U4 Diorama - By the Bridge (zbrush+handpaint mix)

Bedrock

Latest:

---

Spent last week getting this up to quality, planning to upload to my website soonish..

Haven't done much stylized stuff yet and the last one didn't turn out great so I'm doing a lot of practice

gunzfire

Looks great! I really dig whats going on around the stream and the bridge.

Bedrock

Thanks!

Fixed some shading errors, darker background and the mountain is real pwetty now

jsargent

Love this, great job

Grusti

Very cute! I like it

theblueturtle_

Awesome job! I like the area around the water especially. The only thing I'd say is maybe add more texture detail to the large rocks in the background. Everything else looks really visually interesting but the backdrop looks like it's at 85%. Maybe try pushing the color variation and contrast a little more like the image below. Nice work!

CarlK3D

Looks great, I really love stylized stuff like this

Bedrock

Alright threw the mountain back in the ring. Added some color variety and tweaks.

Swizzle

This looks pretty sweet. Have you done any vertex normal editing on the foliage? You could probably get some nice shading there to make it look less like planes if you tweaked the vertex normals to be a bit more smooth.

There's good info on the PC wiki about editing vertex normals for foliage: http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/VertexNormal

Bedrock

Hmm, I've done that with foliage before but I'm not 100% sure if it would improve the situation in this case. Majority of the planes are already facing the camera so the shading is pretty smooth. I think it just comes down to the planes being quite massive and therefore more obvious. I opted for bigger planes to reduce the tri-count. Here's a screenshot with the shading and one of the bigger planes selected.

Bedrock

Decided to just throw more polys at the tree canopy problem by creating smaller planes that only had 3-4 leaves on them and placing them.. strategically. I've narrowed down the problematic areas to the following:

1. Planes that didn't face the camera and appeared quite flat. Particularly at the top+sides of the tree. Use small planes to obscure these areas.
2. Lack of shadows being cast. Inside the textures the leaves don't have any baked in shadows apart from some light AO, so I kind of end up having lots of nice shadows where a lot of the planes overlap and no shadows at all towards the top. Use small planes to break these areas up.
3. The leaves texture on the planes is actually quite square-like. This is quite noticeable on the sides. Use small planes to make a more random looking silhouette.

Normally I'd just throw a couple hundred planes in there, but I'm trying to keep the tri count down with this piece, so I had to be a little more considerate Thanks Swizzle for pointing out the flatness. I also forgot to mention that the canopy is "assembled" in u4 instead of being one giant mesh which is another reason why I couldn't mess with the normals.

Changes:


And an updated version of the main shot

Alex1

Beautiful work. Great job.

MisterSande

great work on the tree redo! mind showing us some of the textures ?

Bedrock

Thanks! I think I will do a full breakdown thing with the assets separately. Not too happy with wireframe shots in u4 so I'm going to do some renders and post the textures while I'm at it.

skodone

i love it so much i wanna copy the style right into the game im doin

teaandcigarettes

Great work, I especially dig the tree.

Bedrock

Alrighty, took some time to put together a texture and wireframe showcase thing. Didn't really know what to show and what isn't interesting so I'm just going to put everything up.. besides, I have a fairly simplistic website layout so you can just scroll back up quickly if you don't care about that stuff

Glad you guys like it, pretty happy with it myself thus far. There are some weak spots, but that's something to carry over to the next piece! Or not, you know what I mean.

BradMyers82

Very good work man! I think it would be cooler tho if you turned up the ambient in general. The thing about these stylized scenes is the darks never go that dark. So the fact that you have a lot of black in there is sorta killing the vibe imo. I actually really like how your pure diffuse looks, so it tells me you did a good job with the textures. Anyway, just my 2 cents, nice work man.

felipealves

Amazing work man!

I wish to see more stuff with this style.

magmabolt

really cool stuff! How did you go about coloring that nice gradient in the tree?

Bedrock

@BradMyers82

Yeah I know what you mean. Unfortunately I don't have a lot of control over it as I would with fully baked-into-texture lighting. I've experimented with it before, plugging the albedo into the emissive, boosting SkyLight values, boosting Diffuse Boost, indirect lighting intensity etc. and you kinda fix the problem whilst making the rest of the scene brighter or washed out. There's probably a really easy way to fix this but I ran out of ideas.

One idea I played around with though just now is to add more shadows. This way instead of having a bright scene with some really harsh pitch black shadows that stick out I end up with a much more balanced range in contrast. But then the shadows end up obscuring a lot of the texture detail so you can't really win there heh.. :poly122:

Anyways you can compare it here and see if the new setup (right) is any better.. it's like 2am here so I'm withholding judgement til tomorrow.



@feli: Thanks man

@magma: Well as I explained earlier the planes that make up the canopy are hand placed in U4 which means that I can just pull their Z value and use that as a gradient to change the color. http://imgur.com/naZneBT

I'm using this mainly because I already had the setup lying around from a previous project, but I'm sure you can accomplish the same using vertex painting in maya somehow. Oh and I also use this for the flowers, except it's XY values in that case.

skodone

only one thing that buggers me is... why are the burnt pieces of wood light grey instead of dark coal grey?

an i like the left setup better

Bedrock

I've tried dark coal and it kinda just blends in with everything else and you can't really tell what it's supposed to be.

skodone

what about making them wood brown just adding some blackish spots to it?
grey looks just unnatural and as if they were forgotten and just had an AO

Earthyn

Very inspirational! Love the design very pretty!

BradMyers82

I do actually like the version on the right better, only thing I think is not as good is the shadow that is cast from the tree. The left version has a nice shadow cast where in the right version its sorta hidden behind the tree.

Very cool tho man, I haven't messed enough with udk, I just figured there would be some global ambient scale or something you could get access to, similar to how it is in 3ds max for example.

Bedrock

I've ended up experimenting with the lights some more. Couldn't get anything out of Sky Light, for some reason it only picked up light from directly above the scene even after placing a sky sphere into the scene... oh well. Ended up putting a hdri into the ambient cubemap slot in the effects volume. This worked really well but the skylight coming from above proved to be a little strong so I just ended up darkening the hdri itself manually.

Here's a final™ shot with this setup and a comparison shot from the last update.

BradMyers82

Nice man! Final shot def. is improved. Well done!

jamiemurphy

It looks beautiful, really nice work.

pixelpatron

This turned out great! Congrats.

2cents.....the fire pit would be stronger just being one log surrounded by darker coals with hot embers. There is insufficient contrast between the rocks and the wood; it's all just blending together.

[HP]

Fantastic stuff, thanks for the flats btw!

Bedrock

pixelpatron wrote: »

This turned out great! Congrats.

2cents.....the fire pit would be stronger just being one log surrounded by darker coals with hot embers. There is insufficient contrast between the rocks and the wood; it's all just blending together.

Yeah I was never really satisfied with the fireplace and skodone mentioned that it could be improved as well... Took the time today to update the fireplace and the burning wood using y'alls feedback and studying reference images a little more. I recall doing the wooden bits by sculpting in the detail (was a massive PITA), but hand painting everything in 3dcoat was just so much easier! Did baking for the fireplace but overall things went quick start to finish.

Here's an up close of the fireplace because you can't really see most of the detail in the main shot..



updated moneyshot

pixelpatron

Ohh hotness! Literally.

skodone

love the new fireplace!

AnyaElvidge

This is soooo nice, aw maaaaaan!

JedTheKrampus

If you want light to come from below from the skylight you have to uncheck the box Lower Hemisphere is Black.

Bedrock

Yeah I've tried that but it makes the lighting rather unnatural unfortunately.

JedTheKrampus

You could try multiplying a gradient over your image in your favorite bitmap editor too. That would help with some of the lighting from below without entirely eliminating it. But if ambient cube looks good to you in this particular case there's no reason that you shouldn't stick with it.

stoyan3d

Wow Alex, you've really pushed the quality on this! Love the attention to detail!

Bedrock

Thanks! All the feedback made it very easy though.