Unearthly Challenge | PWNstars | Emberspawn
Hallo, this be our thread.
ALL HAIL EMBERSPAWN!!!
Team members include me, Drachis, and Foxious
Our concept is the following:
ALL HAIL EMBERSPAWN!!!
Team members include me, Drachis, and Foxious
Our concept is the following:
Replies
oh rly? Sounds interesting...
Be sure to specify which concept you are working from in your first post in this thread as well as any team members contributing to the entry.
Good luck.
-caseyjones
now suddenly concepts.
and more than 1 to boot!
Ta start a bit of re-imagination of the pit
And some colors to get a feel for it.
a bit more of the decay side of evil with some slime at the bottom and runic platforms hovering about.
did a bit of fleshing out on the points of the star, figured if we were celebrating the decay them some of them should of decayed away (or of been worn off by acidic slime) and been rebuilt from the bones of fallen worshipers
Figured out what we wanted out for the overall composition and got a rough block out together...
I kinda hate max a bit at the moment, the lack of forward compatibility has left me staring at a thumbnail of the file I had in school a few hours ago (which decided to upgrade to 2009 over the quarter flop apparently).
Zero started a sketch over the original concept, should be an interesting look at the final comp if he cleans it up.
Foxious is starting on a high poly of the column
I'm going to start on the center flower/alter and get it as vicious looking as I can.
Got the sculpt of the flower to a reasonably finished level, going to do a second pass on it once I have the retopo done to add more scaring to its features in a non radial manner and add the bone structures. That should help break up the inherent beauty in the symmetry is seems to have now.
I'm a bit sleepy now so I'll make the lowpoly and bake a bit later...perhaps tommorrow
EDIT: looking back at the concept now, i realize i sorta missed the general shape...the balloon part should be a lot bigger so that the tentacles are more towards the bottom of the general mass ...rather than coming straight down from the sides. meh...ill fix that tomorrow also
Still short a few maps, but that will change in the morning.
got some feedback in class today we may of deviated a wee bit much from the original concept. So we decided to bring some of the hard surface elements back into the scene to help establish scale.
Also decided to try and focus the composition with color tweeks not sure which variant is best, I'm leaning toward this one, but I want to hear what you guys have to say. This will mostly deal with how we light the scene and post process it in engine more than actual textures.
As you may of noticed in the comps there are now glowy bits around the flower altar reminiscent of the candles in the original concept. We were thinking that making those some sort of poisonous glowing pollen might be cool and it would add a valid light source to the top of the compositin.
Great stuff!
Also we got the start of the composition in unreal together.
Need to add some detail maps to the center flower to compensate for the resolution limits.
We've got a lot of work to do... seems sleep is truly going to be a fleeting memory this week.
thats weird, it put my post before the concept post
For some reason, my normal map got downsized in the engine....ill fix that later
Light Egg done and in engine, next asset will be the flower stalk unless zero has finished it while I've been typing
going to reuse a non glowing version of the light eggs at the base for the ball elements to help give a unified sense of scale
I'll do the second pass on this Monday eve or Tuesday depending how time goes. Right now there is too much small detail that will be lost in the final shots.
**Update**
Got the lighting to about where i want it, a wee bit over the poly limit on the render (256k) but with some hidden mesh removal it gets down to 189k. not sure how the color range is on other people's monitors so I'll likely need to play the gamma game as i move forward.
just going to extend this post with new renders from now on;
**edit**
the colors seem to off drifted toward classic evil... I'll need to go in and correct that when my mind is up and running at 100%
Got a suggestion from a teacher that the flower altar should have a flatter top so that it feels more like the original concept... I'm not sure I like the change since it takes a lot of the curve and life from the upper segment of the composition but here is a variant with that implemented.
Another thing that I think could help it now is some atmospheric perspective from some mist/fog in a combination of normal distance-fog and also maybe some spore or dust particles floating in the air, especially around the middle of the render space to help bring some more orangy-red tones to go along with the color the stem/column is in the same area. I think that could give it a feeling of a very dense swampy air which would look really cool with the piece.
Overall it's looking really nice so far though, looking forward to more
-caseyjones
At Foxious's request I went back to the original colors on the slime, I'm think the green is a bit too lively for the composition might shift it back to blue green to help with visual weight and sense of depth.
Decided to try adding a bit of glow to the eggs at the base of the pillar, I'm thinking the colors in that region might need to be shifted a bit for more evil.
I've reduced the weight of the ambient pass on the flower so the colors show through better. I think I need to make a new diffuse texture since the current one feels a bit over saturated and low on details.
Tried flipping the mouth-shrooms on the stalk over so I could get some sweet subsurface effects off of them... and it seems now they get entirely lost, so I'll flip them back over and hit them with a rim light. to pop them out a bit.
RE curved flower vs flat flower. I think the flow of the composition is very broken at the moment, without the curved fall off of the flower the viewer seems to be trapped in the top tiers of the image and the stone work isn't helping that at the moment. I'll go through and curve the flower tips a bit to try and restore the flow.
I saw our scene on a really crummy monitor today and the colors were so dark all you could see was the glowing bits it was rather disappointing. So I decided to try add more lights so the scene is more visible on non-LCD screens.
A bit of curves magics in photoshop has reveled that adding more blue is a great way to make the composition seem more ominous.
The blues feel a bit magical so it might be off target for decay style evil but seems to add a lot of spectacle.
I really like the glowy bits added to the eggs at the bottom of the pillar, though I think they would look nicer against the more blue colors you had down there before. Like you said I think the green loses some of the nice color balance the blue-er hues were creating.
The quick solution to getting some of your blacks back with fog is to use post processing to force some additional contrast, but you will have to play with your lights afterward to avoid blowing anything out so things can get a little messy. You can try using a darker fog color, but that is one of the trickier aspects of introducing fog to a dark cavernous place. Unfortunately I dont have a lot of experience messing with it so if you come up with a good solution post it, haha.
Since in a cave the fog is more a way to fake the way the light falls off, not an atmospheric haze, setting the fog color to black seems to suitably simulate that.
Now I have to re-balance the contrast to ensure the elements all are visible...
I've reverted back to the green fog and added a particle system to help simulate some pollen fog, not quite sure how to ensure I don't bust the poly limit on particle systems, so they are going to be spawned with the burst method and a max draw count, currently about 1k tris are in use in particle systems. I'm going to have to play around with their impact to make the tri hit worth it.
I'm trying to figure out what to add to the lower half of the composition to make it more interesting. I'm waiting on Zero's re hash of the stone work I think that will add a great surface to work on.
All in all its pretty badass...damn Tolli(sp) and his infernal shader knowledge.
Me and Benno could use some crits. I know you three will have 'em, which is good.
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?p=857930#poststop