I'll be adding more detail to the mesh (and breaking up the bricks so it works on the platform) but yar, I tried to go for a more hard edge look, is it working better?
edit: and this is (once again) a 2 second base texture... just messing around and see how the normals work so far.
Alright so here is my last update of the night for the floor (Have early classes tomorrow and I'm tired :P )
I still have to fix seam errors / normal errors (along the ornaments in the middle) as well as tear up the bricks and what not along the edges to help fit on the platform... ANNNDD make the center of the piece... and get some nice spec working on there (I want the ornaments to read as metal).
I should have this done by tomorrow, and from there I'll start working on tillable textures (texturing) for the walkways.
Okie dokie... I think for the most part I'm done messing around with the textures for this, now I just need to break it up, make the center of it look bad ass... and do it all over again with new stuff :P
I'm gonna try my best to see if i can speed up my process with this project, I know I am slow as ffaaccckk.
Its coming together really nicely, I like it. Did you ever find out if it is possible to organize things into sub folders in unreal? I have been wondering that as well.
This is going to start looking really good, really fast once you get those textures on! can't wait dude
Small crit for the stonework. I think you should tone down the normals a bit on the actual block geometry (just take a soft brush and paint blue over the seams), keep the cracks normals as they are. This way you can draw more attention to the decorative bits of the scene without having so much scene noise, plus it just looks more hand painterly. Or maybe it's the AO that's making the blocks a bit too noisy, hard to tell. I really loved your "flat version" from earlier, would be nice to see more of that in the rocks.
Small update just to show some progress... I'm hoping to have some nice big shots for you by the end of this weekend.
My schedule was to zbrush everything first, and then textures start next week... But i've been finding I'm sculpting then texturing the same piece all at once, I don't know if that's taking more time... so I think I'm gonna stop that for a bit and just sculpt.
Does anyone know a solid way to either crank up the normals in udk / more so try and replicate how marmoset handles its normals / spec, because right now my scene has absolutely no information from the normal maps kicking in, and I know it has to do with the lighting... but there has got to be a trick to really help push those normals some more.
If i'm trying to bump up my normals really quick, i just create a new layer of the texture in photohop, put it above and do an overlay, you can do this multiple times. You can also do this in UDK by multiplying the red and green channels of your normal separately with a multiply by 3 constant node, multiply the blue channel by 1, focus on increasing the values of the red and green and keep their values the same.
Other than that don't forget the importance of ambient occlusion maps to get some of that bake data in your diffuse channel, and like the overlay above for the normal, you can multiply the AO over itself to make it more obvious. Spec Value and power is also VERY important for making your normals pop. I'll usually lower the specular power very low (4 is as low as you want to go from my experience) if I want the normals to pop out on the entire object because it allows more spec on the object at any given time.
One last trick you can do is the transmission color. You can use a Fresnel, plug your normal in it, do a one minus from there plug that into a power and multiply node so you can adjust it and plug that into your transmission mask. This will give you some rim lighting on your object, plug a vector parameter into your transmission mask (i usually multiply it by a constant so i can make it pop as much as i want to) and start tuning it up. This rim lighting will help give your normals some pop and works great for hand painted environments.
Lemme know if you want to see any screenshots from the UDK showing this stuff off, or i could even just give you a sample upk file showing these setups in a sample material, i accidently slept through class today and could use some karma points
I've heard quite a few techniques for cranking up the normal map info in Unreal. Unfortunately, it is my opinion that Unreal3 just has a fairly cheap and weak method of rendering normal maps.
Making heavy AO passes in the Diffuse map is such a hack, but that's one good way of faking it. In Sandbox, by contrast, some of my textures barely needed much of a Diffuse map on my last project. Overlaying normals produced very marginal results for me in UDK.
I'm sure many will think me a fool for says this! But, show me a prop in UDK, and I'll show you much better normals in Sandbox or Marmoset on a prop basis. Once everything is all lit up in UDK it can be hard to notice though.
oh one other trick you can use in UDK is the "derivenormalZ" node. It'll ignore the blue channel and reconstruct it using your red and green channels, so if you you bump those up it'll have a greater effect on the overall normal. Can make a bit of a difference.
Crazy - Post a sample of a piece you've made with those normal tricks, I would love to see what kind of effects you are getting.
I really like that Fresnel trick, I will use that on this environment I think, just gotta make sure I can get a nice balance.
Currently I'm working on the walkways... thank god I unwrapped a base piece and THEN made my edits, or this would take SOO much longer then it is.
Would like to get the walkways semi - finished tonight, so everything has a base texture / normal and lightmaps set, I'll probably mess around with the normal tricks as well.
Yeah, all these texture tricks can look pretty shabby if you go overboard, make 'em subtle.
Here's a shot of it overboard, i adjusted some values so you could really see it in effect and i increased the normal tiling so you could see it more:
It's a fairly complicated material but i tried to make the setup as visible as i could without too many connections getting in the way. You can toy with the values till they fit your scene. This stuff only really works with a fantasy environment as lighting in the real world obviously doesn't make things glow on their dark side
You can take this in any direction you want, like if you don't like the glow, you could instead multiply this by your diffuse and increase the shadowing in the dark areas to bring out the normals, just be creative with it.
That "mask R G" node is a componenet mask set to only affect red and green, but isn't really necessary since i'm rebuilding the blue channel anyway. But if i were trying to keep the blue information i'd use that mask. Come to think of it you could probably add .5 to the blue channel, raise it by a power, and then subtract .5 from it and "append" it back to the red/green channels to get some cool normal map control of the height channel.
Alritghy so... I'm not at all happy with how this is turning out right now, but I just gotta get into a groove and hopefully turn it around... I figure I'll at least pimp some stuff so you guys don't think I forgot.
Everything is dirtyyyyy dirttyy WIP right now, I've spent most of the time going back and fixing up UV's since I did a semi-half ass job before hand, so now I'm finally getting to the point where I can start texturing for realz.
Lighting is bawls, but I don't want to get caught up in the little things just yet, need to keep on rolling with getting textures out / looking good.
No "fun" shots yet, I've gotten a couple of ideas of some angles I would like for beauty shots, but because I've really only worked on the walkways, there's not much to show.
I'll be cracking away at this, and hopefully speed up just a bit so I can get some good progress done in the next couple days.
Keep pushing through! I'm roughly at the same place with my project right now, and it does kind of suck but I like Adam's advice of keep working and don't get hung up on something you can fix later.
Everything does look really nice, I love your texture work. Very inspirational.
Some more updates... time to start moving onto the terrian / rock part for a bit cause I'm getting tired of some of this stuff... but I'm slowly starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
So right now im just gonna "rush" through a first pass for the rest of these textures, I've already started to do it on the door / entrance area, so at least I can get an overall feel for the rest of the environment.
The last post I made only focused on Unreal hate, so I just want to add in that it has been a lot of fun watching this evolve. I'm sure your texture work will all be stellar as usual. I love the scraggliness of it all.
Pushing forward is a great idea. Your flat greys are really throwing the lighting off. Can see how your stonework could use more lighting, but throwing more lights at it is overblowing your whitebox materials.
You might consider tuning your white material in the meantime so you can pump up your lighting.
Other than that i think you need to bump your normals somehow and get more spec on the stonework, overall just looks a bit too flat compaired to your max shots. It'll get there man, keep on truckin'.
Another material trick you might use with your UDK materials that you might not already know: when adjusting your materials with multiplies, powers or whatever, use a scalar parameter, not a constant. If you're using constants you can right click them and convert to scalar parameter, name it something appropriate. For example, if you want more spec, plug your spec into a multiply and plug a scalar parameter into the b input (you can hold "S" and click to get this node), name the scalar parameter specboost or something. Set this to 1 to keep it defaulted. Once you've got some of these adjustable scalar parameters for your diffuse, spec, spec power, normal intensity, create a material instance constant copy of the material by right clicking it in the browser and create a material instance copy. This material will allow you to adjust your scalar parameters in real time using a slider method as well as vector paramaters if you want to adjust a color node in real time. Simply expand the collapsed stacks on the left side and check the white box next to each parameter, this will enable your adjusted values to take effect. Not only will this work in real time (especially helpful for terrain materials), but this will also allow you to make many slight variations of the same material to really fine tune your scene! Just remember to put the new material constant onto the meshes.
Crazy - you have been a huge help buddy, you have some great ideas that I think will push this scene more and more, thanks for all the feedback. I've never worked with referenced materials before, but now when I get some more textures done, I'm gonna go back to my materials and set it up the way you suggested, should make on the fly changes 10x faster.
I was talking about the white material you have placed on your untextured objects. If you were to tone down that white to be almost as dark as your finished assets, it'll help you get more appropriate lighting and material tweaks in as you work, you wont be adjusting things against what's not actually in the scene.
So I've put on a lot of place holder textures for the rest of the scene, but found myself spending a lot of time on the lava and learning some new stuff within udk (like vertex painting). Big thanks to some good friends from class that helped me out with this stuff, really brought the environment to life... I got a kick of inspiration from it.
This week I'll be focusing on the last push to get the final textures done / finishing up some sculpts, then the last couple weeks will be focused on tweaking the materials, creating some particle effects / shaders to help tie everything together. And of course... LIGHTING LIGHTING LIGHTING!
Big thanks to those who have helped me so far, defiantly couldn't have done it without them.
Tone down your bloom though, bit distracting, and some depth of field might help reduce the noise brought on by your background elements. Regardless, imma stop giving crits, you got this shyt in order . Keep doin' what you're doing looking forward to more!
I'll defiantly work the post processing more, figure I can get away without touching it until I get the rest of the textures finished up... then its the fun stuff :P
this is looking awesome man... any thoughts on like dirtying stuff up a little? would be kool to throw in a little bitta grime and wear to stuff maybe use the mesh paint in udk and throw in a nother node into your mat of a dirty grimy texture and paint that on in the corners and such to kinda break up the edges of your textures - or lots of cards but yeah man lookin awesome
Ok so I apologize for the lack of updates, i've been busy with other stuff for school / website stuff (which should be up soon) but yar... I took a screenshot for my BOY ae (braah braah yuh yuh!) and I thought that I should at least post somewhat of an update here...
I've been avoiding those support beams for so long now... but i'll tackle those next I think. I'd like to get some lava splash effect done as well... and then tweak tweak.
This is due tuesday, but I'll be working on it afterwards as well.
I know remi said to have some sort of depth biased transitioning between the dirt and the broken tiles... so I'd like to implement that later on as well.
Anywho, more screenshots to come, but I'd thought I'd post just to let people know i'm still working on it.
bah just got back from the lab (5:30 am now) and the screenshot looks a lot darker on my screen, which makes me feel all icky inside.
Anywho :P
doeseph - Its hard to say how long i've been working on it, cause for the last couple weeks i've been focusing on other projects, but I can say in the last couple days... most of the bigger changes (as in direction of the piece) has taken place... such as particle effects, new models, new lighting, etc. etc.
It all started with that chandelier thingy, and it took off from there. Before that I really hated it, couldn't see the direction it was going, but once I established that piece... and put those grates on it, it kinda hit me where I wanted to take it, and here it is now :P
This has definitively been the biggest project I've worked on... learnt a lot so far... and hopefully I can learn a bit more from the finally stretch that I have hit
Replies
Round 2?
I'll be adding more detail to the mesh (and breaking up the bricks so it works on the platform) but yar, I tried to go for a more hard edge look, is it working better?
edit: and this is (once again) a 2 second base texture... just messing around and see how the normals work so far.
Round 3...
Alright so here is my last update of the night for the floor (Have early classes tomorrow and I'm tired :P )
I still have to fix seam errors / normal errors (along the ornaments in the middle) as well as tear up the bricks and what not along the edges to help fit on the platform... ANNNDD make the center of the piece... and get some nice spec working on there (I want the ornaments to read as metal).
I should have this done by tomorrow, and from there I'll start working on tillable textures (texturing) for the walkways.
sleep time
Okie dokie... I think for the most part I'm done messing around with the textures for this, now I just need to break it up, make the center of it look bad ass... and do it all over again with new stuff :P
I'm gonna try my best to see if i can speed up my process with this project, I know I am slow as ffaaccckk.
Small crit for the stonework. I think you should tone down the normals a bit on the actual block geometry (just take a soft brush and paint blue over the seams), keep the cracks normals as they are. This way you can draw more attention to the decorative bits of the scene without having so much scene noise, plus it just looks more hand painterly. Or maybe it's the AO that's making the blocks a bit too noisy, hard to tell. I really loved your "flat version" from earlier, would be nice to see more of that in the rocks.
My schedule was to zbrush everything first, and then textures start next week... But i've been finding I'm sculpting then texturing the same piece all at once, I don't know if that's taking more time... so I think I'm gonna stop that for a bit and just sculpt.
Does anyone know a solid way to either crank up the normals in udk / more so try and replicate how marmoset handles its normals / spec, because right now my scene has absolutely no information from the normal maps kicking in, and I know it has to do with the lighting... but there has got to be a trick to really help push those normals some more.
Other than that don't forget the importance of ambient occlusion maps to get some of that bake data in your diffuse channel, and like the overlay above for the normal, you can multiply the AO over itself to make it more obvious. Spec Value and power is also VERY important for making your normals pop. I'll usually lower the specular power very low (4 is as low as you want to go from my experience) if I want the normals to pop out on the entire object because it allows more spec on the object at any given time.
One last trick you can do is the transmission color. You can use a Fresnel, plug your normal in it, do a one minus from there plug that into a power and multiply node so you can adjust it and plug that into your transmission mask. This will give you some rim lighting on your object, plug a vector parameter into your transmission mask (i usually multiply it by a constant so i can make it pop as much as i want to) and start tuning it up. This rim lighting will help give your normals some pop and works great for hand painted environments.
Lemme know if you want to see any screenshots from the UDK showing this stuff off, or i could even just give you a sample upk file showing these setups in a sample material, i accidently slept through class today and could use some karma points
Making heavy AO passes in the Diffuse map is such a hack, but that's one good way of faking it. In Sandbox, by contrast, some of my textures barely needed much of a Diffuse map on my last project. Overlaying normals produced very marginal results for me in UDK.
I'm sure many will think me a fool for says this! But, show me a prop in UDK, and I'll show you much better normals in Sandbox or Marmoset on a prop basis. Once everything is all lit up in UDK it can be hard to notice though.
I'd love to hear that I'm wrong!
I really like that Fresnel trick, I will use that on this environment I think, just gotta make sure I can get a nice balance.
Currently I'm working on the walkways... thank god I unwrapped a base piece and THEN made my edits, or this would take SOO much longer then it is.
Would like to get the walkways semi - finished tonight, so everything has a base texture / normal and lightmaps set, I'll probably mess around with the normal tricks as well.
Thanks again all
Here's a shot of it overboard, i adjusted some values so you could really see it in effect and i increased the normal tiling so you could see it more:
It's a fairly complicated material but i tried to make the setup as visible as i could without too many connections getting in the way. You can toy with the values till they fit your scene. This stuff only really works with a fantasy environment as lighting in the real world obviously doesn't make things glow on their dark side
You can take this in any direction you want, like if you don't like the glow, you could instead multiply this by your diffuse and increase the shadowing in the dark areas to bring out the normals, just be creative with it.
That "mask R G" node is a componenet mask set to only affect red and green, but isn't really necessary since i'm rebuilding the blue channel anyway. But if i were trying to keep the blue information i'd use that mask. Come to think of it you could probably add .5 to the blue channel, raise it by a power, and then subtract .5 from it and "append" it back to the red/green channels to get some cool normal map control of the height channel.
Everything is dirtyyyyy dirttyy WIP right now, I've spent most of the time going back and fixing up UV's since I did a semi-half ass job before hand, so now I'm finally getting to the point where I can start texturing for realz.
Lighting is bawls, but I don't want to get caught up in the little things just yet, need to keep on rolling with getting textures out / looking good.
Meh!
I'll be cracking away at this, and hopefully speed up just a bit so I can get some good progress done in the next couple days.
Thanks guys
Everything does look really nice, I love your texture work. Very inspirational.
So right now im just gonna "rush" through a first pass for the rest of these textures, I've already started to do it on the door / entrance area, so at least I can get an overall feel for the rest of the environment.
This is looking fantastic. I'm really digging the lighting. Keep it coming!
You might consider tuning your white material in the meantime so you can pump up your lighting.
Other than that i think you need to bump your normals somehow and get more spec on the stonework, overall just looks a bit too flat compaired to your max shots. It'll get there man, keep on truckin'.
Another material trick you might use with your UDK materials that you might not already know: when adjusting your materials with multiplies, powers or whatever, use a scalar parameter, not a constant. If you're using constants you can right click them and convert to scalar parameter, name it something appropriate. For example, if you want more spec, plug your spec into a multiply and plug a scalar parameter into the b input (you can hold "S" and click to get this node), name the scalar parameter specboost or something. Set this to 1 to keep it defaulted. Once you've got some of these adjustable scalar parameters for your diffuse, spec, spec power, normal intensity, create a material instance constant copy of the material by right clicking it in the browser and create a material instance copy. This material will allow you to adjust your scalar parameters in real time using a slider method as well as vector paramaters if you want to adjust a color node in real time. Simply expand the collapsed stacks on the left side and check the white box next to each parameter, this will enable your adjusted values to take effect. Not only will this work in real time (especially helpful for terrain materials), but this will also allow you to make many slight variations of the same material to really fine tune your scene! Just remember to put the new material constant onto the meshes.
Stop saying this every time you post your stuff! commit to your ideas Jason! its just as bad as saying "good for a student" :P dick.... love you!
Crazy - you have been a huge help buddy, you have some great ideas that I think will push this scene more and more, thanks for all the feedback. I've never worked with referenced materials before, but now when I get some more textures done, I'm gonna go back to my materials and set it up the way you suggested, should make on the fly changes 10x faster.
What do you mean when you say "white material"?
I was talking about the white material you have placed on your untextured objects. If you were to tone down that white to be almost as dark as your finished assets, it'll help you get more appropriate lighting and material tweaks in as you work, you wont be adjusting things against what's not actually in the scene.
Keep going!
So I've put on a lot of place holder textures for the rest of the scene, but found myself spending a lot of time on the lava and learning some new stuff within udk (like vertex painting). Big thanks to some good friends from class that helped me out with this stuff, really brought the environment to life... I got a kick of inspiration from it.
This week I'll be focusing on the last push to get the final textures done / finishing up some sculpts, then the last couple weeks will be focused on tweaking the materials, creating some particle effects / shaders to help tie everything together. And of course... LIGHTING LIGHTING LIGHTING!
Big thanks to those who have helped me so far, defiantly couldn't have done it without them.
WEOPWEOP... moar work!
Tone down your bloom though, bit distracting, and some depth of field might help reduce the noise brought on by your background elements. Regardless, imma stop giving crits, you got this shyt in order
I'll defiantly work the post processing more, figure I can get away without touching it until I get the rest of the textures finished up... then its the fun stuff :P
I've been avoiding those support beams for so long now... but i'll tackle those next I think. I'd like to get some lava splash effect done as well... and then tweak tweak.
This is due tuesday, but I'll be working on it afterwards as well.
I know remi said to have some sort of depth biased transitioning between the dirt and the broken tiles... so I'd like to implement that later on as well.
Anywho, more screenshots to come, but I'd thought I'd post just to let people know i'm still working on it.
Anywho :P
doeseph - Its hard to say how long i've been working on it, cause for the last couple weeks i've been focusing on other projects, but I can say in the last couple days... most of the bigger changes (as in direction of the piece) has taken place... such as particle effects, new models, new lighting, etc. etc.
It all started with that chandelier thingy, and it took off from there. Before that I really hated it, couldn't see the direction it was going, but once I established that piece... and put those grates on it, it kinda hit me where I wanted to take it, and here it is now :P
This has definitively been the biggest project I've worked on... learnt a lot so far... and hopefully I can learn a bit more from the finally stretch that I have hit
More to come.. now sleep!
I really like the colours you got going on there. Maybe push the purple a bit more ?