WIP: Alley Way "grotto" Environment
polycounter lvl 10
Hey everyone. My name is Dan and I'm new here. I was pointed here by vcortis, who I went to college with. Same major too...so we're in the exact same boat. He started coming here earlier than I did so I'm a little behind but I feel like I have direction now after 6-8 months of being lost. That's the easiest way to put it.
Anyway, I'm working on a environment that I plan to import into the UDK. The scene is based off of some reference photos I took. I will post a screen from Maya and the primary reference photo I'm using.
Few notes: I'm trying to keep it low poly. I truthfully don't know if 20K triangles is high for a scene like this. If I hide the gate layer it is cut down to roughly 10K triangles so I need to work on fixing that.
Please be honest. Though I know you all will.
Anyway, I'm working on a environment that I plan to import into the UDK. The scene is based off of some reference photos I took. I will post a screen from Maya and the primary reference photo I'm using.
Few notes: I'm trying to keep it low poly. I truthfully don't know if 20K triangles is high for a scene like this. If I hide the gate layer it is cut down to roughly 10K triangles so I need to work on fixing that.
Please be honest. Though I know you all will.
Replies
Yes, diffuse, normal specular and if I can AO map...though I don't know how to do that yet.
Try to capture the general shape and silhouette of the object. Anything that doesn't affect the silhouette can usually be faked wtih a normal map and some clever texturing.
Heres some advice, start up a recent video game, like L4D2 I know you have that! Look at the models, decipher the geometry, take screenshots. You can see what is textures and what is actual polys fairly easy, this is the Source engine which is a little outdated so if you're going for next-gen you can probably bare to up it a bit.
But only use what is necessary.
As far as your actual scene goes, the first thing that comes to mind is your pine tree. It looks like it's sucking up a LOT of polys for such a small object in your scene. Some intersecting planes with a transparency map and good diffuse would probably suffice for the needles. Likewise for the vines by the gate (although for the larger ones I would keep those as polys).
Can I see a view of the wall with the windows on it? And are you planning on keeping the scene snowy?
Edit: For your vines, go back and play bioshock 1 in the tree area I forgot what it's called. There is ivy growing all over the walls. Look to see what they did for that.
As far as the snow goes, I might. I'll decide on that after I fix up my foliage. And yea I'll re-upload a couple more images later in the day.
First one up is the primary camera angle from the ref. photo:
And from my alternate camera angle. This one is subject to change, just not sure where to place it at the moment.
Once complete, I will be placing it into UDK.
Thanks everyone!
I think you need to add some more dirt and grime. Especially in areas that are close to the ground and underneath window ledges etc. where you would expect to see water streaks.
Those are the little details that are going to sell it more.
Also think about the colors you're using on the ground and bricks. The red comes off a lot darker and contrasts a lot with the other two warmer colors of the ground and other building. My eye is pulled more to that wall because of this. I'd lighten up the red brick a bit and desaturate it a tad as well.
Other than it's looking good. Textures just need a little work.
So currently, I'm feeling a little tired of working on this. I feel like I've learned a lot in the past 3 weeks from threads such as Adam's Evil Genius Base, talking with vcortis, or just general googling problems as well as working on this piece. I also have learned from all the threads about workflow. I have a three project plan, and this was project 1. So far I'm happy with how it's been coming but I can notice what I think I should change. Short list:
-Polygonal gate, not a textured plane
-Modeled windows
-Look at the UVMaps on the pipes in RoadKill
Currently, I plan to get this finished, tweaked, and imported into UDK to get the experience from it to apply to project two, which will be better thought out and far more modular. Then, perhaps after project three I can come back and tweak it.
What does Polycount say??
And yeah. U could make the polygonal fence if you can. Its just a matter of how much detail is needed. I think.
Here is a close to first pass texturing WIP. All that's left is for the windows with art work to be done!
I'm considering removing the planes with the vine textures in favor of duplicating the current vines, and just scaling them to be smaller. I might have to do the scaling anyway. I also have a transparency map error on the limbs/leaves for my pine tree. I'm positive it was working earlier today but it just decided to render out the plane at say 10% opacity. It's odd, I'll look into it more tomorrow.
Wireframe coming soon. Thanks all you've all be very helpful!
Some numbers first:
Tri's:19,240
Verts: 10,830
Specular looks too intense on the bricks/lights are blowing out portions of your image.
You desperately need something to fill the giant black void in the center of your image.
Looking foward to your second pass on textures.
-All materials completed.
-Bricks on walls dirtier
-Red bricks less red, more warm.
-Normal Maps not as strong in bricks and some fire escape materials
-Vine planes shrunk, multiplied
-Vines shrunk to match the image more
-Volume light replaced with ambient light (temporary?)
-Plane with image of Howard County Court House in background
I appreciate all crits. I plan to UDK this from tomorrow until...whenever. I'll be importing the big objects all alone and the smaller groups (fire escape, etc) as one object. First, I'll have some housekeeping to do in Maya.
I am going to play with the volume light a little bit, see if I can get some other nice effects.
Thanks everyone!
First things first, is the lack of a sky. The black abyss isn't really helping set the mood lol.
The vines (also the pine tree) still look a little off, I get the feeling that it is all one giant clump of entaglement instead of them creeping up and down the side of the wall.
Lastly, the ground could really benefit from some vertex painting or texture adjustment of a build up debris and dead organic material around the edges of the buildings and fence. You could easily do this in UDK though.
Nice work on the rest of it though, the bricks and lighting look a lot better.
On a side note, tried the volume light again. Not quite doing it so I think I'll drop that for the time being.
From another angle:
I'm all ears.
First of all i don't see any transparecy, maybe u haven't activated it. The shape is incoplete as well. In addition to that u need several basic planes to be perpendicular to the wall in order to create branch volume. Overall texture should have less branches and be more "light" and transparent.
Also don't forget to assing 1 smoothing group to tree trunks
P.S.: i'll try to do a quick example of similar tree structure when i come home.
Here is a rough and quick example of what i meant in my previous post.
Please note that some stuff (especially textures) r only basic and simplified examples which show my point, and they were not fully elaborated for final quality look :P
First of all, when u deal with low-poly vegetation u need to look at your references and ANALYZE.
See what overall shape it has, what r basic elements that can become building blocks for your tree/ivy/shrub etc.
In this case the features are:
- "CURLINESS"
- looks like a light cage
- it is not flat like most of ivy plants, but it has a volume
Here is my example in max (again, quick and rough one, contains only basic structure and texture):
What are the steps?
Seen that this ivy is very curly i did bunch of curved splines :
Then, i rendered the image and saved it with alpha channel.
I used the alpha channel as opacity and it helped with making a shape of "branches" for diffuse texture.
In this example my diffuse in a plain color with some Bevel/Emboss effect to give some volume.
Ideally of course u would assign some wood texture to your spline-generated meshes, and maybe u would alter thickness of those splines as well in order to get more varied, detailed and realistic shape
Next, I created a plane to which my texture is assigned. I subdivided it and gave it a bit of depth since this ivy is not perfectly flat. After that I scattered these pieces along the "wall":
But that does not give sufficient volume and also would not work well enough if we would be looking at it from your primary camera position. That would be similar to what u have now e.g. with perspective we start seeing silhouette of polygons.
So to fix this I placed another array of polygons, but this time turned ~90 degrees:
And i joined both parts together:
And finally that what i ended up with:
Above: 2 different wireframe colors (blue and red) which show 2 layers of ivy which when combined together work for all viewing angles.
I also want to mention that they all do not use precise 90deg angles nor they r perfectly flat. They are rounded or "randomly" turned in order to have more natural and irregular look, and to help each other create more volume. In this way it reduces the chance that viewer will see individual flat polygons.
Voila, hope that help :P
Btw, one opinion regarding tree generators :P
Of course it is cool, but MOST of jobs require u to do vegetation manually. It needs to be optimized as much as possible and often objects r just impossible to generate if they require more specific or stylized look.
In any case, foundation of basic low-poly vegetation helps in other gameart-related tasks as well so it is always good to know.
And of course if u r learning and doing things for portfolio then generators would be a bad habit
As far as I know, no one would be looking at your tree generator skills
3DRyan: Thanks for the bevel tip. I know I'm probably shooting to low on poly count for this scene, I think I underestimated the amount of polygons to make a detailed game scene. I use to never really worry because I wasn't making a game render.
MAP: What Ivy generator?
Right on, thanks everyone. It will take some extra time then, I'll probably consider scraping a number of my planes and remaking the vine texture if I don't rework it. Everything else I'm getting to right now.
yes and no :P
If you would reproduce exactly my example u could use Illustrator or similar because I used only plain color.
But u would supposed to have some bark texture on that ivy :P
And that bark texture would need to follow the shape. Therefore doing it in 3d app is better because u can assign some simple tileable bark texture to your spline-generated mesh.
U could do those shapes with NURBS for example if maya gives u hard times getting thickness for splines. Maybe somehting like sweep or something similar to that...
How to render the result into alpha channel?
Quite simple.
U put your maya camera on top (or select top view or whichever is the appropriate view to see your splines flat) and render from that view. U just need to select image format that supports alpha channel (like TGA).
I worst case u can simply maximize your viewport and make screenshot from it. Make sure to have good contrast between splines and viewport background so that u can easily do a Maigc Wand in PS
***EDIT: another reason why using 3d for those splines is that Illustrator will give a flat shape (which is good for Alpha), but in the Diffuse those splines overlap and/or pasing above or under each other. And getting such information becomes possible because 3d render adds lighting, occlusion etc. to your image.
Tomorrow I think I know what I'll do regarding the splines. Your splines were generated polygons in Max right? That's part of what I was doing wrong. Ill play with Maya and get a 3D Render out and then follow these steps again. Thank you so much for your help. Also, I seem to be getting that weird error on some of my planes where the transparency isn't 100% although it should be. Definitely going to look into it. Managed to fix it before with my tree.
On the speedtree thing...I'm currently making an outdoor environment and I'm modeling everything by hand except for some trees and bushes that are made in speedtree. Is this really frowned upon in portfolio work? I just figured that since alot of studios use foliage generators, it wouldn't matter how I made them, just the end result. If it does mean something, I'm doing my own texture work on the bark and leaves....:poly124:
Matroskin, great post. Vig, watch out! Someone's gunning for your "elaborate tutorial with illustrations" crown.
Here are the shots. First the main shot:
The other:
Any and all critiques are appreciated. I really think the new branches make a large difference. I think the poly count is a little high maybe overall: 34,140 tris. While 1300 come from the new branches, a good couple of thousand come from the smoothed vine/trunks. Is that a ok number for a scene like this? Or am I worried about tri's too much; the vert count is 19,248.
Likewise you need to do what you did with the vines to your Pine Tree. It needs more volume, so I think that means more intersecting planes.
Keep at it, this will be a great piece when your done and you're learning a lot in the process. :thumbup:
And
Vic, is that about what you were talking about?
Any other crits are very welcome!
Thanks all!
Hit me with your best shots, I'm going to start UDK importing today. Which is going to be an awesome happy fun time!
The ivy looks way better, good job on that
I suggest that it does not stay the same thickness and density all the way till the top. Ivy grows with thinner branches towards the top in order to reach higher as fast as possible, and it starts having more branches where it has already "captured" the space. Moreover, the ivy would not grow that far above its support which is the wall in this case. Otherwise it start being a tree and looks too heavy.
fire escape railing and platform are too thick. Looks like they r made of concrete. The texture is weird as well. It feels like flozen.
I think u should use same texture and approach as u did with 45deg supprt and stairs' railing
The nice thing about how I'm importing this into UDK (object at a time, which is the right way no?) is that I can make most of these changes while importing. It'll take me a while to import anyway. I think.
Also Import it by object as long as that object uses the same material.
For instance if you just want to straight port it over to UDK and not have it editable you could select all you debris on the ground, export it. But now in UDK it is stuck like that, you can't move any individual piece and can only apply one material to it.
It all depends on wether you want the scene to be editable or exactly like your Maya one.
And Red.
If anyone has UDK tips feel free to drop em. Now I'm gonna do sleep.
I've had to rebuild almost all of my light maps, still have a few more to do. I mucked around with the lighting, read up on that and some on Lightmass. I've read on shaders some more and I'm going to go back and tweak some of them.
In short, still have a ton to do. I'm totally a UDK newb so here are a few questions:
Pixelated shadows: That should be better after I up the lightmap resolution?
How can I get some better defined shadows? Right now I have a skylight and a directional light both casting shadows.
For the background, should I just import the sphere from Maya wit a texture on it, or can I make something similar in here, like a skydome or skybox or something?
Any crits and tips I'd love. Even if I don't know what you're talking about.
EDIT* Is it possible to get the viewer or game to show the higher rez textures? It pretty much cuts everything in half.
To Do:
-Normal Map problem needs to be fixed.
-Keep working with different lighting setups for better shadows, would love to get the transparency details shadowed.
-Refine UDK materials
-Figure out how to get it so it's "playable" because I would like to take a screenie of that.
And for those who hate heavy post processing, or just hate it in general:
Comments an Critiques are always welcomed and requested. I'll just take them and put them into my word document containing my project outline.
Thanks all, you've been truly helpful and I am very grateful. Stay tuned for project two, should be starting in about a week (next week I'm going to be all over the Ohio Indiana area).