Wasteland mini-Environment

NoChance

Just a little piece I started a couple days ago. Just looking for some feedback on layout and textures. The normals don't look correct because I rendered it out in mental ray and it doesn't handle normals well, and it crashes if I try to turn on high quality rendering. The whole thing right now is just under 14,000 tris.

Also, if anyone knows how to render out normal maps correctly in maya and could point me in the right direction that would be great. Otherwise its just going into UT3 but it would just be easier if it could be done in maya.

MoP

Looks like a decent start. I like the scene setup in general.

You have some scaling issues - Those telegraph poles in the background look totally the wrong size... the wires look like ropes and the poles themselves are too thick and not tall enough.

The texture on the ground looks quite low-res, are you using a tiling texture there? You should try tiling it more so that it gains some resolution.

Also in general I think your textures are a bit dull and washed out, a little more saturation here and there would really help.

Also, this lighting setup is pretty much the worst one you could choose - a single light from behind the scene? Everything is in shadow, which makes it look flat and boring. Bring the light around so it's shining into the shack and casting some interesting shadows around inside, it'll look way better.

Hope that helps, I look forward to seeing this piece progress!

edit: To render with normal-maps correctly in Maya you need to use Mental Ray (the default renderer can't do it for some reason), and you need to set this setting!
Thanks to Paul Tosca's tutorial for this tip

ZacD

Yeah mental ray isn't helping you much.

The tire in the back of the shed could use some more division and needs to be smaller, it doesn't look like it could fit on that car, also wires and larger higher quality renders would help us critique it better.

the power lines look too short. The sign is too short.

NoChance

So, put it in UT3 and all the textures and normals look ten times better mental ray just sucks with normal maps.

@MoP You're completely right about the scale I hadn't noticed, fixed that, and the texture on the ground is actually from poor UV's i believe I just found this out when I made applied my tileable texture to a brush and it looked fine so I need to go sort that out. I don't really agree with you on the textures though it's supposed to be in a desert where sand is beating on this stuff constantly the textures are supposed to look dull from all the wear and dust on them, in my opinion at least. I also tried the mental ray setting and got the same results, in general mental ray seems to render out normals extremely bumped out when close but almost non existent from a distance, so I'm just done with it.

@ZacD Good point on the tire I added some divisions and scaled it down, also lengthened the sign and power lines.

Heres some new shots, I through it all in UT3 today and started playing with lighting, light fogs, and a skybox. I'm not exactly a pro with UT3 so can someone tell me how to harden my shadows edges? And before someone says anything about the horizon/skybox or some such it's not supposed to be realistic I just though it was better to look at then just grey/black, and kinda went with the theme.

build.

You should be able to adjust your quality of your lighting in the build settings.
Also in the mesh editor for each model you have the option 'light map resolution'
But first of all do you have your models set up properly for lightmaps? (2 uv sets)

d2king10

He is right about the textures and the saturation. You don't have to take his advice, but right now, the low saturation levels is just killing your pieces visually. I get where you are coming from with sand and it beating on the objects constantly, but as an artist you have to make choices, even if it means going against realism, to make your piece look better and pop. You can still get that same weathered effect with nice saturated textures.

The new update looks a lot better than the first update

vj_box

is that nuke in the background composited?

ShadowFox

From the height of the nuke's mushroom cloud wouldnt your building be currently being ripped apart from the wave as the distance its at you can actually see the epicentre and the ground leveling in the horizon.

Just having a look at it, im guessing you may add this in later on with the sand dust and such?

I like it alot though so far awesome stuff!

Doorstop

digging the clown face in the nuke

danshewan

ShadowFox wrote: »

From the height of the nuke's mushroom cloud wouldnt your building be currently being ripped apart from the wave as the distance its at you can actually see the epicentre and the ground leveling in the horizon.

I think that'd be an interesting approach - the final moments before the blast impact.

Maybe you could add some little props that make it a little bit more hospitable, like somebody has tried to make a home out of this dilapidated shack, only for the detonation to blow it to pieces. Maybe an old calendar on the wall, and an armchair and a small, broken TV or something to create more of a story or background to the scene.

P442

i would move that rock. Why would someone build a garage in front of a rock? Also, make the rock and cactus bigger. The cactus also needs some texture blending at its base to help it blend into the ground, or even build a little dirt around its base as part of the mesh. I see you have the mushroom cloud in the BG. Is this post apocalyptic or pre apocalyptic? If the mushroom cloud is in the background, then the destruction hasn't reached the garage yet. Or is it a second bomb?

Normal maps in Maya: on ALL of your textures, go to the file node of each texture in hypershade, set filter type to OFF. In addition, go to all of your bump nodes and make sure "USE AS" is set to "TANGENT SPACE NORMALS"

SomberResplendence

I agree about the cactus. Maybe add some alpha planes of dried, dead weeds or grass, or a tumble weed to help blend the base of the cactus better. Also I think the poles behind the shed should be thinner.

NoChance

In my head, when I created this I was just thinking of a post apocalyptic shed or whatnot thats been long abandoned, with the sand slowly starting to build up around everything, that a character would come across and grab some ammo, etc. I guess I'll remove the nukes in the background, as I said it isn't supposed to be realistic, orginally I was just gonna have it freestanding and render it out with a grey background but I figure a skybox makes it look better and just put some nuke pictures on the skybox just for fun. But everyone seems to be confused it wasn't supposed to be realistic just better looking than nothing. Or maybe Ill just put the time in and make it look good.

I'll play with the saturation some more, I actually desaturated them because I felt they looked out of place but I'll fix it and post some screens to get your opinions.

Sage

To be honest you ran into a happy accident. I think you should push yourself and do the nuke scene. Make a scene that shows moments before the shock wave hits the building or have rock formations behind the building the in theory would shield it from the shock wave. I think the cloud with the clown face on it makes the piece very original.

NoChance

Sage wrote: »

To be honest you ran into a happy accident. I think you should push yourself and do the nuke scene. Make a scene that shows moments before the shock wave hits the building or have rock formations behind the building the in theory would shield it from the shock wave. I think the cloud with the clown face on it makes the piece very original.

Unfortunately that's probably going to have to go. I didn't do that I just searched mushroom cloud in google images and that came up and I didn't even realize the clown face, and I don't want to steal someone elses work.

ShadowFox

haha too late :P you've set the expectations! we now WANT! a clown faced nuke mushroom clowd, get your photoshop fired up

I reckon making it just a standard prop sitting in the middle of nowhere sounds a bit uninteresting, a shed on the point of a nuclear impact with rays of sand and debris flying along the side may make for a nice action piece but I like lots going on, like a picture says a thousand words others may think differently.

Rhinokey

yeah i didnt notice the clown face till someone mentioned it, but as soon as they did i rembered seeing it before on the internets, moral is becarefull, with photosourcing, woulda been bad to put something in your portfolio thinkin it had a stock photo of a cloud in it, and it turn out to be someone elses painting. altho just snaggin whole photos aint all that great to do

Sage

You did say you just grab an image... You can always make your own and see how it looks just use it as reference or inspiration. It will give you an excuse to learn how to use particles in unreal. I made my cute tank after I saw quickie model that was posted here. After taking feedback it evolved. My point is, as long as it's your own work it doesn't matter. There is a difference. I doubt the image you used looks like your current work. Make your own happy cloud and state that you got inspired by another artist work.

NoChance

Well, I decided to run with the nuke idea and tried playing with the particle system to try and get a blastwave effect, and after about half a day and many thoughts of suicide I decided to just go with a mesh. It doesn't look quite as good and still needs some work but I think I can get it where it needs to be. Added in a heightfog to simulate all the dust getting kicked up and created a flag to show some wind/motion, and get the effect across better.

I tried to find a better mushroom cloud picture to no avail even one to edit myself, and I tried to create it with photoshop but I'm not quite that skilled. So, for now I'm going to keep using the clown mushroom cloud, which was created by TBWA-Paris so full credit to them and I sent them an e-mail asking permission to use the image, so we'll see, until then I'll just make sure to note it was created by them.

Next, I'll be adding a particle/fog thats moving across the surface of the ground to keep selling that blastwaves motion.

danshewan

It's progressing pretty well, but there's still a couple of things that keep catching my eye, the first being the telephone poles. They're still way too short, and it's kind of odd that they end so abruptly at your shack. Even if the cables were cut, they wouldn't just stop, would they? There might be one or two missing or cut down for firewood or something, but right now it's distracting.

They could also serve to aid your composition by helping lead the viewer's eye into the image if you adjusted your camera position to a slightly wider angle, and give the scene a little more depth. Even with the cloud in the background, the scene is still pretty flat.

It's good to see this progressing, though, and it's got a lot of potential, so keep at it!

NoChance

danshewan wrote: »

It's progressing pretty well, but there's still a couple of things that keep catching my eye, the first being the telephone poles. They're still way too short, and it's kind of odd that they end so abruptly at your shack. Even if the cables were cut, they wouldn't just stop, would they? There might be one or two missing or cut down for firewood or something, but right now it's distracting.

They could also serve to aid your composition by helping lead the viewer's eye into the image if you adjusted your camera position to a slightly wider angle, and give the scene a little more depth. Even with the cloud in the background, the scene is still pretty flat.

It's good to see this progressing, though, and it's got a lot of potential, so keep at it!

Yeah the scene is kinda evolving so some things have to change. Originally it was just going to be on a turn table and not have anything around it which is why the cables end like that. Now that I've expanded it I'll have to add in some more. I also need to have some tipping over and have the wires slightly curved from the blast, incoming update!

Edit: Added a bunch of poles and had some being hit by the blastwave and being knocked over and added the semblance of motion to the wires. I'm thinking of titling it "If a tree falls in the forest" or something like that.

Ro-Sham-Bo

Hey nice little scene, My opinion u should tone the fog down a little bit, i really liked the clear renders a lot better. Another thing about this scene is that its just like a shack in the middle of nowhere, so maybe instead of the telephone lines you created like a satellite dish and like some broken solar planes that would make more sense for how barren the location is, just my two cents, and im not sure if you talked about this but i would get rid of the turntable platform/raised circle ground. Nice work so far, keep at it.