caltech environment model
polycounter lvl 18
polycount!
Hey guys, I'm revamping an old env model from a year ago back when I didn't really know what I was doing. I'm just touching up the textures and hopefully learning how to use lightmaps. I will be adding some funky vegetation as well. This is modeled after the Beckman Institute quad at caltech, hence the uninteresting fountain in the middle. Hopefully that will be updated as well. I am modeling the thing in fourths so it will be duped around a central axis.
Heres an early lighting test, its supposed to be daylight, early afternoon lighting, lots of hard shadows.
Hey guys, I'm revamping an old env model from a year ago back when I didn't really know what I was doing. I'm just touching up the textures and hopefully learning how to use lightmaps. I will be adding some funky vegetation as well. This is modeled after the Beckman Institute quad at caltech, hence the uninteresting fountain in the middle. Hopefully that will be updated as well. I am modeling the thing in fourths so it will be duped around a central axis.
Heres an early lighting test, its supposed to be daylight, early afternoon lighting, lots of hard shadows.
Replies
cheers cholden. reminds me of that jill scott track, living my life likes its cholden...
The lighting is working for me but how do I make it look more like water in the middle?
Is it hard to add a sky? I tried using an image plane, but it wouldn't show up in my viewport in Maya.
As far as overall lighting, yellow/orange for sun, a light blue from the opposite sides to reflect the sky, and a tan/brown from below to reflect the ground. With the green from your foliage, you could have strong use of the color spectrum.
Old stand-by tip: test your lighting without textures and watch out for solid black or white spots.
So now I have cool looking leaves, but they are still wayyy to complex for game art, each leaf is like 8 tris or something ridiculous. I need to spend a lot of time tweaking to get what I want from paint effects
So the leaves don't really line up well with my tree trunks, but they cast some cool shadows. The atmosphere is there, but the scene is really boring. It looks too much like an architectural rendering, not a fun, interesting game level. any suggestions?
Place the scene in a game and see how it looks, good luck with translating the leaves. You might want to do a single plane with groups of leaves painted on them with a opacity and scatter those, and see how that looks. It won't look as good as they do now, but it might lower the polycount for you and possible give your computer some speed.
Or give over to that this scene is a architectural rendering. The biggest thing that might be driving you nuts is that its so perfectly symmetrical and clean. Very clean. Place some Mountain Dew cans and a trashcan where people missed the basket. Normal college students disaster zone type stuff.
Its very beautiful and peacefully looking, Dabu. So how long did this take you?
I *know* you probably want a 'gamey' look to the lighting, but radiosity is often baked into world geometry these days. This scene is absolutely *begging* for an AO/radiosity pass.
Obviously that central bush needs some luvin' and some of the UV's on that semi-circular concrete bench in the foreground look strange. But really nice work. No suggestions for making it more like a game level, but I like Lores suggestions for making it feel recently occupied.
Oh and If you're interested in the radiosity and not sure, ping me and I'll go over it. At the very least get some blue in those shadows.
spinning on the floor, hehe. I do like Lores suggestion, but I won't get to it till tomorrow, got a gig today. I took a ton of reference pics since I walked around the quad for days. It does need trash cans, and litter and a few more chairs. This is "next gen" cause each chair is 800 tris. Ha. I had alpha planes for the leaves, but in Maya 5, alphas don't cast proper shadows, they just look like solid planes. So having actual geo for the leaves makes the shadows accurate. They fixed this in 6.5 apparently.
When I made this 1 1/2 years ago, it took me a while, like 3-4 days to model and 4 days to texture. It also had no lighting and the textures looked really bad. I spent 5 hours cleaning it up yesterday, my I've come a long way in that time.
Heres an old image of what it looked like and a ref pic
So I came up with a different cheesy solution. Projection map. Slap down a plane on the ground and fake the leaves shadow. This might get you past the none ability to create traced out shadows from the leaves. But if the Unreal3 engine is what games will be like in the future, then ignore this really cheesy suggestion, but it might be something to think about for other things.
Hey Cheese, how do I implement that? Do I just add some planes and put alpha textures on them in the corners? It does need edgwork, everything is o clean right now.
Jody
Anyway, one directional raytracing light set to 1.5 intensity ( perhaps a little hot ) with a reddish hue, a sky blue picked out as the env. colour for the camera, final gather ticked on in the render globals ( G.I off ) and globals quality set to production. For finished renders you could up the FG rays to 10,000. This was just 1000, hence the blobs.
Have mailed you back the file ( but obviously it's only of use to you as ref. All the materials are gone ) Anyway, more realistic lighting is just showing off really, but something to think about. An understanding of more complex lighting techniques can only be one more thing to impress a potential employer with. It really brings the scene alive.
*EDIT* might help If I actually included the images
I guess I should drop these cheesy slices of jokes.