[UE4] Medieval Town (Improvement)

jwills

Hey Polycounters,

Its been quite a while since posting here but Tim Simpson's progress vlogs have really inspired me to jump into a new project. If you havent seen his polycount thread go here... its great (https://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2657966) 

Im also interested in seeing my progress (if any) over the last two years of full time work and replacing some old environments on my folio. About 2+ years ago i added a medieval village environment to my artstation which at the time i was happy with, however looking now... not so great 

SO! lets replace it! I saw this concept by Vladimir Manyukhin which you can find here on his Artstation LINK and began building a reference board around this concept. Could definitely use more references but will add to them as I go. 



I liked the winter scene and the beaten up buildings as it would be a good chance to play around with vertex blending and could make for a cool atmosphere (havent decided if its a night or evening scene yet).Im trying to create the feel of a full city with tall buildings and cramped little streets, almost claustrophobic, which open up to a small market square. 

I'll follow along with Tim's vlogs and his progress on the scene and try and pick up any tips and tricks he uses that I could bring into my environment. Following his advice, im spending plenty of time on the blockout and keeping my modular kits to as few and as big elements as possible, hopefully keeping the workload down.

I've created my initial blockout which im overall pleased with, the layout and scale feel good after running around, some areas need some refinement (mostly at the top - market square area) but will continue blocking everything in until i have a clear picture of how the spaces will look.



Wish me luck, hopefully havent bitten off more than I can chew  More blocking!

Ashervisalis

I think you'll be fine. Your last town was pretty cool.

jwills

@Ashervisalis Hey thanks! I remember you commenting on that project too! Glad to see you're sticking around

Wasn't happy with how the blockout was feeling, so did aabit of iterating and simplified it down a bit. Feels better, however lacks some vertical areas and focal points. Certainly feels abit more like a street corner now. Added a landscape to pull through my floor and stair meshes to act as snow for the time being, no idea if this method will work later down the line.

jwills

Building Update
Been spending sometime designing the modular system for building_1, it features a lot throughout the scene so I wanted to create a system that would allow me to model variations that  snap together easily. Also taking some advice from Tim about using prefabs to assemble elements. Really helpful especially when I'll be adding variations to break the repetitions.The bulding isnt perfect but good enough to start spliting it apart and working on the individual modules. 



As always, CC is much appreciated

jwills

Spent today working on some wooden planks or beams. They feature ALOT through out this environment, pretty much every building will have wooden beams. So I thought I'd create a few, UV and texture them, and use these to build my modules. They can be cut and stretched as needed to fit my current designs and Hopefully will save me some extra unwrapping and texturing time later on(Another of Tim's tips). Plus it was nice to take a break from moving verts and faces. 

They started out as simple, evenly subdivided rectangles and brought into Zbrush. I wanted to just beat up the edges a bit since I created a substance material which has all the wood details I wanted so i didnt have to waste time adding them in zbrush. The material is just a first pass and I'll revisit it later on to make a more complex wood but for now does the job nicely.

Combined the highpoly bakes with my material inside painter and added a few extra layers of edge wear and colour variations to break it up. I also wrapped it all up into a smart material for re-use later on.

Will start re-building my modules with these beams next and potentially create a plaster wall place holder mat.

PixelMasher

lookin good I rememebr seeing this concept before and thinking it would make a good scene. Glad the tips are helping you out!

jwills

@PixelMasher Thank you! Hopefully I can do the concept justice Your vlogs are great, they really help de-mystifying how environments are put together.

jwills

Texture Update.

Spent this week adding textures to my modular pieces! Added concrete/plaster and a pretty bad attempt at a "parallax interior". Definitely just a first passes for these materials at the moment but they're good enough to show what im going for in the level. Later on I'll add vertex painting for my concrete so i can add mold and damage that will expose bricks underneath. 

I'll try and create a better cube map for the fake interior effect but i wasn't able to get the "InteriorCubeMap" node in UE4 to work without distorting the texture so if anyone has experience creating this kind of effect and can point me in the right direction, it would be really appreciated. 

Next up... Roofing and bringing my other buildings up to this quality.

aclund3

Good work so far with the modularity. I'd pay a little bit more attention to where the beams line up in your modular pieces. Like, in this type of construction, a 2nd floor column would never be larger than a 1st floor column. Also, vertical members tend to line up, but that's not a hard rule.  And the ends of the arced beams also tend to line up, and typically don't end into the side of a column without something on the other side.  Your ref is a little too small for me to see properly, but just a few thoughts from an architecture perspective.  The walls read fine overall, its just more in the details

I'm very interested in following your project as its has some similarities with my current project   Cheers, and keep going!

jwills

@aclund3 Hey thats a really good point, I actually completely overlooked the structural aspect of why the beans are placed in such a way, will definitely look into re-designing and simplifying them down to read better. Thank you, really appreciate it

aclund3

Glad to help!  Architecture is my background, so that stuff always speaks to me first

Oh, and another thing I neglected to mention is that the horizontal beams should sit on top of the vertical columns/posts.  That's how they'd have to be built to be structurally sound in medieval times.  I can do a quick PS paintover if any of this is unclear, just let me know

jwills

@aclund3 i think I got the gist of what you mean, I've redesigned my sections following some of the points you mentioned and they certainly  read much better and less cluttered and follow my reference more, appreciate the crit. As for horizontal beams always laying on top of vertical beams, I've done that for my modules, however Im using individual vertical beams to cover up where my modules meet in the corners, so they have to overlap. Maybe I can redesign my modules later on to fix this issue but for now they're feeling better

 

aclund3

Ah, I get you man. Yeah, sometimes you gotta sacrifice that realism to make it all actually work

And, nicely done with the redesigned sections!  Ref is KING, right?  The wood elements of the frame reads really well now structurally, massive improvement!  It is a bit more static now, but you can could throw in some different smaller horizontals or arcs like you had before, sort of as a secondary (or tertiary) read for the frames. The smaller 'weird' members don't necessarily have to make structural sense as they aren't really carrying any vertical load (maybe some horizontal or shear depending on their placement but those things are less obvious).  Anyways, it looks really good now, so that's just an additional option if you're really into placing posts and beams, hahaha

Great redesign, and keep at it!