Right now in my oppinion it is hard to read the environment.
All glowing stuff takes all the attention. The strongest atractions for the eye right now are lava "waterfalls"
Reasons are:
1) huge brightness difference.
Most of enviro is quite dark while self-illuminated objects are very bright and don't seem to contribute to the lighting. i am sure all that lava would lit the surroundings more.
Anyways, in this case bright areas look more bright due to the rest of stuff is dark. Contrary is also true - darks seem even darker.
2) Not good color composition
Normally the warm color stands out for the human eye . If there r cold colors it will even increase the "importance" of warn for the eye.
Because of that lava streams again win all the attention
All that makes it harder to notice what is the point of interest in your environment. Right now i can tell what is that only by seeing the title of the thread :P
your architecture is great, its composition works well, but lighting and colors break that.
I would reccoment that u change lighting colors a bit, reduce glows and make colors and light lead viewer's eye to your throne.
Reduce light intensity around the "throne island" and increase lighting around the throne.
There is a "red carpet" passage and circular space which just need to become more dominant.
u can add some torches to the brindge passage for example
Hey Jason, about time posting progress!! Very cool stuff man, although I gotta agree with above comments to tone down your bloom a tad. Yeah your last shot is very dark on my screen also, I really liked your blue stone from before. Now its more or less gray. Keep it up, MORE SCREENSHOTS!
Jason,
You're scene is coming along nicely! I've been watchin your progress on this for a bit now. Really nice texture work you've got going on there
I've noticed a couple of artists on here are from Oshawa. Are there studios there in Oshawa or just schools?
Keep it up! Its looking really good!!
Big thanks to you mr Vlad (chatting with you on msn but might as well say thanks here as well).
Shinobix - Thank you There is no studio here, but most of those Oshawa people are from Durham College's Game Development program. Most of them are from 3rd year (year I'm in) and we've been working on our final projects, and a lot of them are turning out great.
Sorry again for the dark screenshots... that will be fixed next update... as well as taking down the bloom (sorry about that) annndd re-focusing the scene on the center (thanks again Vlad).
I've heard of Durham college before. 3 year program eh? Nice! My program waaaay back in the day was only a 1 year certificate program. I can't imagine 3 years. I lived at the school and survived off of Tim Horton's coffee, cigarettes, and bagels... I call it my dark year.
Keep pimpin your scene man, its turning out really good!
My one wish is if some of the environment dudes from Vigil would post some work from the game, and just DESTROY me with it, I would love nothing more than that!
Hey Jason Great Job! This is definitely my favorite work from you yet. Not being an environment guy myself, I have learned a ton just reading threw this thread.
I may have missed it, but how did you solve the unreal normal issues. I tried to import some characters in unreal a long time ago, and the normals looked so flat, I nevered bothered with unreal again.
So, if you don't mind, can you show a little preview of one of your models, the textures, and the material setup. It would be a huge help to me understanding how to get stuff setup properly in Unreal. Also, showing your lighting setup when you are done would be really awesome also.
So I think I still need to work so much more with the lighting and bloom and what not... but right now my eyes need a bit of rest from this sucka, so I'm going to take the rest of the week to get up the portfolio site, then from there clean up whats needed (which there is alot... but I want to touch on the key stuff and hopefully be done with this).
If anyone wants to rip this up, please do... cause I KNOW that the lighting and what not is... too much (over exposed it feels like) but for the life of me, I can't figure out how it SHOULD look. So if anyone could do a paintover, or anything like that... it would be MUCCHHLY appreciated.
Thanks everyone for the help so far
I'll be getting out a fly through aswell... i'm kinda more excited for that since I have worked on a lot of particles / material effects that (i think) bring this scene to life, and it see it in motion should help seal the deal.
Ok soooooo... a BIG thanks to mr Andrew "Wood in my pants" Wood (shinobix) for doing this paintover for me, I thought I would share it with everyone on here as well, since I think this really illustrates a big problem I have when lighting my environments.
When I'm lighting, in the back of my head i'm thinking that everything is a "focal point", everything must be seen by the player. What he illustrates with the paintover (and I know others have said this before in my sci fi thread) is that I need to reaalllyy push my focal point, and that its ok that some things aren't scene. CONTRAST CONTRAST CONTRAST!
It's a newbie mistake, and I'm going to try from here on out to make sure when I'm lighting, I don't get the thought in my head that I need to show everything... what matters most is where I want to draw the viewers eye (as Vlad said before).
Anywho, I thought I share that with everyone, and know that I will go back to my scene and fix the lighting... eyes just need a break from this sucka
shinobix beat me too it, I was going to suggest making the lighting more dramatic, and paintover, the painted over lighting does the piece a lot more justice.
Sure the lighting can use some work and it looks like you have got some great direction so far as where to take it but even now its just a great piece.
It seriously looks like in game shots out of the latest Prince of Persia game.
Hey Jason, completley top notch stuff you have going here and great inspiration for anyone. The lighting does need work as others have pointed out, but you really hit a home run with this piece. It's something to be proud of for putting in all that work.
The paintover looks like a good start thanks to shinobix, but be careful with pushing the contrast too far, especially with your lava and lamps etc. There is a very fine line between great lighting and contrast to... hey things are blown out and I can't see jack over there in those shadows.
Is there any way I can edit the cameras near clipping distant, I'm currently working on a quick fly through of the level, and I'm having made clipping issues.
I think its because my level is about 1/10th of the size of the unreal character IN game (but it was modeled based off of an unreal character). So I COULD resize it all, the problem is... lights don't resize (translation wise) so I have to re-place all my lighting and I rather not do that.
In my opinion, the emittance is way overdone and distracting. Do you want people looking at your neon tubes of lava or at your architectural elements? Bring the glow elements way down and make them subtle accents. Then you will have the tonal range to brighten up the key areas with more spot lighting.
I would also use less saturated light sources in general until you have your values better balanced. Then, turn up the saturation a bit on the lights that need it.
Hope that didn't sound too negative, it's a very nice piece!
Lot of good points in this thread. Its looking good but I cant tell what the heck I'm supposed to be looking at. What's the focal point? You need to guide the viewer's eye and break out shapes. Everything is the same brightness, I don't see any main shadows, there's also no sense of atmosphere or air. You should be using fog planes or regular fog to decontrast stuff in the distance and break out silhouettes of foreground and midground objects.
Jordan - I quickly played around with a fog volume before I left (doing this during class) and you nailed it man, it really added weight to the scene (as you said) so I'll be playing with that a bit more, and will have some updates later on in the week I hope. Thank you for that, it's something fairly basic... but does wonders for the scene's atmosphere.
Doc - Nah man, there can never be too much negativity :P (I didn't take it as being negative, I took it as some really good crits).
I have been playing around with the lava and the intensity ofl ight that it casts, and thanks to Andrew's paintover, I think its going in a much better direction (i'll post updated shots later... sorry ).
The main issue I am still having, is trying to balance the intensity of the lava material itself, because If I take out of the emmisive-ness, or bring it down to much, it completely loses the effect of the lava... I want it too look really bright and fresh... but if I crank it too much, then it just blooms way out (i've messed around more with bloom scale) and draws the eye away from the focal point.
When I post the new shots I'd like to hear what you think (if you have time). Finding that balance has been very hard throughout this scene's development.
And for other news, I've really enjoyed how Adam has gone about adding some near DOF to his scene, so I tried it myself and I think I'm getting some pretty good (yet subtle) results, so it's not as obvious when the camera is moving, but hopefully the screens can show some of that effect off.
And again... if ANYONE knows how to edit the Near Clipping Plane value, pleaseeee tell me
I need to get this fixed before I can put up the fly through.
lights don't resize translation wise... you sure? Do you have their locations locked? I once had to rescale my level for the same reason and I was just 1 quick and dirty scale away from fixing it. Selecting everything and resizing it shouldn't really be an issue.
One thing you can try is hitting tab while in "play from here", and do a "changesize .1", or maybe its 1 and 10 is default. Might be setsize. Haha, hope that helps. Oh then do setspeed .1 to match your smaller size.
arg, prefabs. I've had nothing but problems with those myself, can't really help with that, other than to say don't use prefabs unless everything's done and working exactly how you want to in the future .
Worse comes to worse dude just scale everything up, you never know when you might want to do a playthrough of the level, especially one of this quality. If the lights stay small just add new larger ones on top? (Or go all the way and ditch the prefabs, just copy paste the suckers). Can't say i can help much more beyond that, level design can be a B sometimes, live and learn!
Scene also looks a little dark right now, might want to adjust some post process highlights, midtones, and shadows. Not too much though, love the unique dark setting but you still need to see what's there
I like the lighting much better this way! It's much more subtle compared to your last lighting pass. As Crazyfingers said though, some places are a bit too dark. An example in the second picture is the back of the broken pillars. Those faces are almost pitch black (At least on my monitor).
This is a great scene overall though! I've been watching your progress for the past few weeks but haven't posted until now. I'm going to bookmark this thread and use it as a reference for when I start building scenes completely with my own assets. It's great to see a well documented start to finish process from another artist to compare workflows and pick up new techniques.
Anywho, I just wanted to say that when I update my site (getting rid of lightbox, adding more breakdowns) they'll be a new video on there with a fly through, plus some quick videos (hopefully loopable) of some particle effects (if i think it'll work out... maybe it'll suck though).
The other thing I was thinking about... (this would be my first time doing it) is maybe make a 10 minute video or so, and just go through my environment, explain the process, break down some materials if need be, etc. etc.
This idea was inspired by Adam and how he has been doing such an amazing job documenting his current environment, and how other polycounters now are doing the same thing (I think its a great idea).
If anyone thinks this would be a good idea, let me know some of the things you'd like me to talk about or show. I don't want it to be too long, and most of the scene is all smoke and mirrors anyways, but if anyone has any ideas as to what they want me to talk about, just let me know.
I'll probably do the video sometime within the next 2 weeks, I've also written a postmortem for a class, and I'd be more then happy to post it up as well, nothing too in-depth though :P
I think going through the process of how you make a texture for this type of stylized hand-painted environment would be great. I don't mean as much for your portfolio, but for others to learn from. I would love to see the entire process from sculpting to final texture as it's something I plan to learn and practice a lot in the coming months.
Damn, haha... gonna need a bit more then 10 minutes for that, and in all honest... my textures are shit... like I said, smoke and mirrors :P
Edit - Bah that sounded rude. What my intention is for this little video is to take a quick look at everything and talk about the process of starting from concept to ending with what I have now. I can certainly touch on those aspects, but I don't think I am prepared to do an entire video on that just yet, I feel as though I still need to get better myself before I start "teaching" or doing a tutorial.
I'd like too though, its just that I still need to get a little more confidence in that area.
Let me see what I can do though, I want to plan everything out before I go ahead with this.
You're not giving yourself enough credit! You're scene is great and beginners like me could learn a lot from it.
A breakdown of this scene from start to finish would be great too. It doesn't have be super in depth. It would be awful nice of you to make a simple texturing process video/tutorial though! You don't have to show all the intermediate steps like a sculpting lesson and painting the texture in photoshop, just breakdown your workflow into steps to make it easier for beginners to jump in. An quick example would be A. Sculpting, B. Baking, C. Painting, ETC with tiny little explanations in important parts like how you get your sculpt to tile.
Sorry if it feels like we're asking a lot from you. We just want you to share your knowledge with us!
Hey, great scene man! I missed this during my slovenly PC hiatus. Dunno how much work you've done since the 4/8 posting but I did a quick paintover, hope you don't mind:
Basically I'd recommend pushing the torches in the "playable area" so to speak into a more neutral coloration, that way you can help the visuals separate into zones while maintaining the high contrast. You could also push the lava and the light it casts to be more red to reinforce that further, and use the red light from the lava to help ground the center platform in the environment. Cheers
Oh shit... zack, man that is nice dude, those red highlights work so well... I'm gonna mess around with that buddy.
The reason why i took the intensity down from the lava was because people said it was drawing the eye... but I like how you're using the redish tone for the bottom / highlights, and using the more neutral tone for the playable area. I think someone else had said to do the same thing (it may have been Andrew) and looking back at my scene, i don't think I fixed that.
Thank you a bunch Zack, I will for sure fix it up in that direction, that really helps push the platform into focus I think. And its good to see you back on the forums man, I hope everything is going well.
Zip - Ok I see what you mean... I'll try and work that in actually. I don't think I do anything differently from what I've been taught from tutorials such as racer's and what not, but I'll defiantly go over it then.
Replies
Right now in my oppinion it is hard to read the environment.
All glowing stuff takes all the attention. The strongest atractions for the eye right now are lava "waterfalls"
Reasons are:
1) huge brightness difference.
Most of enviro is quite dark while self-illuminated objects are very bright and don't seem to contribute to the lighting. i am sure all that lava would lit the surroundings more.
Anyways, in this case bright areas look more bright due to the rest of stuff is dark. Contrary is also true - darks seem even darker.
2) Not good color composition
Normally the warm color stands out for the human eye . If there r cold colors it will even increase the "importance" of warn for the eye.
Because of that lava streams again win all the attention
All that makes it harder to notice what is the point of interest in your environment. Right now i can tell what is that only by seeing the title of the thread :P
your architecture is great, its composition works well, but lighting and colors break that.
I would reccoment that u change lighting colors a bit, reduce glows and make colors and light lead viewer's eye to your throne.
Reduce light intensity around the "throne island" and increase lighting around the throne.
There is a "red carpet" passage and circular space which just need to become more dominant.
u can add some torches to the brindge passage for example
Make color difference less harsh as well.
You're scene is coming along nicely! I've been watchin your progress on this for a bit now. Really nice texture work you've got going on there
I've noticed a couple of artists on here are from Oshawa. Are there studios there in Oshawa or just schools?
Keep it up! Its looking really good!!
Shinobix - Thank you
Sorry again for the dark screenshots... that will be fixed next update... as well as taking down the bloom (sorry about that) annndd re-focusing the scene on the center (thanks again Vlad).
WORK WORK!
Keep pimpin your scene man, its turning out really good!
Indeed, it has a really, really strong resembelance to the Darksiders art style.
So... hint hint nudge nudge!
I may have missed it, but how did you solve the unreal normal issues. I tried to import some characters in unreal a long time ago, and the normals looked so flat, I nevered bothered with unreal again.
So, if you don't mind, can you show a little preview of one of your models, the textures, and the material setup. It would be a huge help to me understanding how to get stuff setup properly in Unreal. Also, showing your lighting setup when you are done would be really awesome also.
Congrats on the great work thus far dude!
Forgive me if this has already been asked, but are any of your textures hand painted? Or are they photo sourced then filterised?
Update... so this is what I handed in.
So I think I still need to work so much more with the lighting and bloom and what not... but right now my eyes need a bit of rest from this sucka, so I'm going to take the rest of the week to get up the portfolio site, then from there clean up whats needed (which there is alot... but I want to touch on the key stuff and hopefully be done with this).
If anyone wants to rip this up, please do... cause I KNOW that the lighting and what not is... too much (over exposed it feels like) but for the life of me, I can't figure out how it SHOULD look. So if anyone could do a paintover, or anything like that... it would be MUCCHHLY appreciated.
Thanks everyone for the help so far
I'll be getting out a fly through aswell... i'm kinda more excited for that since I have worked on a lot of particles / material effects that (i think) bring this scene to life, and it see it in motion should help seal the deal.
When I'm lighting, in the back of my head i'm thinking that everything is a "focal point", everything must be seen by the player. What he illustrates with the paintover (and I know others have said this before in my sci fi thread) is that I need to reaalllyy push my focal point, and that its ok that some things aren't scene. CONTRAST CONTRAST CONTRAST!
It's a newbie mistake, and I'm going to try from here on out to make sure when I'm lighting, I don't get the thought in my head that I need to show everything... what matters most is where I want to draw the viewers eye (as Vlad said before).
Anywho, I thought I share that with everyone, and know that I will go back to my scene and fix the lighting... eyes just need a break from this sucka
this looks amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sure the lighting can use some work and it looks like you have got some great direction so far as where to take it but even now its just a great piece.
It seriously looks like in game shots out of the latest Prince of Persia game.
Haha Rens this pic is very appropriate :>
Please post breakdowns and pics of your assets
The paintover looks like a good start thanks to shinobix, but be careful with pushing the contrast too far, especially with your lava and lamps etc. There is a very fine line between great lighting and contrast to... hey things are blown out and I can't see jack over there in those shadows.
Is there any way I can edit the cameras near clipping distant, I'm currently working on a quick fly through of the level, and I'm having made clipping issues.
I think its because my level is about 1/10th of the size of the unreal character IN game (but it was modeled based off of an unreal character). So I COULD resize it all, the problem is... lights don't resize (translation wise) so I have to re-place all my lighting and I rather not do that.
Any and all help would be much appreicated!
I would also use less saturated light sources in general until you have your values better balanced. Then, turn up the saturation a bit on the lights that need it.
Hope that didn't sound too negative, it's a very nice piece!
Jordan - I quickly played around with a fog volume before I left (doing this during class) and you nailed it man, it really added weight to the scene (as you said) so I'll be playing with that a bit more, and will have some updates later on in the week I hope. Thank you for that, it's something fairly basic... but does wonders for the scene's atmosphere.
Doc - Nah man, there can never be too much negativity :P (I didn't take it as being negative, I took it as some really good crits).
I have been playing around with the lava and the intensity ofl ight that it casts, and thanks to Andrew's paintover, I think its going in a much better direction (i'll post updated shots later... sorry
The main issue I am still having, is trying to balance the intensity of the lava material itself, because If I take out of the emmisive-ness, or bring it down to much, it completely loses the effect of the lava... I want it too look really bright and fresh... but if I crank it too much, then it just blooms way out (i've messed around more with bloom scale) and draws the eye away from the focal point.
When I post the new shots I'd like to hear what you think (if you have time). Finding that balance has been very hard throughout this scene's development.
And for other news, I've really enjoyed how Adam has gone about adding some near DOF to his scene, so I tried it myself and I think I'm getting some pretty good (yet subtle) results, so it's not as obvious when the camera is moving, but hopefully the screens can show some of that effect off.
And again... if ANYONE knows how to edit the Near Clipping Plane value, pleaseeee tell me
I need to get this fixed before I can put up the fly through.
One thing you can try is hitting tab while in "play from here", and do a "changesize .1", or maybe its 1 and 10 is default. Might be setsize. Haha, hope that helps. Oh then do setspeed .1 to match your smaller size.
Ok so I have some prefabs... and lights don't seem to scale up with those, as well as particle effects and what not, how did you do this?
And the change size didn't work, thanks for that suggestion though.
I would honestly think there is some text in the config files that allow you to set the near clipping plane value... this is facking stupid.
Is that the console command you were looking for?
Edit:
If that's not doing it try using 'set Pawn scale x'. Not sure if that will even work but it's worth a shot.
Here are some new images... if they are too dark i apologize, these monitors are just so fricken bright.
Worse comes to worse dude just scale everything up, you never know when you might want to do a playthrough of the level, especially one of this quality. If the lights stay small just add new larger ones on top? (Or go all the way and ditch the prefabs, just copy paste the suckers). Can't say i can help much more beyond that, level design can be a B sometimes, live and learn!
Scene also looks a little dark right now, might want to adjust some post process highlights, midtones, and shadows. Not too much though, love the unique dark setting but you still need to see what's there
This is a great scene overall though! I've been watching your progress for the past few weeks but haven't posted until now. I'm going to bookmark this thread and use it as a reference for when I start building scenes completely with my own assets. It's great to see a well documented start to finish process from another artist to compare workflows and pick up new techniques.
Looking forward to future updates!
Anywho, I just wanted to say that when I update my site (getting rid of lightbox, adding more breakdowns) they'll be a new video on there with a fly through, plus some quick videos (hopefully loopable) of some particle effects (if i think it'll work out... maybe it'll suck though).
The other thing I was thinking about... (this would be my first time doing it) is maybe make a 10 minute video or so, and just go through my environment, explain the process, break down some materials if need be, etc. etc.
This idea was inspired by Adam and how he has been doing such an amazing job documenting his current environment, and how other polycounters now are doing the same thing (I think its a great idea).
If anyone thinks this would be a good idea, let me know some of the things you'd like me to talk about or show. I don't want it to be too long, and most of the scene is all smoke and mirrors anyways, but if anyone has any ideas as to what they want me to talk about, just let me know.
I'll probably do the video sometime within the next 2 weeks, I've also written a postmortem for a class, and I'd be more then happy to post it up as well, nothing too in-depth though :P
Should be fun either way... hopefully :P
Edit - Bah that sounded rude. What my intention is for this little video is to take a quick look at everything and talk about the process of starting from concept to ending with what I have now. I can certainly touch on those aspects, but I don't think I am prepared to do an entire video on that just yet, I feel as though I still need to get better myself before I start "teaching" or doing a tutorial.
I'd like too though, its just that I still need to get a little more confidence in that area.
Let me see what I can do though, I want to plan everything out before I go ahead with this.
A breakdown of this scene from start to finish would be great too. It doesn't have be super in depth. It would be awful nice of you to make a simple texturing process video/tutorial though! You don't have to show all the intermediate steps like a sculpting lesson and painting the texture in photoshop, just breakdown your workflow into steps to make it easier for beginners to jump in. An quick example would be A. Sculpting, B. Baking, C. Painting, ETC with tiny little explanations in important parts like how you get your sculpt to tile.
Sorry if it feels like we're asking a lot from you. We just want you to share your knowledge with us!
Basically I'd recommend pushing the torches in the "playable area" so to speak into a more neutral coloration, that way you can help the visuals separate into zones while maintaining the high contrast. You could also push the lava and the light it casts to be more red to reinforce that further, and use the red light from the lava to help ground the center platform in the environment. Cheers
The reason why i took the intensity down from the lava was because people said it was drawing the eye... but I like how you're using the redish tone for the bottom / highlights, and using the more neutral tone for the playable area. I think someone else had said to do the same thing (it may have been Andrew) and looking back at my scene, i don't think I fixed that.
Thank you a bunch Zack, I will for sure fix it up in that direction, that really helps push the platform into focus I think. And its good to see you back on the forums man, I hope everything is going well.
Zip - Ok I see what you mean... I'll try and work that in actually. I don't think I do anything differently from what I've been taught from tutorials such as racer's and what not, but I'll defiantly go over it then.
Thanks again guys