Courtyard Environment (image od)
polycounter lvl 11
Been working on this for a while, looking to get some absolute criticism!
Don't hold back! I need to hear everything, after this I'm going back to the polycount challenge and finshing that, and finishing the rest of my work.
The texture is 2048. Polycount round 20k, thought because it was indoors and there was no other geometry anything else would be culled.
Don't hold back! I need to hear everything, after this I'm going back to the polycount challenge and finshing that, and finishing the rest of my work.
The texture is 2048. Polycount round 20k, thought because it was indoors and there was no other geometry anything else would be culled.
Replies
The piece does feel like it's laking in a few areas.
-no focal point/story
-flat
-lighting uninteresting
-texture size reads smaller than stated (also I think you could use a 1024 max and achieve the same but it doesn't matter)
I'd start off by figuring out what I want to show off in this piece (the foutain, the door, the whatever), get a nice camera angle and build from there. Also cut up those huge walls into smaller slices and tile the texture a little more and...
I totally lost my train of thought but I hope this helps as a starting point. Good job, keep pushing, playing with ideas and I look forward to seeing what becomes of this.
You problem is that all your hipoly pieces are:
- In dark areas as well as being dark
- In areas that are usually farther away from the player (up in the roof)
So you are kind of wasting all your hipoly details imo.
Then the texture usage.. it seems pretty meh to me too. You got like.. 1024x2048 wall.. that's a lot of walls I tell you... and they look pretty much the same. One of these jerks who participated in the modular facade challenge could probably turn it into two whole buildings.
Then we have lighting.. there doesn't seem to be much lighting? If you're putting this into an engine that can do 2k textures and 20k poly scenes then I bet it has at least vertex lighting. I mean a video card that does 2k textures should be powerful enough to do standard lighting setups...
Noisey materials are mudding up your details. You have strong details, edges, etc, but with the current level of noise in the (diffuse?) materials, it's almost all lost. You might as well be using 128 textures for everything and getting the same results. You could learn a lot from looking at TF2's environments. Not that you should oversimplify your materials.
Lighting here is just too simple. If it wasn't for that hard square light on the floor, I'd have assumed this was an unlit viewport screengrab.
Noticeable seams between everything. This is a mix of lighting a materials here. An AO bake would do wonders.
The T-junction planes for vegetation works wonders at a distance, but it falls apart up close. You may be better off with an alpha dome growing out over the edges of the pot.
Rated Rrr: I can see what you're saying about the story/focal point. Is it not better to get the whole overview of an area rather than a small view? I'm thinking of cutting the wall texture in half so that I can create other features, such as draped cloth, cables, maybe even a bike.
Kawe: I've lightened up the mid tier so that its more visible now. Again, the wall textures will probably come down by half to make way for other objects.
Cholden: By noisy textures you mean no contrast/definition? Maybe its the normal map breaking up the diffuse too much. The seams are most predominant where? About the AO bake, how does that work when using tilable textures? or should I bake some lightmaps? I thought AO only really worked on unique objects....I'll look into that alphadome technique.
Bugo: Do you mean there isn't enough resolution in the walls or the opposite? again it could be because its too noisy.
SinisterUrge: The tiles are strange, the resolution compared to the wall is the same, kind of, but they look blurry, it could be the normal map or angle. But I'll take another look.
Finally, the lighting. Everyone commented on it and I'm gonna get it sorted. Because the scene pretty much has only 1 major source of light, how do you go about making it more dynamic? The image below is me messing around with lighting. Does environment lighting necessarily have to be realistically based, or do you add well placed, non true, lighting to add interest?
Thanks again.
reminds me of a cs map.
http://bh-source.com/images/ocss/de_chateau.jpg
'Terrorists WIN!' LOL!!
I would say lighting doesn't necessarily need to be realistically based, but it needs to follow the basic rules of how light would work in the real world for the most part. I'd advise you to do some reading on color theory , then try to come up with a back story/ emotion for this courtyard, maybe this is a spot in the game where you get a rest and some ammo before you go back in the shit, then use warm colors and try to give it a calming feel, or maybe this is an ambush spot, make it darker and give an ominous feel. you have a good texture base going, your floor has a higher res then the walls I'd fix that by making you walls tile as the floor is.
Been messing around with different colour schemes.
Cool and Warm
see what you can do about making those shadowy areas nice and blue maybe? real nice contrast could be had with that.
Wheres this going to end up? UE3 or max/maya etc? If the former, some AO decals would add some nice lighting variation, cutting those dark areas back. Could AO be baked in to the texture? (not sure how its applied/tiled)
Well maybe, I find that the plaster wall seems a bit low res, not sure tho, u could try to share with us a checker or something above the mesh so I could tell.
Here are some shadows added.
I can understand about how the higher polygon pieces are not as visible from the ground, however, would it not be fair to assume that the player will be active on the balcony level also?
When creating a level/scene, do you not also open up the possibility that the player will get very close up to objects/walls and the like.
Also I miss some effort in breaking materials up into components that would make things look more realistic and built. The last horizontal trim before the roof starts is just a plain green bevel... in reality it would be either a decorative trim or a shinier metal piece (which could be made a bit irregular =win) to collect the water from the rain, which would finally flow down a pipe on the sides (yay, cheap irregular details!).
Also, the balcony is all green too, you'd thing there would be some wood for the part where you rest your hand... the floor of the balcony looks already like wood (judging by the lines in the texture, not really visible in any other way), but the green is the same as the walls, just with the lines.
Make the green slightly different. Places like that will always have matching colors, but the paint on the wood will never match the tone of the plaster exactly, which helps break up the materials in a nice and subtile way.
Some of the textures (the plaster wall and fountain mainly, followed by the floor) are too hmm unpleasing to the eye.
There's something going on them related to the amount of different colored stains on them + the noise + contrast between all of it that's really irritating to the eye.
If you look at the screenshot someone posted from that CS map you'll see how that scene feels much calmer and easier to read.
If you look at the screenshot below, normalmaps were not only used for the bumps on the tiling textures but also for all kinds of simple and easy to do trims.
THe normalmaps on the textures are not noisy, which makes bump details in them stand out more.
Lastly, the difference between the base materials and the weatheration is always rather soft yet very visible. Even if it feels subtile in PS and you think it's not enough contrast or tonal difference, once you put it in the engine and the texture tiles all over the place, it will have the right effect.
http://www.strangefate.com/portfolio/2007/mausoleum1.jpg
Add some more colors! especially in the trim. Saturate your plants (I was about to suggest you add some plants, when I realized you actually had some in ALREADY.) they look dead/nearly invisible. I agree cool the shadow color down, and leave the sunlight warm. Try and get rid of the shadow line under the balconies/overhangs. This shouldn't be a hard line, but a slow gradient down the wall (darkest in the upper back corner.)
Shepeiro: Thanks, it should improve more.
Tumerboy: Thanks for the paintover, I'm going to add some colour as you suggested.
Kawe: The red will be in there, was thinking of yellow as well to compliment the green.
Having a brain freeze at the minute about what to do.
These were the refs:
You can get away with rather clean materials in games if the color tones are pleasing, i'd almost suggest sampling the green from the photo as a start, it's musch softer and pleasing to look at than the green you're using.
I'd get rid of the cloud effect you have in your textures, like the weird stuff in the green texture.
Random clouds in textures changing colors and/or contrast or saturation are only irritating/noisy to look at.
You need to find a better way to add some soft dirt and weatheration, and keep it as a softer overlay that adds to the textures but doesn't draw so much attention.
The fountain is an object that i'd either not model or change the surface material for game use. Again, just because exists it doesn't mean it works for a game.
The texture of it is too noisy and wont work ingame. This is where the game artist has to kick in and find a material solution that works better ingame and still looks good on the fountain and in the scene.
Overall, the modeling is fine, it's just the texturing completely killing the scene.
You probably don't wanna go Team fortress 2 on it, but that game is a great example of how soft pastel tones (like your photo has too) work great even if they're plain clean colors.
Even WoW is a good example.
About the trims, the trick is to exaggerate them ingame, make them bigger than they are in the photos, by default, everything looks smaller ingame and you're limited by resolutions so you have to push small details to stand out more.