Fantasy Village Props

Reiyn

Hi everyone,

I'm a first-time poster.
I haven't known about polycount for long, but have really enjoyed reading it lately...

Here are some screens of an environment I've been working on for the past few weeks. If you could lemme' know what you think, any critiques or suggestions, etc, it would be greatly appreciated.

I know I have to work on foliage and trees a lot more. I'm trying to get a lot of practice and also develop a workflow.

The images are quite big, but should load fairly quickly...

Thanks!

Lee3dee

very nice! what engine is the game running in?

oobersli

looks really good. everything seems to have a nice consitency and the in game shots look great. You still going to AI?

Reiyn

Thanks =o

-- Yep, still at AI, just started final quarter so I've only got a few months to go.

The engine's a combination of Ogre (Ogre3d.org)and PhysX and some other libraries. It's basically my personal project as I'm sort of a hobby programmer. There's sort of a nice foundation right now -- It's multiplayer with a server, some simple combat and user interface. I have a little site started at http://projectchimera.net It's been fun trying to implement stuff, and it's served as a decent sandbox to apply knowledge learned from classes.

... The props all have a spec map in the Alpha of the colormap and they're rendered using a cg shader supporting normal map and spec from 3 nearest lights. I really just took an existing normal map shader and added the spec part in. I don't really know realtime shader languages too well at all, just the basics haha.

beancube

lookin pretty cool, although the normal maps could have had a bit more love spent on them.

StJoris

Wow that's really nice.
Interesting to hear you are also doing an engine and making a small game yourself, very cool, respect!
They look pretty good, crits from me are:
- uv space usage could have been better
- normal maps seem to be made by nvidiafilter/crazybump, some have too much highfreq detail, looks like noise. For some things it will be nice to see what you can do with a baked normal map from a high poly mesh.

Cool stuff man, looking forward to seeing how it looks together.

MoP

Looks good, nice consistency and style.
However I have to agree with the normalmap comments, in fact it looks like you just took the diffuse textures into Crazybump and fiddled with the settings a bit - that will never create accurate normal maps for uniquely unwrapped objects. In fact I can see from some of the flat textures that the normals are just plain wrong.

I notice that, on the Wooden Crates texture (2nd set along on the top row of flat textures), the normal map has angle information on surfaces that should be flat, due to using Crazybump's "find 3d shapes" on a texture with baked shadows - it's really throwing some odd normals onto the planks of wood, and the coils of rope (?) normals don't really make much sense either.

The "Village Lamp" normal map has stones with a flipped normal map, they currently recess when they should stick out. Similarly the "Tent 1" normals don't make any sense, there are odd angles all over the place.

Also, the way you're outlining all the UV segments in black, while it may look good on a flat texture for presentation purposes, it's not a good idea for an ingame asset as this will affect the lower mipmap levels. Similarly it's screwing up the normals since you're just running your flat diffuse maps through Crazybump, with these black silhouettes around each segment.

Basically I'd say you need to rework nearly all your normal maps so they actually provide useful information, at the moment it's only basically surface noise with a lot of big strange angles.

That said, the renders do look very nice, I just think they could be a lot better with accurate normals providing real depth to some elements.

Keep it up though, it's nice to see this all come together!

Vylaroth

Those props look just awesome! I don't mind the "lazyness" going on in the normal maps, the diffuse work is so great. It's also nice to see an indie creator with really good looking content.

How's the overall performance of the current build?

Keep going, this looks really promising.

Nate Broach

Hey welcome Reiyn! Very cool looking stuff man and its awesome that your putting these props into an engine and making a game with it.

Im in the same boat as you are with the normal maps, they're a pain to figure out but this is definately the place to learn to do them right. Keep us posted!

Emil Mujanovic

Great job dude!

-caseyjones

The Umbrella Man

I thought about going to AI here in Santa Monica CA, but I was told by a lot of friends that I shouldn't because "It was a waste of money", "AI is only good for Culinary", and so on. I was wondering, do you feel you became a better artist as a result of being at AI? I went to gnomon for some 2d classes and felt immediate improvement and I am thinking about taking their full time classes. Wanted to see what someone in school currently thinks about their progression. Sorry to derail and ask so many questions in your thread.