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Medieval City (UE4)

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polycounter lvl 16
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Snefer polycounter lvl 16
So, found some time to work on some personal art the last week, was a long time since I did something modular/not-scifi related, so I started making a fantasy city for fun using placeholder geo, just to see how far I could take it using a relatively simple kit.

Here are some random shots and an older shot of some of the kitpieces I am using.

city11.jpg
city10.jpg
city09.jpg
city08.jpg
city07.jpg
kit1.jpg

Replies

  • Anuxinamoon
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    Anuxinamoon polycounter lvl 14
    Hey man, this is gonna be good!

    Just first thing that came to mind is those old school towns and their organic streets and alleys. I wonder if you will be trying to achieve that kind of organic layout as you progress?
  • ecas
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    ecas polycounter lvl 8
    Hey, this looks awesome! I really like the third image.
  • anglorum
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    anglorum polycounter lvl 6
    Oof, this is gonna be cool. I'm curious though, what grid snaps are you using, if any, to get things to lock together? I'm also doing a medieval village modularly, and kind of found that to get that more "organic" feel, not using snaps has kind of worked to my advantage. I just use beams and other simple geometry to cover up where there might be a some-what off kilter connection.

    Just figured I'd throw that out there. :D Can't wait to see more!
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    Thanks everyone! :)

    anuxinamoon/anglorum: The smallest pieces have a gridsnap of 16 I think, but most are 32-256. I use the large scale snapping to build things quickly together and to prove out the kit. Only I start polishing the scene and adding detailmeshes, proper street layout etc, I will take the snapped together houses and start to mess them up a bit so its not so perfect and straight :) Sofar there are no detailmeshes and just the base shells of the houses :)
  • 3DKyle
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    3DKyle interpolator
    This is great Tor!
    Look forward to future updates.
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    Made a first pass on my shader for the walls. Blending between some tileable textures, only photobased so they are kinda fugly and contain some lighting info. Values are all guesswork and there is no roughnessmaps yet, and no specular values either. Will try to add parallax occlusionmapping, but its such a pain so we will see if i can be bothered, haha.

    city12.jpg
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    Tried making some wallpanels out of my tiling textures today, worked relatively well : )

    city13.jpg
  • Ged
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    Ged interpolator
    understatement? working pretty damn well yeah! haha
  • Minos
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    Minos polycounter lvl 16
    Looks like a solid start, digging the blockout!

    I'd be careful with the noise though, since you are going to use those materials everywhere it might be a good idea to tone down the beaten up edges and general contrast, especially on the wooden beams.

    Also great job on the kit so far, seems very flexible :)
  • StraightDraw84
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    StraightDraw84 polycounter lvl 9
    Love your texturing, how did you get it to look so damn good?
  • MisterSande
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    MisterSande polycounter lvl 8
    Amazing work so far! So few kit pieces and already such a diverse environment. Looking forward seeing your progress.
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    Minos: yeah, there is some noise in one of the normalmaps I need to remove, but in general i want it to be pretty run down. I can easily tweak the noisyness and weathering globally though, so thats pretty flexible : )

    StraightDraw84: thanks, its pretty much straight up cgtextures.com + a little bit of tweaking + ndo2, so.. they are actually not very good, its the blending that fools you!
  • taotang
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    taotang polycounter lvl 5
    Really nice work! Looking forward to it.
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    Started replacing some more modules on my livestream today:

    city14.jpg
    city15.jpg
    city16.jpg
  • Gannon
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    Gannon interpolator
    Was really glad I was able to catch your stream today! The scene is looking really cool.

    Should those beams on the corners lay on the same horizontal plane? You'd think they'd be in each others way. You could probably just offset them slightly and it would be more believable/interesting.
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    Thanks! Hehe yeah I was thinking the same thing, they probably shouldnt :D
  • currve
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    currve polycounter lvl 3
    nice progress so far, looking forward to the texturing!
  • wilbert
    That blending works beautifully already! I hope you will stream more of this project in the future :)
  • Cheathem
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    Cheathem polycounter lvl 6
    I've always wondered but never asked. How do you approach texturing the wooden beams and walls? Do you have them unwrapped when your building the bloc out levell and then just assign a texture whenever you get around to making it? Looks really good though an i'm looking forward to seeing more!
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    Wilbert: thanks! I will :-)
    Cheathem: For this I just made a quick automatic mapping for all the kit pieces, and then a more proper one when Im building the proper one (can be seen in the stream, I unwrap a whole lot of assets there) will post link to youtube video :)
  • Snefer
  • pixelpatron
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    pixelpatron polycounter
    Beams could be constructed that way.

    RX-DK-AP06504_halving-joint_s4x3_lg.jpg
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    Yeah i'll just go with your explanation! ;) haha
  • Tortuga
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    Tortuga polycounter lvl 5
    Are you going for a game friendly scene eventually?
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    What do you mean with game friendly? : )
  • Tortuga
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    Tortuga polycounter lvl 5
    Sorry if i'm not using the proper term, i'm just wondering if you're going to go all the way thru and optimize your kit to have polygon count and other things similar to what you would expect in modern games, or you just want to have a scene that looks good regardless of its performance.
  • reverendK
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    reverendK polycounter lvl 7
    polygon counts can be a lot higher than you might think these days - especially with good use of LOD's - which UE4 can often handle on it's own.
  • Tortuga
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    Tortuga polycounter lvl 5
    Ah, I've just seen the wooden beams having weird geo and thought that would require further retopo/optimizing. I'll read into UE4 LODs, thanks reverendK C:
  • Noren
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    Noren polycounter lvl 19
    Very interesting!

    Personally I don't like the horizontal pieces with the long diagonal beams, especially since they appear relatively often. No idea if you have references for that, but it strikes me as unusual and not really a good method to distribute the weight.
  • cyberkho
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    cyberkho polycounter lvl 2
    HI...

    well done man keep up the good work...
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    The beams dont really have wierd geo, its just that they have geo : ) Polycount is hardly an issue in the scene yet, even without LODs, its running at 80 FPS at 1440p resolution sofar, so not really pushing things at all.

    Replaced almost all the wall-assets with proper ones now. Moving on to fixing the next set, either some stonework or roofs : )


    city18.jpg
    city17.jpg
  • Makkon
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    Makkon polycounter
    The double wooden beams really bother me for some reason. Besides that they are a clear indicator of where the modular pieces break up, It's not a structurally sound thing to do (you have to fasten them together somehow), and uses more material than single beams; timber is harder to come by than daub and wattle. I know it's how the modular sets are made, but maybe there's a way around that?

    Also, here's something visually similar to the direction you're going for :)
    530ef798840a378c965fe28fc2154059.jpg
  • dirigible
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    dirigible polycounter lvl 8
    Posting in an epic thread. Keep up the good work, man, it looks boss.
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    Makkon: I thought about that aswell, its doable, for sure, but it would require lots of more thinking from my side when building things. I could probably minimise it or get rid of atleast 75% of it though. Luckily its easy enough to update the pieces, so.. I might get around to it : )

    Spend some time today making textures and starting to set up the shader for the roofs, tried to make a decent parallax occlusion shader with blending to see if that approach worked, it works ok, but not as well as I would have liked. Might turn into mesh-roofs or atleast one version with it.

    city19.jpg
    city20.jpg
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    Creating more pieces, fixing stuff, converting pieces to final assets etc :)
    city21.jpg
  • locater16
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    locater16 polycounter lvl 8
    Makkon's building has a more interesting look than the comparatively flat exterior walls you've got going there IMO. For your walls, I get that they're supposed to be newer, but it feels too hard to distinguish the stonework in them, and/or that the stones are too small and even. Proper brickwork is a more recent invention for the most part, large cut and uneven stones would be the likely building material for the sort of thing you're going for.

    But dang, those roof tiles you've got are fantastic!
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    No, proper brickwork is really really old actually, just as likely to find proper brickwork as uneven stones in ancient buildings. That being said, I will create more texturesets, one with proper bricks, and one with larger chunkier stones. : )
  • locater16
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    locater16 polycounter lvl 8
    Snefer wrote: »
    No, proper brickwork is really really old actually, just as likely to find proper brickwork as uneven stones in ancient buildings. That being said, I will create more texturesets, one with proper bricks, and one with larger chunkier stones. : )

    Oh I didn't mean a "brick" as in just what we think of as a brick, I meant as in the solid, utterly uniform brick patterns we see today, the sort of thing your building seems to be made of. Just more of an "ad hoc" style where the moulds are differing and the building is just put together the best it can be after the fact. EG

    orange-brick-wall-ancient-root-tree-17962218.jpg
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    My buildings are not made out of brick (not yet atleast) its just randomly sized stones. Look at the blendingtextureexample on the other side : ) Bricks have been utterly uniform for millenia though, its more of what building you are looking at then how old it is. The reason why I dont crack up the plaster more to show the underlying stones entirely is because then the spots would be repeated very quickly across the modules, I hold off on doing more unique vertexpainting until things are more in place and im not moving/changing buildings : )
  • Makkon
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    Makkon polycounter
    Yeah, uniform blocks have been around since pre-history, and have been rather ubiquitous across many cultures. What determines the outcome is usually time, the importance of the structural integrity of the building, resources, tools, and sometimes funding (lo, the invention of taxes). Often times it's a mix; castle walls will usually have nice even blocks on the exterior, but the interior is a lot of cobblestone and mortar.

    Cement/mortar is another one of those things that's a misnomer, it's been around for a very very long time also.

    For the hovels he's building here, they'd likely have non-uniform stone because it's cheaper and less labor, and they don't hold up defences. For a manor, that'd probably be more uniform stone blocks.
    I think the only issue I'm seeing in his materials is contrast. The timber, daub, and stone all are pretty close in value so they're harder to distinguish. Snef, maybe making the timber a tad darker and the daub lighter might help?

    Also, red brick could look pretty rad too! Brick Gothic is totally a real thing!
    4134216972_6d958fbba2_o.jpg
  • Gazu
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    Gazu polycounter lvl 12
    Hey Tor, nice Environment, i like the Walls of the Houses and the Wood.
    Can you show your Sculpt of the Wall and the wood panels?
    Did you make a tileable Texture out of it?

    A little breakdown? :)
  • anglorum
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    anglorum polycounter lvl 6
    It sometimes blows my mind that your primary source for texturing is just CGtextures.com

    Really inspires me to get over my apprehension about feeling like I'm just using someone elses photo. You really turn it into your own thing, and make something beautiful!
  • NomadSoul2501
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    NomadSoul2501 polycounter lvl 10
    Really cool scene!

    Thank you for sharing the breakdown of the kit.
    When you work with such small modular pieces though, don't drawcalls eventually become a problem?

    How do you go about optimization?
  • AndrewMKelley
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    AndrewMKelley polycounter lvl 7
    Good God this is a beautiful scene!
    I am absolutely in love with modular construction and you're nailing it!
    What is the size of some of your texture maps? Whatever they are, they look fantastic with the tweaks you made.
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    Makkon: the daub is already overbrightening a bit, but both it and the wood is set up to use different colors, once I have the scene more in place I will play around more with which house has what color etc : ) Darkened the wood a bit globally though! : ) And yeah, I'm def adding some proper brickwork aswell : D
    Gazy: no sculpt for the walls, just tiling textures. Wood is just a very basic sculpt, with a detailnormal over it.
    NomadSoul: drawcalls will become a problem at some point yes, thats when I will start merging together some of the more commonly grouped together assets, will bring the drawcall amount down a lot : )

    Andrew: 2k textures mostly, only using a couple of textures for the whole scene sofar, 4 texturesets or something like that right now : )

    added another house and some new parts during the stream today:

    city22.jpg
    city23.jpg
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    Made a slightly better looking (and more expensive) parallax shader, now I'm applying it almost everywhere. Also started making some bricks to have some variation in the scene.

    city24.jpg
    city25.jpg
  • Gazu
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    Gazu polycounter lvl 12
    Dis is so good O.O
    Can you tell me which technique u used for blending the textures from cgtextures.com together? I mean that one for the Wall O.O
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    I made a tutorial on it earlier, you can see it for free here: http://eat3d.com/free/vertex_painting
  • Snefer
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    Snefer polycounter lvl 16
    Took a quick pass on the lighting since i got some good feedback on it and started straightening that out a bit. Also made a bunch of new assets and tried making a quick atrium to see how that worked : ) Slowly coming along, but alooot of pieces left to make and alot of problems left to solve :D

    city27.jpg
    city28.jpg
    city29.jpg
    city30.jpg
  • WarrenM
    Getting epic sized, this is great!
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