[WIP] [UE4] Snow Siege
interpolator
Hey Polycount, I'm looking to get some crit on a new game environment project i've been working on the past few weeks. The goal for the project was to learn more foliage techniques and to create a realistic, large scale, exterior environment with some interesting story telling and world building.
So far, I've been working on a master material for all my assets, so snow builds up on the meshes where they merge with other meshes / the terrain. There's also snow that builds up on top of the meshes depending on orientation, and some other cool features. I've slowly been building a modular kit for my castle which is situated on the hill. Plans for this include a lot of destruction, as the siege will have finished long ago, and this will be the remnants of the battle. I plan to have to give both combatants distinct styles, so Norse Vikings v.s French / German medieval knights.
Any feedback on any elements of the project so far would be great. The siege camp is pretty sparse and is in a bit of a rut, so any suggestions to improve this area would be greatly appreciated! Cheers
**P.S I can't take credit for the lovely rocks used to build the mountain, they're from the UE4 Boy and a Kite Demo. Rest has been made by myself **
So far, I've been working on a master material for all my assets, so snow builds up on the meshes where they merge with other meshes / the terrain. There's also snow that builds up on top of the meshes depending on orientation, and some other cool features. I've slowly been building a modular kit for my castle which is situated on the hill. Plans for this include a lot of destruction, as the siege will have finished long ago, and this will be the remnants of the battle. I plan to have to give both combatants distinct styles, so Norse Vikings v.s French / German medieval knights.
Any feedback on any elements of the project so far would be great. The siege camp is pretty sparse and is in a bit of a rut, so any suggestions to improve this area would be greatly appreciated! Cheers
**P.S I can't take credit for the lovely rocks used to build the mountain, they're from the UE4 Boy and a Kite Demo. Rest has been made by myself **
Replies
thank you, I'll keep at it
I've finished my plank kit which allowed me to make some gates, floor pieces, and the palisade walls. I changed the palisade texture to be more inline with the planks, and to unify the wood a little, as the mossy green didn't support the mood I wanted for the scene.
I've made some progress with the Castle kit by putting together two wall pieces. One straight, one with a slope. This will hopefully help me construct the wall across the mountain range, building the large border wall I have planned. I'm not too happy with the sloped piece, so if anyone has any good reference of how these types of wall pieces are done in the real world, I'd be really interested to see it!
P.S. the lighting and skybox are place holder, just been playing with stuff to see how it feels. Expect it to change frequently as I experiment with different lighting scenarios!
Any feedback would be awesome, cheers!
It's just the UE4 default material on the trees leaves at the moment, but you make a very good point about bringing out the browns in the trees, I can probably boost the values and achieve some variation with the speedtree colour node. Cheers!
I think you're 100 percent right, I need to clear a lot more space for the camp. I've been using both Witcher titles for reference, probably best to reinstall the 2nd game to get a proper feel for the scale of the camp. Thank you, it's the push I need to get it done!
I'll spend the next couple of days working that all out, I think that's an excellent idea. I love the idea of implying that it's just one element of a larger seige, would help make the scene feel much larger. Thanks again, great feedback
After spending a healthy amount of time procrastination on Mordhau, I've come back to my project to work on some lighting changes and some fabrics.
I've jumped into Marvelous designer for the tents, and with some help from my friend Dom Marriott , I've been able to put together a tent, and then go on to create a collapsed one. I've got a nice wind effect on the fabrics that I'll show in video format on another day. I've also been re-working the lighting for something a little more dramatic and stylised. The night time fits the more deserted themes of the scene, but I want to compliment the night with some lit fires around the scene and bring just a little life back to the abandoned camp. Lighting and materials still need a little balancing after these changes, but I think it's in a better place.
Will start working on fixing up my pine trees as they're looking a bit shit. Also need to make some branch textures!
Lemme know what you think
I know this is a wip, but i can throw at you some ideas
add some rotation and placement variation between the tents. right now they look too evenly placed.
On the tent subject, i'd go ahead and make two or even three different versions of them, with slightly different materials and/or cloth folds etc. to get more organic look and not too homogenous like it is right now. stick some arrows on them, add some holes, blood splatters, grime in the bottom (they look too clean if the battle took place for months).
On the subject of arrows, add A LOT more scattered in the battlefield. You could make some decals with erosions in the area caused by artillery projectiles as well.
A fire pit in the center of the camp, with some logs for sitting, pans, some war instruments (drums etc) could add a lot to the storytelling of the scene since it tells the viewer that there are soldier living and eating in there. The fire from the pit could also lead the eye to a focal point and could add a lot of character to the scene.
Good luck!
Your crit on the tents is spot on, I'll get to adding some extra variation with all the methods you've mentioned. dried blood, holes and grime will all go to help add the story telling I want.
The ideas about the fire pit is excellent, I'm lacking a sense of community in the camp and a firepit / bonfire with cooking equipment would help humanise the soliders. I'll start blocking in some of these assets asap! I hadn't even considered doing decals with the arrows, genius idea!
Thanks again for the detail of your crit, has gotten me thinking a lot further.
Been super pre-occupied with wrapping up uni, so I've been focusing on some tasks I can jump in and out of pretty frequently. I've spent some time blocking out my large and medium size tents so I could continue to fill up the seige camp and create a space. So far, I've completed the outer wall and I've started playing with the elevation of the hill, mixing some interior walls to create some height variation. I'm feeling a lot better about the size of the siege camp now, even if I need to get some more tents to swell the population size. Lemme know if you think there's something off about the top down view!
I've also been working on tent variation. I've added a bit more grunge onto the base layer and added some masks in the material so I can enable and disable some ripped holes in the fabric or add some blood on top of the canvas. It's still a little subtle, so I'm looking into some additional methods of adding variety to these small tents. I plan on doing a tent with a door flap open and another collapsed tent for variation as well as playing with the textures a little more.
I've also worked on a siege tower using the pieces from palisade and plank kit. Making these kits has proved so valuable in speeding up production on these assets as well as keeping them looking flush. Hopefully I'll find some time to get onto the castle pieces next!
Cheers for reading, and lemme know what you think!
Keep up the good work :^)
Cheers! I'll look into putting some of those in, it's a great idea
it's been a while since my last update, travelling around the country and interviewing has left me with little time for the seige! Over the past week I've slowly been chipping away at the walls, making some destroyed variations, blocking out some more seige props, establishing some communal areas for the troops, making some better pine trees, and putting the lighting back to my original lights. The purple just wasn't working for me and looked super messy. Going to be playing with it more at a later point but for now, this is the easiest set up to work in.
Some of the siege equipment I've been working on includes, small crates, log seats, cooking equipment, bundled wood and weapon stands. I've still got a bunch of objects to work on, but it's starting to feel more like a place that's been lived in.
The broken castle walls have been a lot of fun. Making my brick kit and then sampling them for the tiling textures has proved invaluable in creating destroyed variations. The wall with the small crack is roughly 5k tris, and the wall with the large crack is about 12k tris, so they're a little costly, but I love the effect.
As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts! Cheers
Yes, the broken walls looks cool!
My suggestion would be to create one or two variation materials for the bricks and blend between them with vert paint to break up the repetition.
Keep at it!
Apologies for the delay on this, but i'll do a little breakdown on the brick wall.
First things first, I started in Maya creating a blockout for a brick kit.
I define some differently sized bricks, and then throw them into Zbrush for sculpting. I usually just use a variety of the trim brushes to get the shapes I want. Once my high poly is done, I export, then create a low poly using Decimation Master. I export the low poly, and throw them back into Maya.
These are now ready to unwrap and texture in Substance Painter. I then use Substance painter to texture the bricks. I use the same material throughout all the modular sets to keep some consistency.
Here they are with base colours in Maya. After this, I assemble my bricks (in this case, the medium sized bricks) onto a flat plane to start creating a tiling texture with my bricks (again, for consistency). I make sure to use the high poly meshes to bring all the sculpted detail into the tiling texture.
I then bake this out in Substance painter, and use the same materials I used for the bricks earlier on the tiling texture.
Now I have a tiling brick texture and a brick set all with the same materials that look pretty consistent, I create a basic blockout wall with my tiling textures applied.
Once I'm happy with this, I start inserting edge loops around the brick intersections and start deleting faces.
Now comes the boring and tedious part. I import my brick models into the scene, and begin manually placing them in the holes created in the wall. I can speed up the process a little by duplicating some of the larger clusters and shifting them back to create depth, but for the most part it is just duplicate brick, move brick, rinse and repeat. This one only took me like an hour after I got into the swing of things. Very tedious though
The down side of this method is the super expensive bricks! so many meshes are going to cost. However, I've found that Unreal's auto lodding system managed to reduce this from 60k to 7k with very little deformation. And since this mesh won't be seen super close up, it actually doesn't matter at all!
Sorry if it's a bit of an info overload, just thought I'd be thorough
Yes you're completely right. It's looking super bland and reptitious from a distance, I'll do some reference gathering and research into what other materials or brick variants I could blend into the material with vertex painting. Thank you!
Just some thoughts - hope it helps!
Sorry for the delay on the response, busy week
fantastic ideas!! I'll add them promptly to my big document of things to do for the castle walls. Mixing some decals and smaller tertiary details in will really help build character and story telling. The overall light damage to the walls is something I really hadn't considered either, so lots of food for though. Thank you so much
Thanks for the answer, a lot of work but the result looks great. Rock on!
Been ages since I've dropped an update on this, and it's for a good reason! I've finished signing the contracts, and it is official. I'm going to be starting a job at Creative Assembly next month as an environment artist
Here's some screenshots of what I've been working on when I've found the time. I've worked on adding some banners for the castle, brick debris for the destroyed walls, some more interesting terrain for the battle grounds, and detailing the mountain a bit further with more rocks. Haven't got to the vertex painting yet, but it is coming soon
way too much AO contrast here
Now for the less happy part. I've been having some pretty big issues with the project however, and most of them have been festering for a while. I'm looking to cut the project down because of them. I'll list them here broadly for simplicity;
From listing these gripes I've got with the project, I'm starting to feel like it might be worth just cutting the siege camp entirely. I feel like focusing on the castle and the mountain might help get this project finished within a reasonable time frame as well as improving the quality of the area much more than if I split my attention between it and the siege camp. Image for reference.
I'm a little lost for ideas right now on how to solve these issues beyond cutting down.
TL;DR Any ideas on how to fix these problems or deal with the scope of the project would be super helpful.
Cheers for reading people and my apologies for the rant, just had to get this one out there.
But after a day off, and talking to some friends about the situation, as well as the lovely people on the DiNusty empire discord, I became more comfortable with cutting the siege camp completely. However, after talking to a good friend Dom Marriott about the situation, he gave me some amazing crit and set my focus back onto the important parts of the project.
So here's the conclusion of the crit summarised into some nice bullet points;
- Siege camp needs to be condensed into one screenshot to let me focus on one shot and save me lots of time and energy.
- Time since the siege took place is unclear, need to properly age the world and give it life.
- Storytelling is lacking and I need to properly define the factions and their motives in through the scene.
Boom, there you go. Dom gave me some super good crit and ideas for the project reigniting my passion for the scene. Check him out in the link above, he's a great dude.Today I've been working on vertex painting for the walls. Been getting some lichen and moss in there. Need to tweak it a bit as it's a bit fuzzy, and the lichen needs some more colour variety. Also been slapping some grunges about to break up the tiling. Also brought some yellow back into the scene with the directional light. I've also been re branding the opposing factions, will upload shots of that when they're more developed. Going to focus on getting in more damage to the castle with some more modelling soon.
As always, lemme know what you think
As mentioned, this is the camp shot that'll have my total focus from now on. much more digestible.
(I've removed the damaged tower for now, but it will be coming back)
Lemme know what you think
Over the past few days I've had the motivation to jump back into the castle tower and start working in some of the additional damage to show how the viking trebuchets have battered the towers. Doing the bricks manually in Maya is slowly starting to grate on me, but it needs to be done. I've also carved a massive hole in the right tower which would have acted as an additional break point for the vikings. Still lots of damage to add to the walls and other towers. I'm planing on making some variants of my pre-made walls and towers with destruction in different places to allow me to quickly add damage to the castle without being too bespoke.
I've also been blocking in a nice little shrine area at the base of the hill. It's very basic right now and needs to be fleshed out with some additional props and set into the area a little nicer, but I thought it would help for story telling purposes for the attackers to desecrate this area.
I also chucked a light into the broken tower to add a bit of extra story telling implying that the castle is still somewhat occupied (on a small degree), but probably not by whoever originally held it. I hope this light will be extenuated when I add some falling snow particles and a bit more fog.
I also brought some yellow from the sun back, the blue was hurting my eyes being in the scene for too long. However, I quite like the look so it might stay like this for a bit unless I change my mind.
Any how, let me know what you think
Hey Polycount
Over the past couple of days, I've been working on the shrine area, and carving a path through the woods leading up to the large breach in the wall. I've been iterating on the statue area a bunch and I've been inspired by a piece of Dark Souls fan art for the religious icon on top of the statue. It reminds me of the orthodox symbol, but has some slight differences. I plane on propagating this to the castle banners soon. The textures are pretty rough and will possibly be re-visited if I have the time, but it'll do for now. I still need to add some benches, offerings, and candles, then I need to wreck it like the Norse invaders would have.
I've also been clearing a chunk of forest for the invaders to march up to reach the breach in the castle wall. I'm trying to make it look like they've burned some of the trees to clear a path, and chopped some out of their way before making the approach. Hoping to make the approach look very daunting and risky for the attackers. Still need to do some set dressing and more ref gathering of burned forests and trees to bring this area alive I think.
As always, lemme know what you think
After staring at this project for a while, the question of "where are all the bodies" finally got to me. Can't explain that one away in a bloody and destructive seige. So, I took it upon myself to do some character work and design a armoured viking! This is my first proper character, and he's still very exposed beneath the waist, but the top part is mostly done, bar some texture changes.
The character will just be used to be posed and to place in and around the snow as corpses. Going to litter some with arrows, slump some against the castle walls, that kind of thing. Hopefully it should add a bit of "life" to the scene
As always, lemme know what you think!
Hey Polycount
Been doing some more work on the viking dudes, given them some pants and boots to finish them off. Might go for a bit of a re-texture on some of the pieces, but they'll do for now. I ended up posing the character using the Maya Auto-rig, which for the purposes of getting some super quick poses, did great! Adding the corpses really breaths some "life" into the scene.
Next up, I need to properly desecrate the shrine and keep smashing up the castle. A lighting overhaul will be on the way after I get most of the key components finished for the scene, I realise it's pretty flat and flawed right now so any ideas for this would be super helpful
Cheers guy, lemme know what you think
I've been working on some lighting and effects for the first shot at the base of the hill. This isn't concrete lighting, I've decided to go destructive and go through lots of different iterations so expect to see me do some comparisson videos and shots soon to get your feedback on them.
Here's my first little test
And as always, let me know what you think
I've been re-working the path up to the castle enterance to have a paved road as well as steps on the side, thickened up the castle walls a bit, adding some extra lighting contrast for inside the broken tower and added some additional damage in place.
Could really use some lighting crit at this point!
Been a little while since I last posted, moved into my new place and finished my first week at the new job, so only found time for tweaks and some new small stuff.
I've been doing more work on the walls, adding extra grunge, snow build-up, weathering, etc. I've also added a bit of a keep behind the initial wall to reinforce the scale of the castle. I did another corpse pass on the 2nd and 4th show just to show the scale of the battle that took place.
I've added some subtle embers to the burned trees on the 4th shot too.
I've also added some clouds after watching a tutorial on cloud creation by Tyler Smith, only have one right now but I plan on adding some more. They were surprisingly easy and fun to do.
Any feedback would be really helpful
*removed the snow fall temporarilly, but will bring it back for final.
Been messing around with some moodlighting over the past few days
Cheers guys, lemme know whatcha think
https://youtu.be/aT9aJ7hwWt8
1 is too flat and uninteresting
2. has a very fantasy vibe and is visually very interesting with the reds in the sky
3. Feels ice-cold, desolated, like a quiet night before the storm and has a kinda sad (?) vibe to it.
Personally, I feel that lighting number 3 fits the best to the scene! But maybe that's just me
Thank you dude, means a lot to hear that!
@Syrtax
Thank you for your feedback big time. I think after talking to a couple of people, I'll be balancing the third one to be a little dark, feels like a fake night from what I've been hearing. I'm also going to duplicate the third set up and try blend a bit of the 2nd shot into it to see if it's possible to get a bit of both worlds.
One other note: the hole in the tower is just too round for me. Destruction is never that neat... I know you're hand placing that stuff, so up to you if you want to fiddle with it. Just one opinion
Great work so far, mate. Keep pushing!
Spent the evening trying to polish up the third lighting scenario a bit. I've been working on some feedback from the great Derk Elshof to tweak my lighting and help balance the scene. To remove noise and improve readability, I've added some fog planes, increased the fog a bit, and added some more snow around and over the rocks to break up some of the detail areas. I've done some additional set dressing of corpses, and I'm experimenting with some torches, forming a path through the valley.
The colours and lighting still need to be balanced a bit on this lighting set up, but tomorrow I'll branch off and try implement some of the warmer horizon whilst retaining the feel of the cold tower.
Thanks again to everyone who gave me their advice on the lighting, really appreciate it
Oh, hey and let me know if you figure out how to get motion blur working for the snow VFX. I couldn't nail it down on my last environment, and just comp'd it after the fact in Photoshop
That way you can get color variation like in the second image set, but you can also get a lot more interesting colors as well. Just thinking as an alternative to a sunset in the distance.
Quick Paintover made in Photoshop to illustrate, did not do any reflections on the ground or change the lighting,
One other minor thing, i am not a fan of how all the fabric on the flags are right now, there just does not seem to be enough wind to keep them so straight as you got them now, plus they all are the exact same everywhere and it is looking very game arty.
@Nuclear Angel Thank you big time for the paint over! I recently did some research into how to create the Aurora effect in 3D so a good excuse for me to jump in and try it. I think you're right, it definitley balances the colours of the scene. amazing idea! I will also try fix those flags by forcing them to gust a bit more in the wind like the trees, good spot
Thanks again guys!
Did a bit of a lighting overhaul and effect overhaul yesterday and today after @Nuclear Angel gave me a solid idea to try work in an aurora borealis effect to try and even out the lighting, creating some nice colour contrast to balance out the scene a bit. I've worked this effect in, it needs some tweaking but the core is there. Still need to set it up properly for all the shots, but you get the idea from the 2 main shots here.
I've worked on some more dispersed clouds moving the larger more volumetric ones to the horizon to form a stormy looking atmosphere.
I've also noticed that the reason this project has been so difficult to get proper values on has been Sony Vegas. As you can see in the video, it seems to really crunch and saturate everything, causing me to pull them back in engine. However, it makes my screenshots much less interesting. Not sure how to tackle this one, might grab a copy of premier and see if that is a little less destructive to my render. Atleast I know now! Removed the snow effects from the screenshots this time for a clearer read.
As always, lemme know what you think
More lighting and effects tweaks over the weekend. Getting pretty close to wrapping this one up, just another week or so left!
Been working on adding more cloud coverage, adjusting post processing effects, textured a couple of old meshes and played with the composition on some shots.
Plans are to move back to some of my older shots and give them a polish up. Really want to get that nice shot from the siege camp working which will take up plenty of time I'm sure.
Would love to hear any crit or feedback! Cheers
I agree with @Rurouni Strife about the auroras. Cool idea for sure, but its a bit overpowered at the moment. It seems to work best for me in the 2nd to last image, where its a little more intermittent and not so much in your face. Just a little dash of flavor
Super cool so far, dude