Alley Environment
polycounter lvl 13
Hey everyone, been working on this for the past week. Looking for some good crits on what I could do to make it better. Shots are from unreal, which I am not the greatest with lighting outdoor scenes - so any help in that direction would be cool.
Total texture size for the scene is 5120*2560
total tri count for the scene is 12807
sky texture is unrealED stock.
-enjoy!
edit: damn garbage can wheel is looking right at me beggin to be fixed. . .. oops.
Total texture size for the scene is 5120*2560
total tri count for the scene is 12807
sky texture is unrealED stock.
-enjoy!
edit: damn garbage can wheel is looking right at me beggin to be fixed. . .. oops.
Replies
Looks solid. Biggest issue I see is the tiny bricks on the right and huge bricks on the left.
The waste barrels seem a bit pudgy too. Make them taller.
Lighting : well it looks like you didn't build your lighting here. Or at least didn't enable shadows in the light sets.
I like the overall tint of the first picture
Your poly usage is good too. Are you just using diffuse maps? Any spec or normals? If you have trouble with lighting you could go for a night scene and use some point lights to make it pop and give some contrast to the scene.
jeffro: I wanted to have different brick textures so its not all the same, is it not working? waste barrels taller, got it.
ParoXum: Bad smoothing group. didn't see that. and, No the lighting is baked, but I had trouble getting good shadows, I tried using dynamic shadows and they where just to sharp. Its one major directional light, and a couple regular lights to brighten up some darker walls. I must be doing something wrong. I did a render in maya of what I was going for. image is below.
HellMark: your right, I do need something on the ground. Just diffuse and spec.
Dekard: you like that graffiti?? lolz
heres that maya render:
If this a test for Cryptic you might want to work in the same style of Champions Online to win points with them. If you have time for it. Them seeing you can work in their style should increase your chances. I know someone else posted their test here and used comic shading with a bit of stylization in the textures. Looked really nice. I think they were hired as well. Maybe Nick is allowed to point you to his work. If I find it I'll link you.
Look at shots from Cryptic's games to get ideas/reference but don't repeat exactly what you see. You could also look at portfolios of artists who already work there to get ideas to see what worked for them to get hired.
You're doing good. Keep at it.
HellMark: i think your talking about the alley done by commander_keen. Very well done. Yea, it was a tough decision on if I should do their style or a more realistic setting. I choose to go with something I am more familiar with in order to get the most work done in the time allowed. I didn't want to get stuck tweeking on something I wasn't too sure on how to do. I hope it doesn't affect my chances too much.
Good luck on your submission.
Questions:
- Whats going on with the ramp/stairs in this image? Is it a ramp or are they stairs?
- Is it all uniquely unwrapped or did you use some tiles and overlays?
- What program did you lay this out in and do the lighting?
Vig: aww damn it, the stairs. lolz, that whole building wasn't in my final shot and i forgot all about it. those are supposed to be a better looking set of stairs, but I only have the placeholders. I'll finish that up.
-yes many overlays and reuse of my uvs. its 6 1024 maps and acouple of alpha maps - one for graffiti and one for ground grime.
- my first post is all unrealEd 3 lighting and the last image i posted was a render from maya
The maya render turned out better, with the shadows and such. I think the sky looks better with the unreal render tho. Not sure about the shadows with unreal.
You should maybe hang some tennies from the wires.
Besides that everything looks legit. Good luck with it.
for the maya render, it is suffering from similar problems, the shadows all seem to have an even level of darkness, if you have an ambient light in there, I think its a bit to high. needs some contrast of dark and light areas to add some more ooomph i think. I dont know if you used GI when rendering but if not that could help with some light bounces/AOin the areas where things meet.
nice work, the textures look pretty soild, Maybe the ground could be broken up more with some crack and stain decals, also it looks a lil low res in comparison to the surroundings. the environment looks really beliveable though which is great, everythign seems well laid out.
a.kincade - shoes from the wires!! why didn't i think of that?
Talbot - just need some hookers standin round
PixelMasher - I need to learn how to utilize my shadows in unreal, that is my biggest downfall with the editor. Plus I wasn't allowed to use any GI so thats out of the question. I do have a ambient in the maya scene, so I will play around with that some more.
Your art test is off to a good start, but I would say it could really benefit from a nice polish pass before you include it into your portfolio. I know you only had a week to get 'er done, but really try and break down the test into a comfortable schedule and stick to it. Maybe 3 days for concept and modeling, 3 days for texturing and the last day for presentation.
If you get the job, you'll be expected to work at a much faster production pace then you're use to, so it is best to establish good working habits ASAP.
As far as specific crits, I really like the direction you are taking this. The camera angle seems to work for the shot, and even though you photo sourced a lot of recognizable textures from certain websites, I have to admit that the final result for the textures isn't as much of an eye sore as I thought it would be.
My main issue is with all that empty space that you didn't use in the upper part of your render. (the sky). It is really open and boring, which adds to a very unfinished look for your art test submission.
I did a really quick mock-up in Photoshop to show you what I am talking about. I would have tried harder to break up the open sky-line a bit more with more functional silhouettes. You could have instanced the brown building once or twice to help frame your focal point a bit better and draw the viewer's eye into center of your scene. You could have also changed the VERT tint on those instances if you were unhappy with using the same asset multiple times.
Also, there is a noticeable pattern repeat on your brown background building.
Also, I would flip the bill board horizontally in order to help with the framing and keep the viewer's eye focused on the center of your render.
The second thing that didn't look right was the image you used for the sky. It is way too blue in comparison to the lighting you baked. Your lighting seems to emit a muted yellow, which seems to suggest early sunset or late dawn, which is then directly contradicted by the bright blue sky. The placement of your shadows also suggests that the sun is directly overhead like it should be during the afternoon.
While this can be viewed as a minor infraction, the lighting doesn't make sense visually to the viewer and even if the viewer isn't aware of why the render doesn't make sense, the human eye is still able to pick up on the contradicting information, which it then processes as unappealing or ugly.
I desaturated the sky and played with the hue a little bit to show what I am talking about.
I see that you created 3 different brick textures. While I can certainly understand that you were going for variety, try and keep in mind variety is very rarely a viable option for MMOs. I would have spent the time creating one really nice tile-able brick texture and offsetting it with dirt / grime decals and overlays and or vert tinting.
I am sure that the art director and or art lead is looking for artists that know the limitations of MMO asset development, and the best suited solutions for these limitations.
One thing that might have helped with the variety is by breaking up the brick textures with more concrete. I included some concrete behind the storm drain and on the first building on the right. Try to break up the way you apply your materials to better showcase your geometry.
The green in one of your brick textures seems to suggest moss, which also doesn't make sense since you didn't add any other visual clues in your scene that suggest there is that much moisture in the air. The alley and lighting looks very industrial, dry and hot. I would have tried to turned that green more into lower opacity values of black so that it came more across as dirt / grime.
As for the rest of the crits, I just added some quick notes to the image. Sorry if any of this stuff doesn't make sense, since I was writing this up at work and had to rush through it. So please excuse any grammatical errors and e-mail me if you need further explanation with any of the suggestions I made.
One thing I'm still unclear about is the vert tint - honestly I've never heard about it before.
I've tried vertex paint and found it slow and annoying to use because of my outdated computer. What's the best way to use this modifier?
OblastradiousO: Vertex paint modifier can be very slow, I think the only way to make it less slow in older computer is to disable shading, or textures, but I'm not sure.
You can use the brush to paint, or you can actually select things (verticies, edges, faces, etc.) and then use the fill to quickly change the whole thing.
i.e. for something like a brick building, you could make a desaturated brick texture, then tint the facade of one building reddish, and another brown/tan, and get a lot more variety out of a single texture.
Gotta play with it though.
You can also bake some ambient occlusion into the verts if you have enough geo for it.
Yeah but don't you have to meshsmooth or tessellate the building wall you're painting on in order to get a smooth transition in the vertex colors? Usually doing result in a lot slowdown on my computer. I could hide certain parts to make things run faster but it gets vexing.
EDIT: the brush acts very slow, but I never tried selecting the verts or faces though. Ill try that method.
It just depends on how accurate and intense you want the AO to be.
Yes, if you tesselate like crazy, and bake it down, it'll look sick, but even without that, if you just throw a cut or two in certain places, bake it down and tweak the levels it can still add a lot even when it's fairly subtle/broad.
Just something to play with.
Vert-tinting is pretty easy and very straight forward. You can even do it in the UNREAL 3 editor for even more variation.
It is a little bit of an old school technique, but is still very viable for games, especially MMOs, since it is sooooo cheap. I am not familiar with 3DS MAX all that much anymore, so I very QUICKLY put together a mini-tutorial for you in MAYA.
We are still stuck using MAYA 8.5 at work, but I am pretty sure the same approach can be applied in MAYA 2009. So don't judge the 5-minute cube model, automatic unwrap and generic textures.
1.) Select the Color Menu for the appropriate drop down sub-menu.
2.) Click on the Apply Color option box to open the Apply Color Options.
3.) Click on the Color box to open the Color Chooser.
4.) Click on the color you would like to apply inside the color wheel or enter your RGB or HSV values manually within the 0 to 255 range.
5.) Once you have chosen the color you want, select your model.
6.) You can then apply the color by hitting the Apply option in the Apply Color Options with your object selected.
7.) The color can be applied to the object, which will color the entire object with an overall flat shade of the color you have chosen, or you can go into sub-object mode and apply them to the individual faces and or vertices.
You can also go into the object's Color Set Editor and use different color sets to apply and blend vert tint color and baked lighting like ambient occlusion and light map information to the verticies.
Hopefully that helps!!!
Vert-tinting is used as a technique that helps give a little more variety to stale low budget textures and models.
You can generally get good enough results with baking Ambient Occlusion to your low poly mesh's vertices (assuming you modeled your mesh correctly and efficiently) but if you have to tessellate your mesh so much that it slows down your CPU, then I would just recommend trying other options like baking the Ambient Occlusion to a texture and overlaying that texture on your Diffuse / Color map in Photoshop.
Vert-tinting is just a fast and easy way to add variety to an optimized model. It is just one option and is not the best answer and solution for every problem or situation.
Experiment with the technique when you can, but don't limit yourself and try other more viable options when you need to.
On the left you can see the basic test object.
On the Right is the same thing tesselated a bunch.
In the middle, I just beveled the inner poly in a bit, only adding 8 tris to the model, but you can see that it's AO is pretty comparable to the highly tesselated one.
On the far right you can see the basic settings I used in Vertex Paint. Set those up, add a skylight (and change it to be white, instead of the light blue it defaults to) Click on the Radiosity Setup, add radiosity, and turn off "display in viewport." Since we're putting it to verts, it doesn't have to be super accurate, so leaving it on default settings otherwise is fine. Hit start, and when it's done, close that window and click "assign" on the vertex paint panel.
Voila!