[UE4] Dark Souls - Firelink Shrine
polycounter lvl 8
Howdy folks,
First time poster here, so please excuse me if I make any issues regarding my posting. (If I goof anything up just let me know) I've creeped on enough threads on here to get an idea of how the format should genuinely be set up, I think!
You can see my past works here: https://www.artstation.com/artist/tylaread
I'm going to be recreating Firelink Shrine from the first Dark Souls into Unreal Engine 4.
I'm aiming to bring the quality of assets up to that of the current gen games, and will be using props/materials in DS3 heavily for reference, and improving on them where I see fit.
Hoping to achieve results similiar to what Benjamin Roach did with his DS3 environment, https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8PJ0Q His breakdown of the environment has been a great resource to me.
My scope currently is narrowed down to just the main circular area of the shrine. The downstairs, the buildings/mountains beyond I may consider adding later but for now I wanted to focus on getting the main area down with as much quality as possible.
Since there are no perfect orthographic references for the area, I had a lot of trouble lining things up correctly. Eventually I stumbled upon a wonderful program, https://kayin.moe/?p=2218, which computes the collision data from the game into a viewable 3D map. The collision data in DS1 is incredibly detailed, and in a lot of cases follows the exact geometry of the in game models. Using this program, I was able to take several screenshots of useful angles, which I then brought into UE4 as reference planes and built on top of.
(This is also useful to view the set up of Firelink Shrine for scale in general, since in my current game some jerk in yellow armor killed my firekeeper, and getting there to take reference photos takes a bit more time than I would like.)
I'm also going to be using this project as a push for myself to learn Substance Designer. I'm familiar with Painter and UE4 materials, so hopefully I'll be able to jump on board and start churning out some textures quickly.
For the reason above, I'm going to be creating materials before assets, and will be modelling around my material layout.
A lot of the structures in the shrine are reused many times, so the modelling portion will not be incredibly intensive. Likewise, there are only a handful of materials used, which are then blended together to create the textures for the ground and walls. Focusing on these first and making sure they come out looking correct is very important for this project.
As you can see, I'm still very much in the whitebox phase, but any feedback or questions you have would be very welcomed!
First time poster here, so please excuse me if I make any issues regarding my posting. (If I goof anything up just let me know) I've creeped on enough threads on here to get an idea of how the format should genuinely be set up, I think!
You can see my past works here: https://www.artstation.com/artist/tylaread
I'm going to be recreating Firelink Shrine from the first Dark Souls into Unreal Engine 4.
I'm aiming to bring the quality of assets up to that of the current gen games, and will be using props/materials in DS3 heavily for reference, and improving on them where I see fit.
Hoping to achieve results similiar to what Benjamin Roach did with his DS3 environment, https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8PJ0Q His breakdown of the environment has been a great resource to me.
My scope currently is narrowed down to just the main circular area of the shrine. The downstairs, the buildings/mountains beyond I may consider adding later but for now I wanted to focus on getting the main area down with as much quality as possible.
Since there are no perfect orthographic references for the area, I had a lot of trouble lining things up correctly. Eventually I stumbled upon a wonderful program, https://kayin.moe/?p=2218, which computes the collision data from the game into a viewable 3D map. The collision data in DS1 is incredibly detailed, and in a lot of cases follows the exact geometry of the in game models. Using this program, I was able to take several screenshots of useful angles, which I then brought into UE4 as reference planes and built on top of.
(This is also useful to view the set up of Firelink Shrine for scale in general, since in my current game some jerk in yellow armor killed my firekeeper, and getting there to take reference photos takes a bit more time than I would like.)
I'm also going to be using this project as a push for myself to learn Substance Designer. I'm familiar with Painter and UE4 materials, so hopefully I'll be able to jump on board and start churning out some textures quickly.
For the reason above, I'm going to be creating materials before assets, and will be modelling around my material layout.
A lot of the structures in the shrine are reused many times, so the modelling portion will not be incredibly intensive. Likewise, there are only a handful of materials used, which are then blended together to create the textures for the ground and walls. Focusing on these first and making sure they come out looking correct is very important for this project.
As you can see, I'm still very much in the whitebox phase, but any feedback or questions you have would be very welcomed!
Replies
GIF link:
https://gfycat.com/PastelCreativeCrow
I'm worried the parallaxing will not come out as nicely on the pillars, and after several tests with different topology I think I'm either going to have to turn down the parallaxing severely, or add in tessellation for the pillars. I think it still works fine enough on the walls though.
GIF link:
https://gfycat.com/ZigzagHastyFugu
This material will be blended together with the grass like this
https://gfycat.com/ShallowContentHackee
Also trying out camera based tessellation for the ground materials:
https://gfycat.com/DismalHalfGroundhog
(Also if anyone knows how to embed gfycat GIFs please let me know.)
I know it sounds weird, but experiment with some colour and roughness variations across the surface of the brick and even the dirt substance. You really don't want everything becoming too grey or mono-tone.
That software sounds great, I wish I had that awhile back! I would overlay that onto your block model and adjust everything as close as possible before moving onto detailing.
Great work!
https://gfycat.com/NeighboringFatHarrier
Have tweaked the textures a bit to mesh better with each other, but the colors still aren't where I want them.
Have been focused on getting materials and objects in so I could have a better idea of what parts of the scene demand more attention than others. Have a good bit of the majority of the assets in, though there's still quite a few blockout pieces left in, and currently only 2 types of foliage.
@KingKellogg I think you make a good point on the bonfire. I never really paid much attention to them but the bottom 'teepee' sort of structure is almost entirely bones, not ash. The ash only makes up the bottom portion of it. So I think that's definitely something I'll go and retouch later.
Also, the ash color on my bonfire and the ash color on the ground are the same material, but end up entirely different shades. Have been trying to get those to blend better, so any ideas on that would be much appreciated!
Now that I've gotten a lot of the base materials in, I need to go and add some variation like @Benvox2 said. The ground material and the stone steps still need something else added in to break them up. May do a second ground material with different dirt or small rocks or something, and a mossy stone materials to blend around the scene.
And I'm not happy with how the vertex painting on the stonebrick pillars went. May see about using decals to add in the broken/worn away stone look. My goal was to use as many tiling substance designer-made materials as I could, which is why I went with vertex painting, but the blending isn't really nailing the look I wanted. Will try moving that material into a decal with a sharper edges alpha and see how it goes.
Finally, still no idea about what to do with the background. That's going to go on the end of my priority list, I think.
Again, thanks for keeping up, and any and all feedback/ideas are always welcome!
Benjamin Roach did an awesome job of recreating the outside area around Farron Keep:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/YEKkq
As for the bonfire material, its not going to blend with the ground without either some blending decals or a fancy shader that matches the textures normals and world normals etc and blends them together seamlessly (I have seen this done but Im not proficient enough myself yet to recreate it
Also you mention your brick pillars. Personally I would build those form single bricks (in you HP) and then bake that down to a pretty detailed lowpoly mesh. Look at the area Catacombs of Carthus from DS 3 they did some pretty good work with that area which is mainly brick columns and walls.
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/Y7bTOnpyho3LQI6cI-RIVcH4tL8=/0x0:1920x1080/1600x900/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/49291923/Catacombs_of_Carthus.0.0.jpg
Good luck with this! and sorry if some of my crits sound harsh but I think your scene shows promise and you could gain a fair bit of quality with a tad more reference.
PS: If your set on using Substance Designer for all you materials Id check out https://www.artstation.com/joshlynch. His materials are all done in SD and he has quite a few tutorials available that certainly helped me out!
Updates on this may be slow over the holidays, but I'll post when I can. Thanks again guys!
Feel free to follow along with my current project here:
http://polycount.com/discussion/197974/ue4-wolfenstein-modular-sub-room-bombates-room/p1?new=1