The dumpster nearly disappears into that corner, but the decals are fluorescent. Bring the levels up on the dumpster, and down on the graffiti. The palate looks good except the dirt layer seems a little uniform and noisy.
Maybe it's what you're going for, but the lighting feels very strange. It's obvious that the sun is coming from behind the building we're looking at, since it's shadows are being cast on the wall to the left, and the ground in front of us. Yet, the wall directly ahead is almost glowing.
On top of that, we can see a sliver of blue coming through the arch way. This might be expected if we were in the country and there was sky on the other side, but this seems very city, and I'd expect more buildings on the other side, and more of a yellowy/orange light similar to the rest. Lastly, the actual sun light seems rather dim, and there isn't as much reflected light as I would expect.
In this shot there is almost no direct sunlight (some in the upper right, and through the arch) Notice how bright the left wall is anyway. Also, the specular highlights on the stone walk way at the end of the arch, adn the reflected highlights on the upper portions of the various arches, with dark parts between.
Currently, your arch is pretty much pitch black, even though there appears to be something very bright on the other side. If it's that bright over there, I'd expect some light to be bleeding into the hallway. If you want the arch dark, then block off the other side, or at least show me that it's dark over there.
wow thanks for the crits// didnt look at this thread when i was working on it on the weekend
-so the known issues is the lighting (ALL OF IT)
- brightness on the both the blue and yellow graffiti
yes shep its from HP i toned it down and made it brown what do you think?
what i need to add:
- more dirt/poster/graffitti decals
- Gate,bike,powercords,garbage props
- Fix the lighting/brightness on graffiti
- make a final pass at the layout i might change a few things
for the brick i would make a height map form a photo and use mask by alpha in ZB to get a decent start then add some detailing if it needs it. right now its just waaaay to perfect,spacing, straightness etc. thats what is making it look artificial. that brick building could use some trims to break up the solid wall of bricks.
hey guys little update but before that i need some help with my ue3 editor setting if at all possible:
a bunch of the objects are not casting shadows when my camera is not close to it but when i zoom up to them there shadows pop up, im thinking its an performance thing they put into the editor so theres not alot of strain on the computer. i was wondering if theres anyway i can reverse this so that the shadows are showing up all the time.
i take screen grabs from the editor so i need this to get fixed
also small update:
+added new brick wall
+ garbage bag/cokecan/waterbottle
+ blue bicycle
need to add:
+ wires
+decals/graffiti
+ gate
+more garbage
+ work on lighting
also if anyone can find me some pictures with wires in them i would appreciete it most of my refs dont have any electrical wires.
also i tried extruding the windows into the building and it just didnt look good. i still need to adjust the windows to the right as im not totally happy with them.
man dynamic lighting makes me cry
just use static pointlights. I didnt bake it in my folio and I wish I had, because as gamedev stated once, you get a nice sort of AO feel to the lights (I reckon this is partly due to lightmapping res, a nice side effect)
Your lighting is going to show up as red in light complexity, no doubt.
What id do for lighting is throw in one directional static light, and have that as your sun source.Maybe throw in an opposite directional (v subtle) for some faked bounce light. Then start adding smaller lighting details, start big work down to small. maybe blue-ing out the shadowed areas (although you can do this with PP as well to a degree) so yeah start off nice and simple with lighting, and bake when you can because it'll look nicer for it
And yeah the inserted windows should look good, you might need to create brick trimming to place around them so its not box cut, but maybe arched etc.
Your new brick wall looks really good though. Any chance of dialing down the frequency of it and having those bricks a little larger?? Your texturing is all really nice so far, and baked lighting along with deco layers are really going to help settle the elements in to each other, as opposed to looking like they floating
hope that helps? Alot of what I say is already on your to-do list : D
nice update man. The brick looks 10x better but its a bit small right now, decrease the tile a bit so its like 20% larger maybe.
something appears to be off with your scale of objects a bit, the pallete is nearly as large as a dumpster? unless maybe you changed your camera's FOV to be super wide and its really increasing the perspective a bit.
for the lighting I would really recommend using static for most of it as unreal wasnt really designed with a ton of dynamic lighting in mind. It would be good to have lightmapped static meshes in your portfolio as well to show prospective employers you have a good understanding of level building in unreal.
the lighting setup you have right now looks like a good start, I would maybe recommend decreasing your ambient light a tad to have a bit more contrast if you are using one.
with lightmaps that large shadow on the left wall should get a beautiful feather to it that looks way better than a razor sharp dynamic shadow. areas like that are prime examples where to put more resolution on your lightmap while keeping other areas pretty modestly low, EX: small-medium props should probably be 32-64 res starting out and tweaked higher or lower depending on what looks good.
This is looking pretty cool now.
The blue graffiti on the left and yellow graffiti on the right looks like it's glowing... wrong blending mode? Should probably be multiplying down on the underlying surface.
Something I think would really help is a bit of dirt/water streaks down underneath all those windows and little balcony things, to help make them look like part of the wall, like they've been there for a long time. One or two decals should do it, just float some planes over there and scale/flip them so it's not obvious that you're re-using the same decals.
oops sorry i was actually using static lighting for all my lights :S i baked the lighting shadows seem to show up proper now but the lighting is really dark now might have to fix that :P
btw thanks for the crits guys shep yeah i persanolly didnt like it, maybe it because i work in construction and we do alot of window trims :P ill give it another try when im finalizing the windows today im just gonna work on the graffiti/decals
Whats your focal point, because it certainly isn't anything below that blue shade area. Everything is so dark down there, that my eyes tend to wonder up because its lighter~. Seems like the left wall is your focal point, because its the brightest thing in the entire scene.
Whats your focal point, because it certainly isn't anything below that blue shade area. Everything is so dark down there, that my eyes tend to wonder up because its lighter~. Seems like the left wall is your focal point, because its the brightest thing in the entire scene.
actually my focal point is the sky/top half :poly122: im not sure thats a good focal point to have in a piece like this. but i love how the blue just looks so alive and gives off that summer vibe and the light just beams down.
I would bring up the levels on the bottom, then jack the bloom on the top to blow the sky right out like a photo that has been exposed for the low-light. It should hopefully give it a seedy feel, like walking into a scummy alleyway out of a brightly lit street and your eyes are still adjusting.
i dunno about what the other guys think, but i0m liking this scene.
i think you are starting to get the hang of this shit. listening to crits and actually applying them to the art.
congrats man, i mean it.
I agree with bitmap dude. This is looking much much better. You are really improving!
I can't tell if those are trashbags just to the left of the gate or not. They look like they are, and if they are I think individually they look fine, but I think with that camera angle, and those two bags just slightly offset like that, it looks like a big weird hole in the wall. I think it wouldn't be so bad if the light was hitting the bags directly and you could see the material of the bags more clearly, but from this angle it looks like a hole in the wall.
Along those same lines though, I think the thing I am not liking is the lighting. It's not that it's bad, but everything in your foreground, all your props and pieces you are trying to showcase, are in the shadow, and are quite flat. For me personally, I would want to make sure that I have some of the props being hit by some nice light so that you can really appreciate the normal/spec maps.
That said though, the quality is really getting up there man, you are improving a lot lately, keep it up.
been struggling with the lighting of the scene all day but have come down to these four settings for it. they all look fairly the same but with little tweaks with the shadows here and there would love to see wich one you guys like.
also after i get the lighting down ill be finishing off the scene so any crits on what i should add or remove would be great
I would go with 1 and maybe add a little more of the blue green coloration so it ends up somewhere between 1 and 2. Its really looking great, but that yellow tag on the dumpster needs to be toned down a lil more and maybe grunged up a bit like some of the paint has worn off. Keep it up dude.
listened to hopefully most of the crits if anyone has anymore im more than happy to go back and fix them before i put this up on my new website im making.
this turned out pretty dope man. the lighting looks good. the only thing I would do is change the arch trim so it stands out a bit more maybe lighten it up with some plaster or something or make it engraved stone perhaps.
other than that, the green shutters really could use another passover they are the only thing that stands out as really fake looking.
finally maybe you could brighten the lighting behind the gate just a tad so you see it a bit better silhouetted against the tunnel.
played around with window shutters but felt if i took them out the brick windows would look bland. im calling this piece done.
I spent the last three days crunching on this piece as i didnt want the work week to start and make me forget all about it. as you can see buy the vast amount of updates in the past 2 days.
I learned alot from this piece and i gotta thank all of you for the awesome tips and help along the way. my texturing/lighting skills has come along way since my first post and i cant thank anyone else but the polycount forumers
This turned out really well. You put a lot of work into lately. Good job on the lighting. I can see what they are saying about the shutters but I would not worry too much about them. Overall nice piece.
Is there a fog or gradient being overlayed? The shadows near the bottom of the render look green or blue save the bike and boxes in the foreground on the left side, they have black in their shadows... what is causing this?
Nice work man, sorry I didn't get back to you before, but honestly, you took everyone's critiques and applied them really well to really push this scene, as bitmap said, really good job on it.
I can't help but think the top of your final picture is lacking something man... even adding in a skymap would help a bit. Also (kinda noticed this afterwards) but your proportions for your objects seemed a little messed up, and with such heavy perspective, it adds to the "awkwardness" a bit. Because your bike has the "same" height as your dumpster (bike is closer, dumpster is furthur away) it creates a bit of tangency... which again, kinda plays tricks with your eyes. Also... I don't know if dumpsters are THAT big, but if they are, I would maybe make it a bit smaller because right next to it is the shelf unit, and it looks realllllyy small.
Also man (you can do this for any future projects if you want) but for your other map, I was looking at the vehicles again... I say you really push the spec on those next time, I think it will really bring out the quality in your modeling / texturing.
Either way man, great work man, I honestly think you are ready for a job and I'm excited for you, soon we can share newbie stories about the industry
But don't wait for "them" to e-mail you, you e-mail them!!! I'll keep an eye and ear out
very solid there guy.. followed your progress a bit.. i've been doing a lot of environmental work myself and i'll be sure to take a note or two from your progression.. should frame that scene.. hang it up in a gallery
Replies
Maybe it's what you're going for, but the lighting feels very strange. It's obvious that the sun is coming from behind the building we're looking at, since it's shadows are being cast on the wall to the left, and the ground in front of us. Yet, the wall directly ahead is almost glowing.
On top of that, we can see a sliver of blue coming through the arch way. This might be expected if we were in the country and there was sky on the other side, but this seems very city, and I'd expect more buildings on the other side, and more of a yellowy/orange light similar to the rest. Lastly, the actual sun light seems rather dim, and there isn't as much reflected light as I would expect.
In this shot there is almost no direct sunlight (some in the upper right, and through the arch) Notice how bright the left wall is anyway. Also, the specular highlights on the stone walk way at the end of the arch, adn the reflected highlights on the upper portions of the various arches, with dark parts between.
Currently, your arch is pretty much pitch black, even though there appears to be something very bright on the other side. If it's that bright over there, I'd expect some light to be bleeding into the hallway. If you want the arch dark, then block off the other side, or at least show me that it's dark over there.
-so the known issues is the lighting (ALL OF IT)
- brightness on the both the blue and yellow graffiti
yes shep its from HP i toned it down and made it brown what do you think?
what i need to add:
- more dirt/poster/graffitti decals
- Gate,bike,powercords,garbage props
- Fix the lighting/brightness on graffiti
- make a final pass at the layout i might change a few things
all of this could be changed depending on crits.
or
a bunch of the objects are not casting shadows when my camera is not close to it but when i zoom up to them there shadows pop up, im thinking its an performance thing they put into the editor so theres not alot of strain on the computer. i was wondering if theres anyway i can reverse this so that the shadows are showing up all the time.
i take screen grabs from the editor so i need this to get fixed
also small update:
+added new brick wall
+ garbage bag/cokecan/waterbottle
+ blue bicycle
need to add:
+ wires
+decals/graffiti
+ gate
+more garbage
+ work on lighting
also if anyone can find me some pictures with wires in them i would appreciete it most of my refs dont have any electrical wires.
also i tried extruding the windows into the building and it just didnt look good. i still need to adjust the windows to the right as im not totally happy with them.
just use static pointlights. I didnt bake it in my folio and I wish I had, because as gamedev stated once, you get a nice sort of AO feel to the lights (I reckon this is partly due to lightmapping res, a nice side effect)
Your lighting is going to show up as red in light complexity, no doubt.
What id do for lighting is throw in one directional static light, and have that as your sun source.Maybe throw in an opposite directional (v subtle) for some faked bounce light. Then start adding smaller lighting details, start big work down to small. maybe blue-ing out the shadowed areas (although you can do this with PP as well to a degree) so yeah start off nice and simple with lighting, and bake when you can because it'll look nicer for it
And yeah the inserted windows should look good, you might need to create brick trimming to place around them so its not box cut, but maybe arched etc.
Your new brick wall looks really good though. Any chance of dialing down the frequency of it and having those bricks a little larger?? Your texturing is all really nice so far, and baked lighting along with deco layers are really going to help settle the elements in to each other, as opposed to looking like they floating
hope that helps? Alot of what I say is already on your to-do list : D
something appears to be off with your scale of objects a bit, the pallete is nearly as large as a dumpster? unless maybe you changed your camera's FOV to be super wide and its really increasing the perspective a bit.
for the lighting I would really recommend using static for most of it as unreal wasnt really designed with a ton of dynamic lighting in mind. It would be good to have lightmapped static meshes in your portfolio as well to show prospective employers you have a good understanding of level building in unreal.
the lighting setup you have right now looks like a good start, I would maybe recommend decreasing your ambient light a tad to have a bit more contrast if you are using one.
with lightmaps that large shadow on the left wall should get a beautiful feather to it that looks way better than a razor sharp dynamic shadow. areas like that are prime examples where to put more resolution on your lightmap while keeping other areas pretty modestly low, EX: small-medium props should probably be 32-64 res starting out and tweaked higher or lower depending on what looks good.
The blue graffiti on the left and yellow graffiti on the right looks like it's glowing... wrong blending mode? Should probably be multiplying down on the underlying surface.
Something I think would really help is a bit of dirt/water streaks down underneath all those windows and little balcony things, to help make them look like part of the wall, like they've been there for a long time. One or two decals should do it, just float some planes over there and scale/flip them so it's not obvious that you're re-using the same decals.
btw thanks for the crits guys
+decals
+gate,box,rubble,wire models
+ lighting work
+scene set-up
need to add:
+make trip for brick windows
+add water streak decals for the windows
+maybe 1 more garbage prop :poly141:
actually my focal point is the sky/top half :poly122: im not sure thats a good focal point to have in a piece like this. but i love how the blue just looks so alive and gives off that summer vibe and the light just beams down.
i think you are starting to get the hang of this shit. listening to crits and actually applying them to the art.
congrats man, i mean it.
I can't tell if those are trashbags just to the left of the gate or not. They look like they are, and if they are I think individually they look fine, but I think with that camera angle, and those two bags just slightly offset like that, it looks like a big weird hole in the wall. I think it wouldn't be so bad if the light was hitting the bags directly and you could see the material of the bags more clearly, but from this angle it looks like a hole in the wall.
Along those same lines though, I think the thing I am not liking is the lighting. It's not that it's bad, but everything in your foreground, all your props and pieces you are trying to showcase, are in the shadow, and are quite flat. For me personally, I would want to make sure that I have some of the props being hit by some nice light so that you can really appreciate the normal/spec maps.
That said though, the quality is really getting up there man, you are improving a lot lately, keep it up.
been struggling with the lighting of the scene all day but have come down to these four settings for it. they all look fairly the same but with little tweaks with the shadows here and there would love to see wich one you guys like.
also after i get the lighting down ill be finishing off the scene so any crits on what i should add or remove would be great
listened to hopefully most of the crits if anyone has anymore im more than happy to go back and fix them before i put this up on my new website im making.
other than that, the green shutters really could use another passover they are the only thing that stands out as really fake looking.
finally maybe you could brighten the lighting behind the gate just a tad so you see it a bit better silhouetted against the tunnel.
dope work man
I spent the last three days crunching on this piece as i didnt want the work week to start and make me forget all about it. as you can see buy the vast amount of updates in the past 2 days.
I learned alot from this piece and i gotta thank all of you for the awesome tips and help along the way. my texturing/lighting skills has come along way since my first post and i cant thank anyone else but the polycount forumers
heres a few prop and texture shots from 3ds max:
AK
@jeffro,Tumberboy,A.kincade: Thanks guys i hope to take all the valuable information i learned here and put it toward my next project.
Also just to note if you guys didnt see it already i bought a domain name and edited my site you can view my new portfolio here:
Also i am currently looking for on-site work in canada as a junior-mid level artist.
so if your company is hiring shoot me an email and id me more than happy to apply/do an art test.
well i guess thats all just like to thank everyone for there helpful crits :thumbup:
- Arman
Nice work man, sorry I didn't get back to you before, but honestly, you took everyone's critiques and applied them really well to really push this scene, as bitmap said, really good job on it.
I can't help but think the top of your final picture is lacking something man... even adding in a skymap would help a bit. Also (kinda noticed this afterwards) but your proportions for your objects seemed a little messed up, and with such heavy perspective, it adds to the "awkwardness" a bit. Because your bike has the "same" height as your dumpster (bike is closer, dumpster is furthur away) it creates a bit of tangency... which again, kinda plays tricks with your eyes. Also... I don't know if dumpsters are THAT big, but if they are, I would maybe make it a bit smaller because right next to it is the shelf unit, and it looks realllllyy small.
Also man (you can do this for any future projects if you want) but for your other map, I was looking at the vehicles again... I say you really push the spec on those next time, I think it will really bring out the quality in your modeling / texturing.
Either way man, great work man, I honestly think you are ready for a job and I'm excited for you, soon we can share newbie stories about the industry
But don't wait for "them" to e-mail you, you e-mail them!!! I'll keep an eye and ear out
Lookin good man!
This just in, captain obvious has been spotted by none other than Captain HARLARIOUS...
Vj
actually its rendered in ut3