I think that this scene can still be pushed further.
If this archway was part of a wall, where are the missing stones scattered about? I feel that all the materials in the scene are really lacking wear and tear, and are generally feeling super flat and are lacking visual variety. Right now you have your macro shapes and your micro detail on them, but almost nothing in between.
I'd love to see some leak decals under the spot where the light attaches. Also what kind of lights are these? Magic?
The ground is looking pretty lumpy mashed-potatoey.
A suggestion: If you have this big bright white moon on the back right of your image, there should be some light coming from that direction creating a rim around the gate and the tree nbranches
I think you have a great opportunity to aid the composition if you add a thick swoopy gnarl twist to that main trunk body! Maybe even bend that tree more into a stronger C swoop to draw the eye back around and through
Thank you for taking the time to make that paint over. I have taken your crits to heart. You made me snap out of some kind of tunnel vision I was having about the details. I realized I was making a couple of mistakes. For one, I wasn't paying attention to enough reference. So I have some reference for stone walls, stone arches/gates, and dead trees. Second is that, indeed, I wasn't putting enough effort/time into the details of the objects. I have spent the past three days working to correct all this. While I'm not finished, I just wanted to throw out a quick update so you guys don't think I'm ignoring your critiques.
Thanks for replying. I agree on the tree. I made a new one, and although it isn't 100% there yet, I think I'm on the right track. Let me know.
So here's what I've been doing it. First, I made a new tree. But it sucked so I made another one. However, the peeling bark effect came off as too stylized. And once I got into texturing it, I couldn't get it to work without looking like a poorly painted miniature. I think the base tree is strong enough to keep. I made a substance designer tree bark alpha generator for Zbrush. So I made some better bark alphas to help. I just need to nail down the peeling bark effect, which I have an idea of how to do. Here's a pick of the failed experiment:
So I put the tree aside and started working on the broken stone walls. I made a new verison (once again it sucked lol) so I really examined wtf I was doing wrong and figured out that I just wasn't pushing hard enough on mesh detail, and wasn't using reference enough. I made a IMM brush for Zbrush consisting of around 8 rocks while paying attention to reference. Then Used that to make a new wall mesh. The only part I'm stuck on now is texture density and nailing the color. I have to dynamesh my polycount down while working in zbrush because my computer sucks. But I know good things are possible even on older computers. I think I'm trying to texture too large of an area. The wall is 4m high. But I'm trying to do a unique bake for it. So by the time I dynamesh my rocks down and then bake, I lose a lot of detail on the rocks. And even at a 4096 texture, the smaller details in the normal are weak. So all I have to do is push the details harder, and maybe change my unwrapping/retopo strategy. Left is zbrush, right is in-engine. My color detail tends to flatten it out a little too much too.
What is the best way to retopo? I've been playing with decimation (which is what I'm using on the right), and zremesher. Decimation preserves details better but remesher is cleaner. I know how to hand-retopo I just wanted to avoid it. Any suggestions? My only other recourse to fix the texture density is to make a tiling texture and end-cap meshes. This is what it looks like under the suggested lighting changes:
Looks better, but maybe the scale of the rocks is off? With a nearly 4m tall wall, those would be some huge rocks. It makes the walls look like they should be smaller.
The lights are indeed magic! I realize I wasn't selling that well enough. I came up with a new design to help communicate that new idea. It's going to be metal skeleton hand with the globe hovering above the palm.
I'd like to keep the red light if I could. But I did notice it throws off the values and texture colors if you aren't careful. Any suggestions there? Should I just stick with yellow? I want realism but with stylized lighting. So hyper-realism I guess?
Nice progress so far. What I would like to see is something in the background behind the gate. From storytelling point of view I don't know why the gate is there, what is behind it etc.
Looks good. Maybe the gate is the transition point between two worlds and you can play with dualism, yin-yang, all that good stuff. One thing that i would definetly change is the default UE sky.
Thank you for your reply. I'm working on a little more context. I'm making a trodden path up to the gate (or I might move it coming down behind, and then stopping at the gate. As if many wanderers have entered but never came out the other side. Hopefully with the improved sconces and general atmosphere, that will come off a little more spooky. I really don't have any story in mind for it, it was just an image that came to me around Halloween. One of my problems is doing that, just starting on something without thinking enough about the context of these things. Looking back now I think it would have just been better to not make it a displaced gate and instead do a dilapidated gatehouse or something in a more mundane context. That way people could focus on the artwork itself without having to figure out why a gothic looking ruin is sitting in a desert for no reason. Save the weirder compositions for when I have more skill to realize them.
I appreciate your reply. I took your advice and made a couple new cloud textures and threw those in the skysphere material. I went for a more ethereal look, wispier clouds. I also changed the stars and re-worked the colors a bit.
This is just a quick update. I made a heightmap for the terrain so hopefully it looks more like sand dunes than lumpy mush. I still need to polish up some areas on it. I also made new sand textures, but I need to make one more to complete the proper look. Right now I have a disturbed sand and two wavy sands. Need a flat/smooth sand to make it look more natural.
To do:
- Scatter rocks by walls to sell broken look
- add particle effect to sconce globe and upload video of it in motion
- create smooth sand texture for blending
- maybe bring back desert grasses but improve it over last iteration
- throw a branch or two on the ground near the tree to sell dead look
- sculpt terrain a little more, polish up visible areas
Originally I wanted to do something like a eye and tried the Sauron material I posted above but couldn't get the pupil working. Then this video popped up in my feed so I watched and used that since I really liked the glass orb look
I did Runtime Virtual Texture blending and Pixel Depth Offset blending (which isn't in the vids because somehow my RVT volumes weren't updated at the time). Scattered some rocks and branches.
I learned that you couldn't have more than 12 texture samples in material when trying to do the landscape layers. I first had 4 different sand materials with different colors, normals, and roughness maps. Then I kept getting blacked out sections of landscape when applying more than 3 layers. So I just sacrificed color and roughness for normal variety. According to my reference the wavyness and all varies more than color.
Added a new volumetric fog. I tried using cards but it looked very dated and smokey not to mention the shader complexity was out of control when I got it looking decent. I learned about psuedo-volumes but couldn't quite apply it just yet. Maybe on a future project.
I also sculpted the landscape some more to give a better dune look and add some details. I did an overnight bake (my computer is slow) and I'm pretty pleased except for a few spots on the terrain that need to be fixed. The only things left is adding some grasses as I notice in references that duney deserts have little tufts of grass scattered around. Then tweak post-processing a little more after doing a final bake.
You can set the texture samplers to shared. That way you can use more than 16. But 4 different sand materials seems like overkill. You seem to be more focused on the technical side which is fine but the scene is lacking in composition and story.
Thanks for the reply. Yeah once I worked around the texture issue I realized I was doing too much anyways. I already have some ideas on how to do the same or more with fewer materials.
I tried to take a more critical look at the composition. I want to be a good modeler/sculptor and texture maker. You're right that I wasn't focusing enough on the basic art theory stuff.
This was never intended to be a full game-ready playable level. I just had an offhand idea for an image and got in too deep lol. In for a penny I guess.
- The tree overpowers the gate and it needs to be smaller and/or more in the background.
- The terrain could be altered more to lead to the focal point
- The materials on the gate/walls are too dark. They don't contrast well with the dark sky. So the sky could just be lighter, as in a day scene, but I'm worried about killing the mood. Maybe I should give up on the desert Idea all together and place it in a spooky forest or something or go the other way and make the desert into some kind of hell world.
- The forms of the gate itself are too rounded. The whole scene is organic, rounded shapes. Either the gate needs to be more angular and jagged or the desert needs to be rocky and have angular shapes.
- The sconce orbs are just spheres and while geometric, they're spheres in a sea of roundness
- The background is green and the sand is more on the reddish end of things, so that's good. But the gate is gray/bluish/greenish too which is bad. So something needs to change there. A stronger foreground/background contrast between hues and values is in order.
- I added a blue filter because the mood is lost. It should have an eerie mood, cool colors, darkness, night time, moody.
I tried finding something in a similar vein, although obviously much better quality than mine:
Replies
I think that this scene can still be pushed further.
If this archway was part of a wall, where are the missing stones scattered about? I feel that all the materials in the scene are really lacking wear and tear, and are generally feeling super flat and are lacking visual variety. Right now you have your macro shapes and your micro detail on them, but almost nothing in between.
I'd love to see some leak decals under the spot where the light attaches. Also what kind of lights are these? Magic?
The ground is looking pretty lumpy mashed-potatoey.
Heres a quick paintover of some ideas
Nice little scene!
A suggestion: If you have this big bright white moon on the back right of your image, there should be some light coming from that direction creating a rim around the gate and the tree nbranches
I think you have a great opportunity to aid the composition if you add a thick swoopy gnarl twist to that main trunk body! Maybe even bend that tree more into a stronger C swoop to draw the eye back around and through
Maybe the gate is the transition point between two worlds and you can play with dualism, yin-yang, all that good stuff.
One thing that i would definetly change is the default UE sky.
You seem to be more focused on the technical side which is fine but the scene is lacking in composition and story.