Beautiful stuff, while I wouldn't mind seeing a little more separation between elements. The shots where the flowers are a little more spaced out and placed in clusters are more successful. When the whole scene is over taken by them it starts to get a little too busy. Examples....
TOO MUCH Could be a case of less is more. (meaning group these details of flowers/foliage together, or remove some to expose more architecture) For example, just having a part of the top of this bridge show through, or removing the flowers on the left...I didn't even see the ladder the first time looking at this image... Just having one of those windows on the bottom left have the flowers lessened or removed would do wonders, and the same could be said about the back...I can't really identify what that that white thing is.
REALLY GOOD MIX OF ELEMENTS These shots show a really good balance of architecture, prop placement, lighting, and natural elements. There are areas for the eye to rest and less is more.
@pixelpatron, You bring up some good points. Looking at it now, some of the shots are kind of busy. I guess I did go a little over-board with the flower placement in some areas, ha ha. I'm not sure I want to move around anything in the scene at this point, but I'll keep your advice in mind for future projects. Thanks
That's the pergola arbor with magenta bougainvillea growing on it outside the first restaurant. I was thinking of having a shot that would act as a sort of lead-up or transition between the main street and that terrace restaurant but I had trouble finding a composition I liked, so that shot ended up on the cutting room floor. Ha ha, oops.
BRAVO! Holy smokes man... I have to hand it to you, I am super impressed with how gorgeous this is. I'm definitely going to have to look into Unreal. My PC would probably go into cardiac arrest at the thought of rendering all that plant life in Arnold. Exquisite lighting... Looks like a Thomas Kincaid. Very very well done.
The interview process was a little odd. Arti contacted me out of the blue, saying he liked my Artstation post and asked if I would be interested in doing an interview. I said, sure why not, and he emailed a list of like 30 questions, ha ha. I then spent a week writing about my "process", and creating a bunch of visual aid images. It ended up fairly long and a little ramble-y, but hopefully someone enjoys it.
Your detailed breakdown was an insightful read and am I correct in noting you'd created most of the content elements alongside finalised renders, using a laptop?
@sacboi Yah, I made everything for this project on a laptop. I stared with a 2011 MacBook Pro, which died a few months into the project, and then got a Lenovo Yoga 730 early last year. The Yoga is actually a laptop/tablet hybrid, which was kind of a surprise when I brought it home from Best Buy (I didn't bother reading the description on the display model, just compared the specs to my check-list). I only use it in laptop mode though.
Impressive! when considering the high quality of output was other than desktop derived.
I'm shopping around for a portable option atm so thanks for the info, looks as though the 730 hybrid has made it onto my list and again my compliments on the piece.
Hey Absolutely in love with this project, amazing work! I'm actually using it as inspiration for a university project at the moment, and I'm just wondering if you have any more info/screenshots on how you created the foliage? Particularly the modelling process, and especially the foliage you've got about the white frame of the seating area? I realise you high poly modelled and painted them separately first, but are these then place onto curved planes or? (excuse my lack of knowledge, I'm still learning but you're work is really inspiring!)
I went over my process of making foliage a little bit in my 80 Level article/interview: https://80.lv/articles/creating-a-festive-italian-village-in-ue4/ but I guess I focused more on the texturing part of the process, and skimmed the process of modeling the low-polys. I can try to go into a little more detail about that part for you. Of course having good reference is key as well. The plant I think you are asking about is called a 'bougainvillea' if you want to look it up on Google images.
As an overview, I modeled the low-polys by cutting up, shaping, and arranging pieces of alpha cards into branches and then using those branches to build various modular pieces. Building up volume was my main goal during this phase.
I assigned the material I had made to a flat plane and cut it up into all of the individual pieces. I added extra geometry to each piece so I could move the verts around and make sure they could be seen from all angles. (No flat 2D planes that disappear from the wrong angle)
Then I combined pieces together into small branches. I attached extra flowers and leaves to logical points on the branch to add extra volume.
Then I combined duplicates of those branches together to make even larger branches, adding in extra leaves and flowers for even MORE volume.
I had kept one branch from the high poly modeling phase as a 3D object to use in the Low poly models. I used it as a back bone of sorts for the pillar-climb model. I attached some twisted-up vine cards to the 3D branch, using Maya's 'soft select' and lattice tool to bend them around the pillar in ways that I thought looked somewhat realistic. Then I attached some of the flower branches I had just made to the vines to get the final volume.
I basically did the same thing for all of the other modular pieces. Combining together the simple flower branch, the two twisted-up vine cards, and and the 3D wooden branch into larger bunches. The final collection of bougainvillea models that went into Unreal was 3 branches, 3 bushes, 4 hanging vines, 3 pergola toppers, and 1 pillar climber (a pergola is a type of garden architecture/wooden structure for plants to grow on). Once in Unreal they could be combined together even further to create new arrangements and shapes, and with a simple mask, multiply, and color node in the material, the flowers could be dyed different colors too. I also used Unreal's built-in LOD creator to quickly and easily knock out the LODs for everything.
I hope that was what you were looking for. The process I used is just one of many, and I'm sure it's not the best way to do things. It's just the best I could come up with, ha ha. The drawbacks of my method are a fairly high poly count, and a medium-high amount of quad overdraw, and some chunky shading (I tried to use the vertex normal softening technique, https://polycount.com/discussion/125920/correct-vertex-normals-for-foliage but never got it to look quite right, so left the vert. normals at their original positions for the most part, and just used LOTS of translucency and bounce light to smooth out the shading). If you find a foliage modeling process that works better for you, by all means, use it instead.
That is absolutely perfect! Exactly what I was looking for, thank you so much! I definitely have a lot to learn. If there were such a thing as a foliage artist that's all I'd wanna be! haha But I really do appreciate the breakdown and the visuals! Again, amazing work and thank you very much!
I thibnk the orangey hue is still klilling it. the paintings you posted work really well color wise( on the left seems nicer) has to have more color variation, ie varying the saturation a bit
shadows could be a bit bluer IMHO, ie cooler not warm hues all over
Replies
TOO MUCH
Could be a case of less is more. (meaning group these details of flowers/foliage together, or remove some to expose more architecture) For example, just having a part of the top of this bridge show through, or removing the flowers on the left...I didn't even see the ladder the first time looking at this image...
Just having one of those windows on the bottom left have the flowers lessened or removed would do wonders, and the same could be said about the back...I can't really identify what that that white thing is.
REALLY GOOD MIX OF ELEMENTS
These shots show a really good balance of architecture, prop placement, lighting, and natural elements. There are areas for the eye to rest and less is more.
Still an amazing scene though.
@pixelpatron Do you mean this?
That's the pergola arbor with magenta bougainvillea growing on it outside the first restaurant. I was thinking of having a shot that would act as a sort of lead-up or transition between the main street and that terrace restaurant but I had trouble finding a composition I liked, so that shot ended up on the cutting room floor. Ha ha, oops.
Holy smokes man... I have to hand it to you, I am super impressed with how gorgeous this is. I'm definitely going to have to look into Unreal. My PC would probably go into cardiac arrest at the thought of rendering all that plant life in Arnold. Exquisite lighting... Looks like a Thomas Kincaid. Very very well done.
The interview process was a little odd. Arti contacted me out of the blue, saying he liked my Artstation post and asked if I would be interested in doing an interview. I said, sure why not, and he emailed a list of like 30 questions, ha ha. I then spent a week writing about my "process", and creating a bunch of visual aid images. It ended up fairly long and a little ramble-y, but hopefully someone enjoys it.
I'm actually using it as inspiration for a university project at the moment, and I'm just wondering if you have any more info/screenshots on how you created the foliage? Particularly the modelling process, and especially the foliage you've got about the white frame of the seating area?
I realise you high poly modelled and painted them separately first, but are these then place onto curved planes or?
(excuse my lack of knowledge, I'm still learning but you're work is really inspiring!)
I went over my process of making foliage a little bit in my 80 Level article/interview: https://80.lv/articles/creating-a-festive-italian-village-in-ue4/ but I guess I focused more on the texturing part of the process, and skimmed the process of modeling the low-polys. I can try to go into a little more detail about that part for you. Of course having good reference is key as well. The plant I think you are asking about is called a 'bougainvillea' if you want to look it up on Google images.
As an overview, I modeled the low-polys by cutting up, shaping, and arranging pieces of alpha cards into branches and then using those branches to build various modular pieces. Building up volume was my main goal during this phase.
I assigned the material I had made to a flat plane and cut it up into all of the individual pieces. I added extra geometry to each piece so I could move the verts around and make sure they could be seen from all angles. (No flat 2D planes that disappear from the wrong angle)
Then I combined pieces together into small branches. I attached extra flowers and leaves to logical points on the branch to add extra volume.
Then I combined duplicates of those branches together to make even larger branches, adding in extra leaves and flowers for even MORE volume.
I had kept one branch from the high poly modeling phase as a 3D object to use in the Low poly models. I used it as a back bone of sorts for the pillar-climb model. I attached some twisted-up vine cards to the 3D branch, using Maya's 'soft select' and lattice tool to bend them around the pillar in ways that I thought looked somewhat realistic. Then I attached some of the flower branches I had just made to the vines to get the final volume.
I basically did the same thing for all of the other modular pieces. Combining together the simple flower branch, the two twisted-up vine cards, and and the 3D wooden branch into larger bunches.
The final collection of bougainvillea models that went into Unreal was 3 branches, 3 bushes, 4 hanging vines, 3 pergola toppers, and 1 pillar climber (a pergola is a type of garden architecture/wooden structure for plants to grow on). Once in Unreal they could be combined together even further to create new arrangements and shapes, and with a simple mask, multiply, and color node in the material, the flowers could be dyed different colors too. I also used Unreal's built-in LOD creator to quickly and easily knock out the LODs for everything.
I hope that was what you were looking for. The process I used is just one of many, and I'm sure it's not the best way to do things. It's just the best I could come up with, ha ha. The drawbacks of my method are a fairly high poly count, and a medium-high amount of quad overdraw, and some chunky shading (I tried to use the vertex normal softening technique, https://polycount.com/discussion/125920/correct-vertex-normals-for-foliage but never got it to look quite right, so left the vert. normals at their original positions for the most part, and just used LOTS of translucency and bounce light to smooth out the shading).
If you find a foliage modeling process that works better for you, by all means, use it instead.
I definitely have a lot to learn. If there were such a thing as a foliage artist that's all I'd wanna be! haha
But I really do appreciate the breakdown and the visuals!
Again, amazing work and thank you very much!