Stefan: I appreciate the input, but to me the strongly colored atmosphere is one of the more eye-catching parts of the concept. Hopefully once I get more texture variety in there it should break up the dominant cyan tones a bit more.
Bit of an update: more foliage, tweaked lighting (leaving it be for now, it's working well enough), distant cards of cliffs, and less awful temp textures on everything. I think I've gotten it far enough to start cranking on some individual assets. The hanging foliage looks pretty slapped on at the moment, but it should blend in a lot more once I get moss and water damage vertex paint going on the surfaces they cover. Might need to mess with how they cast shadows too.
Only crit I have at the moment is that it looks like it was built yesterday, but has plants and foliage growing already. But I'm sure it's because you're still at an early texturing stage.
This is looking pimpin, man! Love the look and style, it has a solid, easy on the eye, charming style to it. My only qualm is that the background rocks, though pretty, don't match the scene. Probably already been mentioned, though.
Its looking great, I love the attention to detail with the pattern work. I do alot of temples and cultural buildings at work and am a sucker for nice pattern work...and you definitly got some goin on.
It's definitely nice. Although personally I would try and get a few more colors around. Maybe try different tones of colors (still remaining inside the same color pallet) for the vegetation, cos at the moment all pieces have the same tone.
Also, the grass look like green bananas sticking out of the floor, I would make them much much smaller and shorter, and a bit desaturated or with a slight color gradient on the texture. (Tips of the grass leaves ending in brownish or whatever)
Thanks guys! Everything in there is still blockout-WIP stuff, especially textures, with maybe the single exception of the railing thing. I'm trying a tactic where I take the whole scene blockout fairly far with temp stuff (including simple painted designs on some temp textures) before I tackle individual props in zBrush.
bbob: Yeah, agree. I think I'm going to use post-processing to pump up the contrast since I like the current intensity of the lighting and the amount of bounced light I'm getting.
duxun: They are WIP textures! Hehe. Definitely still want to use them to get my stone brightness and saturation figured out though. They do seem more washed out than I was expecting, I'll go another round of checking against references to figure out exactly what manner of stone was used in these structures.
ParoXum: Definitely, I agree. I'm planning to do crumbly destruction type stuff in another pass once I've got more final material in there, probably through a few paintovers. Maybe in the meantime I should try out some aging/waterdamage vertpaint stuff since I'm planning to use that approach on final assets to break up repetition.
Makkon: Yeah, even as placeholders they're starting to look pretty awkward. I'll have to see about swapping that one out with something more similar to the types of cliffs seen in my very-distant-cliffs card planes. Good call!
[HP]: You're right, the coloration is pretty samey at the moment. I think adding mix materials and discoloration decals will help that a lot, particularly adding moss and water damage. Right now all the foliage except for my mockup tree is cribbed from Epic, as placeholders to help me figure out how to go about making my own as well as help ground the scale of the environment.
Thanks for the crits guys, good stuff for me to be aware of going forward.
Definately needs moar debris, and foliage?
An ancient city would have been completely taken over by nature, maybe some big ivy/creeper/vines type thing could go well?
This is an incredible project and it looks awesome, just looks a bit too clean at the moment.
WOO ZACK.
You need to be really careful about the edges of your polys in regards to where you're placing texture detail. In a lot of the areas of the scene, you have these super abrupt 90 degree edges with no texture detailing around the corners to show wear or erosion. To me, that's the biggest thing lacking in an otherwise cool scene.
If these are mostly tiling textures, just go in and beat up one of the edges, chew it to shit, add some cracks and so forth, you get the idea
Lookning really good, are you going to be making this a fully fleshed out level? as in you can walk/gun about and everything will be in close res/LOD balanced?
Ninjai, I agree, it will definitely need a ton of debris and foliage before I call it finished. Right now I'm just testing ideas for foliage using the stuff Epic has used in UT3 and tech demos as placeholders, so I haven't really gotten to a proper foliage pass just yet. More just getting things a bit closer as a blockout without having to do much work. Damage as well I've been planning on holding off until I have more finished assets in the scene, since much of it will likely take the form of modified versions of final meshes and I want to avoid redoing work.
Amadreaus, I appreciate the concern but as I've said a few times everything in those shots is temp tiling textures. It's all still a blockout, really. I'm only just now transitioning into the phase of final asset and texture creation.
Target_Renegade, I might! For now I'm just building as though I am (with lots of modularity) while focusing efforts on the small walkable area in the shadowed foreground of my main shot. After I get that done I might consider tackling a few interiors and extending the built environment to include the area behind the building seen in the very last shot I posted. We'll see. Extending the environment should be much easier than taking a single section of it to a finished state considering how much I've put into making pieces reusable.
Hopefully I'll make some serious headway on this in the coming weeks. For now, a few new assets and some lighting tweaks. Current task is making a solid set of tiling texture sets, should have screens of the new floor tiles sometime in the next few days.
Hmm, foreground seems a bit darker now than I wanted. I'll have to fix that. As a reminder, tons of stuff in here is still placeholder, including all foliage. Cheers!
I'm not sure I like the moss on the stairs, looks almost like too intense, but I think everything else pretty much kicks ass
I don't think the moss on the stairs is too intense necessarily, but it definitely looks wrong to me. The moss looks like it is mainly just growing on the side of the steps, and hardly at all on the top of the steps.
Shouldn't it be growing just as much on top of the steps and cascading down? Unless the stairs are seeing regular use again after years of neglect.
i think its that the black in the moss on the stairs is too dark, making it look like a bunch of leaves instead of moss. Otherwise your scene is coming together very nicely.
I dunno if you'd want to consider this, but why not give Ivy Generator a try? I'm sure you could export it and import it into the engine. Just import whatever prop / piece you want it to form onto into Ivy Generator and run it, and see how it goes. I'm going to maybe be doing that myself in the future for a project. Don't see why it wouldn't work, unless it produces some ludicrously HP meshes.
Architecture surfaces look a bit too uniform right now imo. Some more dirt/leaking etc stuff would be good to break it up a bit.
Also I would pay bit more attension to the vegetation placement, because u have some small shrubs and ferns right in the middle of a floor while they primarly should grow around corners, surround tree trunks etc. Right now its placement looks a bit random to me.
Anyways, the progress looks quite optimistic
Thanks guys! Don't worry too much about those stairs -- it's just a blockout asset with a tiling material applied to it. I'll get around to sculpting them up properly and setting up better moss for them eventually.
Skayne - I have plans for a bit more story/culture to show through here but for now I'm focusing on the scene's fundamentals. Your gem mine is looking pretty hot, by the way!
Tristamus - I've heard mixed things about ivy generators. I might look into it, but for now I'm expecting to make some ivy meshes in a variety of shapes and place them around manually since it seems like that'd be fun to do anyway. Thanks for the suggestion though.
Matroskin - Solid advice for sure. Right now I'm just focusing on swapping out everything that's placeholder, as most of the architecture is just a blockout with a temporary tiling material applied, but at some point I'm planning do a pass adding more stains and dirt to break things up more. Hopefully once I get to making my own proper foliage assets (this is all just stuff I cribbed from Epic UDK assets other than my placeholder tree) I'll be able to achieve more natural transitions than what you seen currently.
Bit of an update. Lighting seems a bit better now. Got the new tiling stone floor textures in there, and I'm using a bit of parallax to make them look less flat.
In the first and second shots the floor looks like it's a different color from the other surfaces, but that's just the lighting. For some reason that surface is very blue while others are more yellow, and I haven't tracked down why that is yet. The dirt and grass textures blending into the stone tiles are still placeholders and I'm not super happy with how well the transitions are working yet.
Yea loving the work you've packed into this. Keep up the awesome work!
About Ivy generators, I've seen very mixed results with them for games. They work ok if you plan to bake the ivy into a texture and stay pretty far away from it, it works better if its dead ivy with very few leaves and mostly just vines. They don't do a good job of making low poly ivy at all... They're also pretty unpredictable
I forget what app you're using to create this stuff but there should be some spline painter scripts floating around for either. I know 3dsmax2011 has one built in, next to the object paint features, which is also good for paint scattering rocks and dirt. If you're on an older version check out Niel Blevins Soulburn Scripts he has some awesome object/spline painter scripts.
Looked great dude, absolutely love the cyan sky! This is really looking great, your pillars/archways have a nice stacked and balance feel. The texture that seems to be jumping out at me a bit is the tree bark, but I am assuming it is placeholder, something nice and flowing would suit the stonework well. Anyways Can't wait to see where this one goes.
Yeah the tree texture kind of sticks out a bit to me too, but overall this is looking pretty sweet. I've always kind of wanted to create an environment like this myself, so its always cool to me when I see other people do it. I'm still a student so I have a long way to go though before I'll be able to put together something like this.
I'm a little late to the party, I apologize for bringing an older post to the forefront but I was wondering how your grass/foliage was achieved. It looks much more realistic than the cards I use. Any advice or tips you could give? The scene is also really coming together, I too had looked at this concept as a potential scene idea.
I'm back on it... again! Fairly minor update this time, but there's more on the way:
Note: the foliage is placeholder stuff taken from Epic's GDC demo.
Future plans:
1: Finish most of the modular stonework pieces (notably, the stair steps, trim patterns on structures, and a couple of deco blocks)
2: Tackle most/all of the foliage creation in one big pass because it is SCARY and I have never done proper foliage before
3: "Hero" props like the stone faces, statues, and ornate columns
4: Making final, proper mountains and cliffs for the background
5: Additional large surface modeling/texturing to break up silhouette and add detail, also add weathering and destruction
6: VFX such as air particles, waterfall way in the back
I still have a long ways to go! Thanks for all the support and ideas guys. Hopefully I can get the momentum really going on this again.
Like the colors very fresh. Not a big fan of the green-blue distance fog tho
I second that, try turning the fog away from the green side and more into the blue side, as yellows are always the first thing to go with atmospheric perspective.
Yeah, now that you guys point it out, it looks like I went overboard with the intensity of the fog. The fog color is an intentional stylization to emphasize the mood of the scene, as in the concept, but it could probably use some more tweaking. Thanks for the feedback guys.
The little foliage could also use some thinning/scattering, but I really like all the plants/trees in this scene. One of those trees should be rotated though, because from this view (and probably many others) it's obvious that they were cloned.
Edit: The fern-like plants look pretty wet compared to the rest of the plants, might wanna fix it but it's not that much of a biggie.
r_fletch_r: Thanks man, much appreciated. I agree, the second shot feels more compelling to me at the moment.
nordahl: Oh, I should clarify: all of the foliage is placeholder, and the only bit of it that's actually my own at the moment is the tree. The rest is just grabbed from Epic's UDK jungle to temporarily help me visualize how it's going to work. I think it works even better in their scene because of the density they have going on, whereas mine will need to work better as patchy stuff.
Hah! I did actually rotate each tree manually, but I hadn't realized that I rotated one of those two so far around that it nearly matches the other. Good catch! I think that ultimately those two will just need to be two different tree meshes, which shouldn't be too difficult to manage.
Alberto: Thanks! I'm forcing myself to finish it before I start anything new. There's an idea I want to start on that's been cooking in the back of my mind for ages, and that's in turn helping motivate me to finish this, heheh.
Synergy: I wish there was much to say, but it's just some cropped out bits from some CGTextures images. I did some color/levels adjustment on them and slapped them on some curved planes. Ideally I'll give it more personalization to match whatever I end up doing for the final cliff faces, but it's doing the job for now.
Jordan: Thanks man! Love your brawl scene, it really pulls off that thick atmosphere.
New stairs are in! Not super happy with the textures yet, and some chipped bits and debris would add a lot to the meshes, but it'll do for now.
pretty awesome work so far, Im not a big fan of the trees, the leaves look too much like one mushy blob of colour and alpha, Ive never really done many trees myself only lowpoly ones so I dont know how to rectify this
I have to agree with Ged here, I do love how they look in the distance, but when you get closer the leaves seem to be random shapes rather than leaves.
Love the brightness and colors of this scene. You might want to add another color to the mix though, just to break up the green/yellow color scheme. Especially the stone structures are very similar in color and could use something to break it up a bit.
Anyway, looking awesome and keep it up! Love where it is going.
Great work Zack! I really liked watch your progression here. You might have plans to add some light shafts into the scene and pump up the bloom to get soft edges where you have bright sunlight and a shadowed corner but I htink that would really sell the background.
Replies
Stefan: I appreciate the input, but to me the strongly colored atmosphere is one of the more eye-catching parts of the concept. Hopefully once I get more texture variety in there it should break up the dominant cyan tones a bit more.
Bit of an update: more foliage, tweaked lighting (leaving it be for now, it's working well enough), distant cards of cliffs, and less awful temp textures on everything. I think I've gotten it far enough to start cranking on some individual assets. The hanging foliage looks pretty slapped on at the moment, but it should blend in a lot more once I get moss and water damage vertex paint going on the surfaces they cover. Might need to mess with how they cast shadows too.
Loving the colours. But it's perhaps missing a little of the all-darks?
Now on to the textures and props and you're onto a winner!
Only crit I have at the moment is that it looks like it was built yesterday, but has plants and foliage growing already. But I'm sure it's because you're still at an early texturing stage.
Also, the grass look like green bananas sticking out of the floor, I would make them much much smaller and shorter, and a bit desaturated or with a slight color gradient on the texture. (Tips of the grass leaves ending in brownish or whatever)
Good job so far, keep up.
bbob: Yeah, agree. I think I'm going to use post-processing to pump up the contrast since I like the current intensity of the lighting and the amount of bounced light I'm getting.
duxun: They are WIP textures! Hehe. Definitely still want to use them to get my stone brightness and saturation figured out though. They do seem more washed out than I was expecting, I'll go another round of checking against references to figure out exactly what manner of stone was used in these structures.
ParoXum: Definitely, I agree. I'm planning to do crumbly destruction type stuff in another pass once I've got more final material in there, probably through a few paintovers. Maybe in the meantime I should try out some aging/waterdamage vertpaint stuff since I'm planning to use that approach on final assets to break up repetition.
Makkon: Yeah, even as placeholders they're starting to look pretty awkward. I'll have to see about swapping that one out with something more similar to the types of cliffs seen in my very-distant-cliffs card planes. Good call!
[HP]: You're right, the coloration is pretty samey at the moment. I think adding mix materials and discoloration decals will help that a lot, particularly adding moss and water damage. Right now all the foliage except for my mockup tree is cribbed from Epic, as placeholders to help me figure out how to go about making my own as well as help ground the scale of the environment.
Thanks for the crits guys, good stuff for me to be aware of going forward.
Again, everything is still temp tiling textures other than the conspicuous railing piece.
An ancient city would have been completely taken over by nature, maybe some big ivy/creeper/vines type thing could go well?
This is an incredible project and it looks awesome, just looks a bit too clean at the moment.
WOO ZACK.
If these are mostly tiling textures, just go in and beat up one of the edges, chew it to shit, add some cracks and so forth, you get the idea
Ninjai, I agree, it will definitely need a ton of debris and foliage before I call it finished. Right now I'm just testing ideas for foliage using the stuff Epic has used in UT3 and tech demos as placeholders, so I haven't really gotten to a proper foliage pass just yet. More just getting things a bit closer as a blockout without having to do much work. Damage as well I've been planning on holding off until I have more finished assets in the scene, since much of it will likely take the form of modified versions of final meshes and I want to avoid redoing work.
Amadreaus, I appreciate the concern but as I've said a few times everything in those shots is temp tiling textures. It's all still a blockout, really. I'm only just now transitioning into the phase of final asset and texture creation.
Target_Renegade, I might! For now I'm just building as though I am (with lots of modularity) while focusing efforts on the small walkable area in the shadowed foreground of my main shot. After I get that done I might consider tackling a few interiors and extending the built environment to include the area behind the building seen in the very last shot I posted. We'll see. Extending the environment should be much easier than taking a single section of it to a finished state considering how much I've put into making pieces reusable.
Hopefully I'll make some serious headway on this in the coming weeks. For now, a few new assets and some lighting tweaks. Current task is making a solid set of tiling texture sets, should have screens of the new floor tiles sometime in the next few days.
Hmm, foreground seems a bit darker now than I wanted. I'll have to fix that. As a reminder, tons of stuff in here is still placeholder, including all foliage. Cheers!
I don't think the moss on the stairs is too intense necessarily, but it definitely looks wrong to me. The moss looks like it is mainly just growing on the side of the steps, and hardly at all on the top of the steps.
Shouldn't it be growing just as much on top of the steps and cascading down? Unless the stairs are seeing regular use again after years of neglect.
I dunno if you'd want to consider this, but why not give Ivy Generator a try? I'm sure you could export it and import it into the engine. Just import whatever prop / piece you want it to form onto into Ivy Generator and run it, and see how it goes. I'm going to maybe be doing that myself in the future for a project. Don't see why it wouldn't work, unless it produces some ludicrously HP meshes.
Architecture surfaces look a bit too uniform right now imo. Some more dirt/leaking etc stuff would be good to break it up a bit.
Also I would pay bit more attension to the vegetation placement, because u have some small shrubs and ferns right in the middle of a floor while they primarly should grow around corners, surround tree trunks etc. Right now its placement looks a bit random to me.
Anyways, the progress looks quite optimistic
Skayne - I have plans for a bit more story/culture to show through here but for now I'm focusing on the scene's fundamentals. Your gem mine is looking pretty hot, by the way!
Tristamus - I've heard mixed things about ivy generators. I might look into it, but for now I'm expecting to make some ivy meshes in a variety of shapes and place them around manually since it seems like that'd be fun to do anyway. Thanks for the suggestion though.
Matroskin - Solid advice for sure. Right now I'm just focusing on swapping out everything that's placeholder, as most of the architecture is just a blockout with a temporary tiling material applied, but at some point I'm planning do a pass adding more stains and dirt to break things up more. Hopefully once I get to making my own proper foliage assets (this is all just stuff I cribbed from Epic UDK assets other than my placeholder tree) I'll be able to achieve more natural transitions than what you seen currently.
Bit of an update. Lighting seems a bit better now. Got the new tiling stone floor textures in there, and I'm using a bit of parallax to make them look less flat.
In the first and second shots the floor looks like it's a different color from the other surfaces, but that's just the lighting. For some reason that surface is very blue while others are more yellow, and I haven't tracked down why that is yet. The dirt and grass textures blending into the stone tiles are still placeholders and I'm not super happy with how well the transitions are working yet.
About Ivy generators, I've seen very mixed results with them for games. They work ok if you plan to bake the ivy into a texture and stay pretty far away from it, it works better if its dead ivy with very few leaves and mostly just vines. They don't do a good job of making low poly ivy at all... They're also pretty unpredictable
I forget what app you're using to create this stuff but there should be some spline painter scripts floating around for either. I know 3dsmax2011 has one built in, next to the object paint features, which is also good for paint scattering rocks and dirt. If you're on an older version check out Niel Blevins Soulburn Scripts he has some awesome object/spline painter scripts.
~Jon
Note: the foliage is placeholder stuff taken from Epic's GDC demo.
Future plans:
1: Finish most of the modular stonework pieces (notably, the stair steps, trim patterns on structures, and a couple of deco blocks)
2: Tackle most/all of the foliage creation in one big pass because it is SCARY and I have never done proper foliage before
3: "Hero" props like the stone faces, statues, and ornate columns
4: Making final, proper mountains and cliffs for the background
5: Additional large surface modeling/texturing to break up silhouette and add detail, also add weathering and destruction
6: VFX such as air particles, waterfall way in the back
I still have a long ways to go! Thanks for all the support and ideas guys. Hopefully I can get the momentum really going on this again.
I second that, try turning the fog away from the green side and more into the blue side, as yellows are always the first thing to go with atmospheric perspective.
Edit: The fern-like plants look pretty wet compared to the rest of the plants, might wanna fix it but it's not that much of a biggie.
nordahl: Oh, I should clarify: all of the foliage is placeholder, and the only bit of it that's actually my own at the moment is the tree. The rest is just grabbed from Epic's UDK jungle to temporarily help me visualize how it's going to work. I think it works even better in their scene because of the density they have going on, whereas mine will need to work better as patchy stuff.
Hah! I did actually rotate each tree manually, but I hadn't realized that I rotated one of those two so far around that it nearly matches the other. Good catch! I think that ultimately those two will just need to be two different tree meshes, which shouldn't be too difficult to manage.
Can you talk about how you made the background cliff texture surrounding the level?
It looks great!
Synergy: I wish there was much to say, but it's just some cropped out bits from some CGTextures images. I did some color/levels adjustment on them and slapped them on some curved planes. Ideally I'll give it more personalization to match whatever I end up doing for the final cliff faces, but it's doing the job for now.
Jordan: Thanks man! Love your brawl scene, it really pulls off that thick atmosphere.
New stairs are in! Not super happy with the textures yet, and some chipped bits and debris would add a lot to the meshes, but it'll do for now.
Love the brightness and colors of this scene. You might want to add another color to the mix though, just to break up the green/yellow color scheme. Especially the stone structures are very similar in color and could use something to break it up a bit.
Anyway, looking awesome and keep it up! Love where it is going.
Edit: Oh dear i totally necro'd this thread without realising