Monthly Community Noob Challenge Ausgust 2015 (33)
polycounter lvl 7
Notice: There will not be a Monthly Noob Challenge for the Month of September due to my busy schedule this month. I have school fast approaching and I need time to prepare for that as well as handle some other tasks. I will see you all in October for the continuation of the challenge. :]
Hello everyone and welcome to the Monthly Noob Challenge for the month of August.
Hello everyone. We're back for yet another month of awesome environment art. The same rules as last month will continue this month. There will not be a prop challenge to maintain focus on the main environment challenge.
Join our Skype group if you want! Add me on Skype and I will add you to the group.
Me: noble.wulf
You don't have to join the Skype if you don't want to, and you don't need to ask to participate in the challenge, just start working and post your progress in this thread!
Artist - Andrew Bosley
http://andrewbosley.blogspot.com/
Feel free to approach either of the concepts however you like but I'd recommend making it as modular as possible to save time and keep things optimized. It's really up to you, and as long as you are learning, it doesn't matter right?
Also if you want to change up either concept a bit, as some people wanted, then feel free. Interpret these concepts to your liking.
There are some things that I would like to point out to for newcomers.
If you only want to do a few props as best you can, then feel free to go ahead and do it. This way you can gradually work on building up to a full scene before diving head-first into the whole ordeal.
Please read all the rules before starting.
When you are just starting out making a scene, it can seem complicated or imposing, so take the time to break it down.
Think about how you can re-use assets, re-use textures, break it down as simple as possible and plan it out. A lot of people will break it down in their own way when they start out their challenge. Gather some reference images as well for different parts of the scene, maybe gather some refs and make it your own.
Take your time planning and blocking out, it will set you up for success later on.
Here are some specifics.
- Try to post one critique for every post that you make. This will make for a better learning environment and help us all grow as artists.
- You must make your own textures, no stealing. We can't keep you from doing it, but the goal is to learn. You can use other textures and images to create your final texture, but please, no blatant copying of another artist's work.
- You must use a game engine to present your work. Unreal Engine and CryEngine are very common engines that can be used, but feel free to use any alternatives that you want.
- You must try your best and finish as much as you can in the time frame provided.
- Post what you are working on in this thread so that way it's a more centralized place for advice and critique. We don't need to have 1000 disjointed threads littering the forums.
- I would strongly encourage you to go and look at other games and see how they make their assets as well as get concept art to give it your own feel, but it must stay very close to the concept, if not super close.
- Please stay away from using Ddo. It's great if you know what you're doing, and for a production pipeline supplement, but other than that, please don't use it. Ndo2 is allowed. This was talked about in the other thread, so please don't complain.
- Well that's about it. If you think that any rules should be changed, or there should be new additions to the rules, please let us know.
Replies
Don't be scared, just don't put yourself under too much pressure. If you just started out, nobody expects you to deliver triple A quality or to finish with everything in the concept in time. Just start by doing a blockout, as good and detailed as you can, and post it. I'm sure people will be happy to help you out with critique and tips. You'll learn a ton in the process, too.
Gonna be my first participation as well. Never did a Triple A Environment in U4 before, so this is gonna be a lot of firsts for me, too. Wish me luck
Good luck to all who will participate, I hope to see some cool works in this thread
This.
My very first environment, looking back, I was really proud of it, but now, comparing it to where I am now, the difference is night and day
My first Environment, for reference -
The issue I noticed right away are the repetitive details in the ground and ceiling texture, but hey, you said it yourself, looking back at it, you notice all those mistakes in an instant and therefore probably won't make them again.
I've got a lot to do today, but here's the start of the blockout.
Nowhere near done with the block-out. Still need to fix up locations and geography. Once I'm done with that I'll probably start on the terrain.
I think for the trees it will be best to only do two of the coniferous and one of the non-coniferous ones. You can probably get away with one chair and table model, and one retextured oil drum to populate the scene with... hmm.
ross185 I agree, the water with the weeds is pretty much the most intimidating thing.
Huw_Dawson, cool that you started already! What's the thing in front of the first shed?
Cylinders to represent the foreground tree stumps.
I think it's a representative height of a 'person' in UDK scaling. I do the same. ^^
Oh yeah! Of course, the blue box.
It's a 0.5mx0.5mx2m cubouid, which as is said above is used as a scale reference.
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Had some trouble getting the terrain set up. I tried a couple of techniques, but eventually I settled on making a high-poly plane, using soft select to raise and lower bits then using the Graphite tools to make a less dense version.
As I'll be doing modular work (e.g. making modular rocks to line the lakeside with) the terrain itself doesn't need to be terrible detailed.
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Used Bitmap2Material to make two basic ground textures. I was planning to use Unity 5 for this, but after examining Unity 5... you can't use PBR textures and blend between textures at the moment without an external paid-for plugin. UE4 it is!
Oh, thanx!
Though just now looked again at Huw_Dawson's work and I'll be thinking about lower and higher ground harder tomorrow.
Dvids, is creating terrain in engine (Unity?) any different / easyer than in Blender?
This occured to me about an hour after I went to bed last night. I took a look at Unity's terrain gen tools and they look solid enough. My one concern is going to be getting a decent path. I might have to cheat a bit.
I am going to crack on with asset creation tonight. A question on challenge etiquette: I am going to be using Bitmap2Material and some source photos from some royalty-free websites for quick'n'easy ground textures. It really doesn't feel like much work though and it feels a bit like cheating! Should I do ground texture work more in Photoshop? Maybe that might give better results, too?
Honestly, whatever you find easiest, and works well for you is how you should go about it. Forcing yourself to work a pipeline you're not familiar with can get really frustrating and ultimately, will often produce results you're not happy with.
That being said, doesn't hurt to learn new software. Just remember it's not cheating. Everyone learns at different paces.
(Plus, I think you'd only be cheating if you were pulling models off Turbosquid or something)
Here's my blockout so far in Maya. Lots of things just thrown in there. I'll probably start working first on the open building structure closest to the camera.
(Grass material is I-will-burn-the-hard-drive-it-rests-in levels of placeholder)
I'm liking all these blockouts!
Anyone got a suggestion for how to stop my Unity materials' normal maps from blowing my materials out at extreme angles? I'm getting loads of white replacing colour when viewed from a distance.
I would definitely take part, but I'm already invested in an environment of my own at the moment. I will keep tabs on it though and try and glean some knowledge from you all.
Best of luck to everyone; hopefully I can take part next month.
Anyway, spent the rest of this evening having a crack at Mudbox and turning a cuboid into a big ol' block of wood. I then constructed the frame of one of the buildings out of clones of said block, which seems very modular. :-)
Mostly just experimenting with workflow, basically. Tomorrow I'll work on the two or so meshes/textures I need for the roof.
Tonight's progress:
top down:
i'm also getting faster at blocking things out wheee
Mettigel, wow, you put each board up separately? I'd have thought that's more or less a texture with maybe some details modeled in.
wow, ::hits forhead:: thank you! hahah
I guess i looked too much at the xray version of the concept and i missed that!
Yeah I'm not sure on the putting up the boards separately (I know Mettigel, you said it'd be a texture later on). I do like the effect you get from having gaps and spaces in between the boards but that seems like it would be tedious to pull off. I'm not sure yet whether I'll make the board a texture or make at least some of it separate boards to just throw in - because at least that's pretty modular.
I think I'll probably make prefab walls of planks and keep them modular - seems like the best way to do it while keeping the interesting textures/shapes of the wall. I probably wouldn't individually put in each plank in the engine but make groups of them beforehand and throw them around.
On the left, behind the trees? Yeah I noticed that as well but am choosing to ignore it for now as I'm not sure what it could be or what to make of it for now.
Mettigel: That grass is turning out to look really nice. I've never been able to do foliage very well at all. It looks like you're just using plane cards with a few strands on each plane alpha'd in. How are you getting all of the planes to bunch up so well? Whenever I've tried, I've been left with the each plane being far from the other so it's hard to fill space for me.
https://gumroad.com/l/gSRd
Thanks.
C
EDIT:
A shot as it is in Unity:
Solid view from camera:
I stole the idea of the further pier being with a platform from Huw_Dawson.
I think it's an old bunker or some such, though the railing on top... Anyway, it doesn't seem central to the concept, so gets left to "when polishing up".
There's a few useful videos on this Youtube channel. It's largely a Max/CryEngine workflow that's shown off: https://www.youtube.com/user/Futurepoly
For the time being I'm going to focus on getting the three buildings and the jetty complete. They're going to be built modularly, like how I constructed some placeholder stuff of the open-walled building and the jettys.
I think the idea is that, as an environment artist, if a level designer can't use your assets for anything else once you're done, it kind of limits how useful your work is?
I'd just use static meshes if the terrain tool isn't doing the job.