, and the heightmap which goes along with it. This time I actually COULD render out a heightmap, and as a result, you can see it looks a lot cleaner.
I am not dead yet... Learning Unity can take a while!