City of Hell Fortress

Isaiah Sherman

This was a project for the game "Tread." The game was put together using the Unreal 3 engine but I took the asset with permission from the team and rendered in Marmoset to show it off better.

There are lots of pictures and they're large. I also updated my portfolio with these images.

Models and textures by yours truly. Concept art by Shaun Keenan.

Comments / critiques are always welcome!

Slave_zero

nice work so far.

to the execution:

your texturemap has much wasted uv-space. There are so much areas without texture-information. you could add bunch of detail there. Maybe think of some additional assets which could use those areas in your texture. Try adding the lantern or the iron fence which can be seen in your concept.

from what I can see your textures are pretty greyish and flat. This might be intended, and with the colored lights in your renderings it's not that obvious. But considering the stylised loko of the building I would go with more stylised, handpainted textures.

To your model:

nice silhoutte. But for the two Towers: Try to add some polygons to improve their silhouette. Depending on the actual lighting of yourscene the silhoutte of those twoers will be pretty important. At the moment YOu have quite a lot loops arround the roofs of those towers which you don't take advantage from. Use those, imrove the silhoute and add some loops for the wall section of the upper tower-areas as well.

to the execution of the concept:

you are missing quite some little windows here and there. Usually I say: If it improves the whole asset feel free to differ from the initial concept. In your case those tiny windows would improve the whole thing, as they intersect your walls, give interesting detail AND suggest some size to the building.

Some random ideas:

Although it is not seen in the concept it could be cool, if the gaps between the wooden planks would show some light from the interior. Would give quite a scary look.
If you finally add a weather vane on top of those towers it might give a very nice touch.

Isaiah Sherman

Thanks for the crits

For texture space, I will add in some assets to fill up the empty areas. The problem with unwrapping an object that is so massive in relation (flying buttresses) to the rest is a lot of the UV shells are small in comparison to the large object (of course).

I will probably make the lantern and cob webs. I might not add the iron fence because it would be in an area that already has a lot of detail and it would confuse the viewer if there was more.

I can add a few loops to the top tower area to round out the silhouette there a bit. The loops at the very top, however, do improve the silhouette. If there weren't that many loops, the tops would be very jagged.

And lastly, I may have to use a different engine to go with your suggestion of the lighting from the windows. Using the Marmoset toolbag doesn't allow for emmisive textures (I think) and you cannot add point lights. Everything is based on a cube map which you rotate to light the scene.

Thanks again

achillesian

the normal doesnt look very bumpy

Isaiah Sherman

That's because it's a 2048 texture reduced to something smaller than 512, especially considering all the detail from the normal map are tiny things such as roof tiling.

Kovac

Cool stuff so far Haiasi. Slave gave some good crits and I'd definitely say paint the building textures with as many cool variations and style as you did on the vines and you'll have a pretty wicked looking piece.

Isaiah Sherman

Alright, I will revisit the texturing entirely. That will take me some time but it's worth it.

Here is a screengrab with a stronger normal map, and now it just looks kind of bad. Even a middle ground between this and the first shots isn't very noticeable.

konstruct

Pretty nice man! I really dig the silhouette on this,

since you plan on starting over on the texture, I would really take a stab at better use of the UV shells. I feel like you could get 25% the resolution gain if you really pack it n tight. What I find works best packing, is to to initially look at everything zoomed out really far to see if you can envision everything fitting in the 1-1 space. Then put in your big pieces in first. then go from biggest to smallest adding in pieces, filling in the gaps. if you find things are just not quite going to fit, scale everything down slightly, shift your parts back into space, and keep on going.

Also it would be cool to soften up those razor sharp edges on your cement walls. either by doing a high poly, and baking out a bevel, or painting in a highlight along your edges, so they look like they are wearing down, or getting chipped off, or maybe even do a metal bracket trim, that's holding the concrete chunks in place. Basically just something to help the eye round those edges better than the razor sharp edge of polygons.

also how did you get that sky? are you making your own sky boxes in marmoset? its lookin good!

Isaiah Sherman

Actually I really like the idea of breaking up those edges I have, and throwing in some metal bracketing sounds great.

When I repack this I will try to keep that process in mind. The tricky thing about this is I have a lot of thin long pieces and if I want everything to fit I may have to have their scale off in UV space.

As for the skybox, I am using the Stormy sky box but with some tweaks in the toolbox you can really edit how everything comes out. Using a bloom with Gamma set all the way to be the bottom makes the bloom affects the sky box, then you can adjust the hues and color contrasts to get just what you want.

Thanks for the advice, konstruct (love your work by the way )

Isaiah Sherman

Saturated the textures a bit and increased the contrast. That should helpfully remove the desaturated look.

I think instead of completely redoing the textures I may just paint over what I have now, then continue to add props such as lanterns, gates, some rocks, and those metal clamps for the corners. That may be a better use of my time.