[WIP] Sea shore environment

ArtUnitFive

Hi everyone, I'm working on a new 3D environment piece and I wanted to explore the rocks and beaches around the south west of the British coastline because I think there are a lot of fascinating shapes, colours and textures to play around with.

I have a bad habit of jumping straight into things so I wanted to take the time to build a decent foundation of work up before I get stuck into things. Above are some rough sketches I did just to play around with the tonal masses and composition. Your feedback, critiques and input would be greatly appreciated. Like I say, I want to build a strong foundation for the final piece.

I did a more detailed "fluffy" write up on my blog if you're interested http://artunitfive.tumblr.com/post/158146338082/shoreline-environment-art

And here are a few of the inspiration shots i snapped on my crappy phone camera just to give you an idea of where I'm heading. 






Thanks!

Twister3

Looks promising, subscribing.

ArtUnitFive

I didn't have a lot of time today but I picked out a few of the compositions I liked and edited them a bit, throwing in elements from other pieces to create more interesting shapes.





Since this will be a 3D environment and the individual compositions won't exist in isolation from each other I wanted to experiment with how the whole scene might fit together so I did a rough panorama of them.



Nothing is set in stone and I would still welcome any feedback or suggestions. Otherwise I will probably move on to blocking out the scene in 3D.

ArtUnitFive

Blocking in the 3D, The main forms are there. I like how things are looking but it's always subject to change.

Unless anyone can see anything jumping out at them that's not working I will likely start to work up some of the details on the larger pieces.

ArtUnitFive

Sculpting in the rocks: Feedback/suggestions appreciated .

Macebo

Hey man, it's not often that we see seashore environments... So that's a plus for your portfolio

The only thing i can send your way, and mind you that this is my humble opinion, is that the major form of your sculpt looks "blocky", square, almost like a rectangule. You could breakup that form bringing more irregularities to the overall shape. Also, you could add smaller rocks in between the larger ones, making it feels more like natural rock formations.
The detailing though looks pretty solid and close to the reference.

Keep this going!

ArtUnitFive

Macebo said:

Hey man, it's not often that we see seashore environments... So that's a plus for your portfolio

The only thing i can send your way, and mind you that this is my humble opinion, is that the major form of your sculpt looks "blocky", square, almost like a rectangule. You could breakup that form bringing more irregularities to the overall shape. Also, you could add smaller rocks in between the larger ones, making it feels more like natural rock formations.
The detailing though looks pretty solid and close to the reference.

Keep this going!

Thanks man, Yeah breaking up the blocks sounds like a good idea.

RustySpannerz

Cool idea, I like your technique for picking out a composition. 

ArtUnitFive

Went back over the masses I had and tried some different technique to give some more detail and break up the parts that were too blocky. 

ArtUnitFive

Working my way around the scene. Gonna do the smaller rocks next and create a few assets which can be scattered around and used to create loose piles of scree.

ArtUnitFive

Created the low poly meshes and baked ao/normal/height for all the rocks. I've (very) quickly thrown them into a scene just to get a feel for where it's heading. Thoughts/feedback appreciated.

samnwck

I feel like those rocks could've benefitted from a higher polycount. You can tell in the views that most of the work is being done by a normal map whereas your sculpts looked like they had a bit more texture and crevices to them. Thankfully rocks can generally just be decimated right in zbrush with minimal fixing up so it might be worth exploring if a bit higher vert count would be beneficial to the impact of the scene. 

ArtUnitFive

samnwck said:

I feel like those rocks could've benefitted from a higher polycount. You can tell in the views that most of the work is being done by a normal map whereas your sculpts looked like they had a bit more texture and crevices to them. Thankfully rocks can generally just be decimated right in zbrush with minimal fixing up so it might be worth exploring if a bit higher vert count would be beneficial to the impact of the scene. 

Thanks man, I'll give that a look.

cmc444

I def agree I would try re baking a much higher polycount. You can always use lods to get smaller counts for the distant shots. The silhouette breaks down right now because of the smaller number of verts. 

Your original sculpts look awesome though!

ArtUnitFive

cmc444 said:

I def agree I would try re baking a much higher polycount. You can always use lods to get smaller counts for the distant shots. The silhouette breaks down right now because of the smaller number of verts. 

Your original sculpts look awesome though!

Thanks! Greatly appreciated.

So on your advice I went back through and upped the polycount on the rocks, to get it looking closer to the sculpts. Unless there's anything that jumps out to people I'm gonna crack on with the texturing.

ArtUnitFive

It's been a little while since I've been able to get back to grips with this. Had a bunch of stuff going on but I was able to spend a bit of time putting together a base rock material and some sand (which is just on a flat plane currently, will eventually be undulating.)

The rock I'm basing this on is genuinely quite dark but I'm having trouble balancing it in the scene as detail starts to get lost. Any advice or suggestions on this would be totally appreciated. I tried just tweaking the levels to brighten it up a tad but it started to look a bit washed out.

The next phase of attack for me is to build some materials to bring some variation into the rock. Things like barnacles,  mussels, seaweed, quartz, iron deposits etc.

JLHGameArt

You've got some really nice reference there and your rocks really look like they're coming along. What's with the multiple directional lights? This scene will look awesome if you can implement some terrain blending with those rocks eventually to get rid of that hard intersection line.

ArtUnitFive

Thanks man, I was trying to use the extra lights to bring some light back into the shadowed areas, experimented with point lights too. I won't lie, the UE4 isn't something is very used to and I'm finding the lighting and rendering system a bit difficult.

JLHGameArt

Probably better off using the skylight and global illumination in the post process volume to lighten the shadows, but you can get better results by adjust the light bake settings themselves in the World Settings tab.

ArtUnitFive

I'll give that a whirl. Thanks again man.

Macebo

Hey buddy, take a look at this thread, it might come in handy for the harsh transition between the rocks and the floor: 

http://polycount.com/discussion/181140/unreal-4-terrain-blending-tool-inspired-by-star-wars-battlefront/p1

It is quite heavy for real time rendering, but hey, all that counts for portfolio is that it looks good!