I'm loving the progress. How is it working with the Marmoset engine?
I'm not sure of the reason but I can't get the entire scene in marmoset yet. It may be too many different parts or it might have just been a bug at the time. I'll try in a sec.
I think I figured out why. Seems like Marmoset is fine until I try to bring in some of the parts I haven't UV'ed yet. Then it crashes. Guess I'll have to wait til I finish UV'ing to test.
As far as your marmoset problem goes, I believe it is because of the objects with no UV's. I recently put together a pretty large scene, and if I imported anything without UV's it would crash. Once it was all UV'ed it worked fine.
As far as your marmoset problem goes, I believe it is because of the objects with no UV's. I recently put together a pretty large scene, and if I imported anything without UV's it would crash. Once it was all UV'ed it worked fine.
Yeah I think that is the issue. I'm almost finished UV'ing most of the stuff so I will know in a bit
Finally finished with UV'ing this stuff... phew... So I thought about the atmosphere of the scene and I realized I have no idea how I want to light this thing. Part of me wants to try a night scene, but I also want to show off the environment as well... Maybe a foggy dusk shot.
Any Ideas? These are just 2 quick light directions, one with a direct light and one at darker night time idea. Obviously it is really rough lighting.
Scene is looking great Progg. I just have 2 quick comments. The sign needs to be fixed, there is no way it would hang in that position. If you don't like the look of what Zack mocked up maybe try having it hang by the other chain. This way you can have the step angle you need to make it look like its hanging but without it getting mixed into the silhouette of the post. And then the second thing would be the rope that is crossing over the boat could use some more sagging, it looks too stiff at the moment. For how thick it is that rope would probably have some weight to it and would not be pulled that tight just by a buoy. Keep it up :thumbup:.
Before going to bed I finally figured out my Actor X problem with 64 bit maya and ended up doing a real quick setup in Unreal. I think I am going to go with the fog idea.
NOT this dense of course... but without textures I needed to crank it to see any effect.
i think you need to push the fog out. let it come in with a pretty sharp fall off and end/fade out just behind the house. then make some local fog effects to manually place around the scene closer up
Working a bit more on blocking in the colors. Wanted to get some feedback on the hue/saturation on some of the stuff before I add more detail to the textures.
I don't know if I like the red lamp and chimney thing. They're the only warm colors in the scene and aren't really interesting enough to warrant that much attention IMO. Other than that this scene looks awesome so far, keep it up sir!
I don't know if I like the red lamp and chimney thing. They're the only warm colors in the scene and aren't really interesting enough to warrant that much attention IMO. Other than that this scene looks awesome so far, keep it up sir!
Yeah I noticed that as well. I feel like there is too much brown/earthy hues in the scene right now and I'm trying to decide how to texturally break that up.
I still haven't even started texturing the door / door frame or the boat yet.
So far this is looking really good. There aint no flat boring planes anywhere. This is going to be a big challenge texture wise to get everything to hang together cause its busy
So... it has been forever since I updated this thread... but between the 5-6 art tests and interviews I have been completely swamped. Anyways.... I want to get back to this scene. Right now I am focusing on lighting because I feel that once it is out of the way, I can move on to finishing the textures. I've also been trying to figure out how I am going to handle the vista or background of the piece, and I have determined I am going to need a LOT of trees to block out any holes in the background... which worries me.
The main concern I am having at the moment is the washed out lighting. I switched to the UDK from the UT3 Engine, and of course with this I now have lightmass. I knew my way around Unreal enough to light something decent, but for some reason with lightmass in the picture I can't get any defined or crisp shadows.... everything is like ambient occlusion. Maybe I am missing a setting or something? I reviewed the one simple lighting tut on 3DBuzz for the UDK but it was all basic stuff I already knew about.
Yeah, lightmass can kill shadows, make sure you take down your global lighting and bump up your directional lights to compensate for additional bounced lighting.
There are a few settings you can check. Under lightmass within your directional light properties, adjust some of the shadow settings, i think these are adjustable in realtime so no need to rebake the scene while adjusting these things.
Your most recent lighting shot doesn't seem to be showing much shadowing at all, what i can see looks to be only the real time ambient occlusion creating shadows. You might consider starting over with your lighting if you're not getting any shadows, start with just a very basic lighting setup, directional and a weak fill light.
Yeah, lightmass can kill shadows, make sure you take down your global lighting and bump up your directional lights to compensate for additional bounced lighting.
There are a few settings you can check. Under lightmass within your directional light properties, adjust some of the shadow settings, i think these are adjustable in realtime so no need to rebake the scene while adjusting these things.
Your most recent lighting shot doesn't seem to be showing much shadowing at all, what i can see looks to be only the real time ambient occlusion creating shadows. You might consider starting over with your lighting if you're not getting any shadows, start with just a very basic lighting setup, directional and a weak fill light.
Yeah this is the problem. I did start over with new lighting. That shot right there is with a basic directional light for the key light and 2 really weak point lights very far off. Everytime I bake lighting I lose all the shadows.
Do you think maybe it is the lightmaps? I'm starting to get really strange results after baking lighting.
UPDATE.... Actually I think I know what it might be. The pieces were UV'ed in different sections but I exported them all as a single ASE file with different material outlets so that I didn't have to worry about lining it up in the engine. I think the lightmaps are overlapping each other or something. Going to try to fix it.
UDK has a generate UV funtion which is pretty handy (just slap the new one in a new UV slot and use that uv channel for your light bake). You can find it under the mesh tab after double clicking your mesh in the generic browser. Not as great as a hand made UV channel but it'll get the job done for light bakes if you're just trying to troubleshoot UV channels.
Those shadows you're seeing are dynamic shadows and not too representational of what baked lighting would produce, just FYI. I'd try to get shadows working with just 1 directional light to keep things simple, once that's working you can add more lights while trying to maintain some harder shadows.
Working some on the trees. Also trying to figure out what to add in the background besides fog... I'm fairly certain fog alone is nothing going to kill the blank vista... and most swamps don't have hills or giant rocks
I wouldn't clutter the background with such a nice piece to look at on the foreground. Look at photo references for pictures of the sky at the time of day you plan the scene to be at.
Also The Princess and the Frog might be good reference as a large part of the movie happens in a swamp. Couldn't find a decent picture, but I think you can find some good reference on backgrounds there.
Anyway, great piece so far, I can't wait to see it finished. Good luck on your art tests and interviews, you deserve it. Talent like this shouldn't go unnoticed.
I wouldn't clutter the background with such a nice piece to look at on the foreground. Look at photo references for pictures of the sky at the time of day you plan the scene to be at.
Also The Princess and the Frog might be good reference as a large part of the movie happens in a swamp. Couldn't find a decent picture, but I think you can find some good reference on backgrounds there.
Anyway, great piece so far, I can't wait to see it finished. Good luck on your art tests and interviews, you deserve it. Talent like this shouldn't go unnoticed.
i loled at that reference but hey its a good one ^^ :thumbup:
Yeah this is the problem. I did start over with new lighting. That shot right there is with a basic directional light for the key light and 2 really weak point lights very far off. Everytime I bake lighting I lose all the shadows.
Do you think maybe it is the lightmaps? I'm starting to get really strange results after baking lighting.
UPDATE.... Actually I think I know what it might be. The pieces were UV'ed in different sections but I exported them all as a single ASE file with different material outlets so that I didn't have to worry about lining it up in the engine. I think the lightmaps are overlapping each other or something. Going to try to fix it.
Ive gotten this issue many times. usually all it takes is a quick check of the dynamic channel on the mesh. make sure its accepting dynamic lights and casting dynamic shadows. also if you are using just ONE mesh with multiple objects.. might i suggest something?
in whatever 3d software u are using (looks to be XSI or Maya.. im a max user so im not familiar with other HUDs), attach all of your objects, and then when they are all together, just repack them (max has a pack uv function built in, dunno about the others), and keep that on a seperate uv channel. then in the static mesh editor, switch the lighting channel to the corresponding channel you have all of the uvs on.
Ive gotten this issue many times. usually all it takes is a quick check of the dynamic channel on the mesh. make sure its accepting dynamic lights and casting dynamic shadows. also if you are using just ONE mesh with multiple objects.. might i suggest something?
in whatever 3d software u are using (looks to be XSI or Maya.. im a max user so im not familiar with other HUDs), attach all of your objects, and then when they are all together, just repack them (max has a pack uv function built in, dunno about the others), and keep that on a seperate uv channel. then in the static mesh editor, switch the lighting channel to the corresponding channel you have all of the uvs on.
Yeah I'm using Maya. Basically the entire scene is UV'ed out into 3 different maps... so I just resplit the model into the 3 pieces and made another UV set for each piece for the lightmap like I normally do. The shadows are picking up a lot better now.
Still having weird issues with the lighting. Even with the new lightmap channels I can't get any defined shadows. I decided to deal with it later so I started messing with some more texturing and vertex painted materials.
are you using terrain? or is the ground a static mesh as well? (or just a bsp). i get that issue if i use bsps sometimes, but when i use terrain, when i bake with lightmass using a dominant directional light, i get the shadows im looking for.
The ground is a static mesh. I'm starting to feel like the style of this piece is drifting away from what I originally intended. I'm worried now that it is more of a hybrid of stylized and more realistic textures. I'm almost thinking about ditching to scene idea... finishing the texturing on the original central pieces, lighting it nicely in a 3 point setup and capturing it on a pedestal or base. I feel like the background is losing the feel and the fog is too realistic to be helping the style.
I don't know man I like where its going. The dirt texture and water I don't think are helping with the feel.
I am not sure if you're doing this to you're texture maps but, I find that if you run an unsharpen mask on you're textures that will help pull some of the blur away.
i agree about the semi realistic texturing. i think it pulls away from the cartoony bended shapes of the shack. I would suggest looks at some of the environments in Borderlands... the visuals of that game were refreshing.... gameplay... not so much... but i wont get into that here...
for fog maybe you should think about some windwaker. subtle cell shaded steam shapes mixed with a slight environmental light grey in the distance. just some thoughts. i say shrink the background down, round it up to make more of a environment stand.
As for the empty space to the left of the scene, you may throw another large tree in there, or perhaps some crab/crawfish traps, otherwise it's looking great!
i agree about the semi realistic texturing. i think it pulls away from the cartoony bended shapes of the shack. I would suggest looks at some of the environments in Borderlands... the visuals of that game were refreshing.... gameplay... not so much... but i wont get into that here...
for fog maybe you should think about some windwaker. subtle cell shaded steam shapes mixed with a slight environmental light grey in the distance. just some thoughts. i say shrink the background down, round it up to make more of a environment stand.
Yeah I really love the borderlands style.. I was searching around to see if there was any write up on how they did their texturing / rendering... I love the crisp sequential style that they achieved. That is ultimately what I was trying to achieve. What exactly are you talking about on the background?
The backdrop trees make it feel cluttered and the simple blocking colors looked nicer. The fog should be scaled way back, or instead maybe experiment with a thick ground fog to give it that earie feel?
well really they just used alot of black outlines and handdrawn "rust/dirt" on a diffuse map with a combination of somekind of outline shader, i know how to achieve the outer outlining in lightwave but nothing else..
well for the background i was thinking you could just make the shack still in an environment but shrink it down significantly. ultimately it would look as iff is sitting ontop of a small half "world" rounded at the top.
then you could still have a few bg trees if you like and use some atmospheric fog but not too much. Also maybe even some cell shaded water
Hey Betel.. I'm sorry I didn't even notice your post. I really like that idea.. I've been playing with a celshaded texture in the UDK but I was having issues crashing my computer in the material editor when the instruction count got up past 50.. which is pretty unusual. I've been really thinking about this piece and asking afew friends for some insight and I feel like it has gone away from where I want to go. I think at this point to recover back to my first postings of the first few textured props (which is the style I am going for) I am going to focus on setting the composition up and competely lighting it for mood. Then I will deal with textures and shaders.
I've been looking at some Disney Frog Princess shots and I really appreciate some of the color choices and aesthetics they chose for some of the shots. This is really how I originally intended the piece and I feel like my primary background in photo texturing has begun to break through and ruin the hand painted look I was first going for.
Replies
I'm not sure of the reason but I can't get the entire scene in marmoset yet. It may be too many different parts or it might have just been a bug at the time. I'll try in a sec.
I think I figured out why. Seems like Marmoset is fine until I try to bring in some of the parts I haven't UV'ed yet. Then it crashes. Guess I'll have to wait til I finish UV'ing to test.
As far as your marmoset problem goes, I believe it is because of the objects with no UV's. I recently put together a pretty large scene, and if I imported anything without UV's it would crash. Once it was all UV'ed it worked fine.
Yeah I think that is the issue. I'm almost finished UV'ing most of the stuff so I will know in a bit
Any Ideas? These are just 2 quick light directions, one with a direct light and one at darker night time idea. Obviously it is really rough lighting.
But hey, you can always play with it
Lookin' great, love the bait sign, reminds me of the graphic stylings of Brink. Keep it up, this is going to be killer!
NOT this dense of course... but without textures I needed to crank it to see any effect.
How did u model that tree? may a small tut?
Yeah I noticed that as well. I feel like there is too much brown/earthy hues in the scene right now and I'm trying to decide how to texturally break that up.
I still haven't even started texturing the door / door frame or the boat yet.
Really nice stuff!
The main concern I am having at the moment is the washed out lighting. I switched to the UDK from the UT3 Engine, and of course with this I now have lightmass. I knew my way around Unreal enough to light something decent, but for some reason with lightmass in the picture I can't get any defined or crisp shadows.... everything is like ambient occlusion. Maybe I am missing a setting or something? I reviewed the one simple lighting tut on 3DBuzz for the UDK but it was all basic stuff I already knew about.
Any suggestions?
looking foward to seeing more!
There are a few settings you can check. Under lightmass within your directional light properties, adjust some of the shadow settings, i think these are adjustable in realtime so no need to rebake the scene while adjusting these things.
Your most recent lighting shot doesn't seem to be showing much shadowing at all, what i can see looks to be only the real time ambient occlusion creating shadows. You might consider starting over with your lighting if you're not getting any shadows, start with just a very basic lighting setup, directional and a weak fill light.
Yeah this is the problem. I did start over with new lighting. That shot right there is with a basic directional light for the key light and 2 really weak point lights very far off. Everytime I bake lighting I lose all the shadows.
Do you think maybe it is the lightmaps? I'm starting to get really strange results after baking lighting.
UPDATE.... Actually I think I know what it might be. The pieces were UV'ed in different sections but I exported them all as a single ASE file with different material outlets so that I didn't have to worry about lining it up in the engine. I think the lightmaps are overlapping each other or something. Going to try to fix it.
Those shadows you're seeing are dynamic shadows and not too representational of what baked lighting would produce, just FYI. I'd try to get shadows working with just 1 directional light to keep things simple, once that's working you can add more lights while trying to maintain some harder shadows.
or a sunset with a few trees here and there.
Also The Princess and the Frog might be good reference as a large part of the movie happens in a swamp. Couldn't find a decent picture, but I think you can find some good reference on backgrounds there.
Anyway, great piece so far, I can't wait to see it finished. Good luck on your art tests and interviews, you deserve it. Talent like this shouldn't go unnoticed.
i loled at that reference but hey its a good one ^^ :thumbup:
Ive gotten this issue many times. usually all it takes is a quick check of the dynamic channel on the mesh. make sure its accepting dynamic lights and casting dynamic shadows. also if you are using just ONE mesh with multiple objects.. might i suggest something?
in whatever 3d software u are using (looks to be XSI or Maya.. im a max user so im not familiar with other HUDs), attach all of your objects, and then when they are all together, just repack them (max has a pack uv function built in, dunno about the others), and keep that on a seperate uv channel. then in the static mesh editor, switch the lighting channel to the corresponding channel you have all of the uvs on.
Yeah I'm using Maya. Basically the entire scene is UV'ed out into 3 different maps... so I just resplit the model into the 3 pieces and made another UV set for each piece for the lightmap like I normally do. The shadows are picking up a lot better now.
I am not sure if you're doing this to you're texture maps but, I find that if you run an unsharpen mask on you're textures that will help pull some of the blur away.
for fog maybe you should think about some windwaker. subtle cell shaded steam shapes mixed with a slight environmental light grey in the distance. just some thoughts. i say shrink the background down, round it up to make more of a environment stand.
As for the empty space to the left of the scene, you may throw another large tree in there, or perhaps some crab/crawfish traps, otherwise it's looking great!
Keep it up
Yeah I really love the borderlands style.. I was searching around to see if there was any write up on how they did their texturing / rendering... I love the crisp sequential style that they achieved. That is ultimately what I was trying to achieve. What exactly are you talking about on the background?
The backdrop trees make it feel cluttered and the simple blocking colors looked nicer. The fog should be scaled way back, or instead maybe experiment with a thick ground fog to give it that earie feel?
well for the background i was thinking you could just make the shack still in an environment but shrink it down significantly. ultimately it would look as iff is sitting ontop of a small half "world" rounded at the top.
then you could still have a few bg trees if you like and use some atmospheric fog but not too much. Also maybe even some cell shaded water
I've been looking at some Disney Frog Princess shots and I really appreciate some of the color choices and aesthetics they chose for some of the shots. This is really how I originally intended the piece and I feel like my primary background in photo texturing has begun to break through and ruin the hand painted look I was first going for.
i was loving it even with the couple of assets youd already done and then i saw the realistic texturing and was like Oh nooooo!
im looking forward to what you come up with!
I think the borderlands style would fit this perfectly!