WIP Village
Hey everyone, I've been lurking here for a while and want to get going on a new 3d environment for my portfolio. Here's my concept. I will start out in Maya then take it into unreal. All C&C is welcome of corse, whether it is about composition, the buildings themselves, anything.
NOTE: I know it's a bit barren right now, I didn't want to spend too much time filling it with props as that will be easier to do in 3d anyways.
NOTE: I know it's a bit barren right now, I didn't want to spend too much time filling it with props as that will be easier to do in 3d anyways.
Replies
I think some cows or wildlife would enhance the scene. Humans obviously would, but if you don't want to do that I think a cow or two would be nice.
Let's see some 3d!:)
Looks great none the less. Makes me happy
@Frump - Ya, I have thought about some cows and pigs and stuff. Once I get all the major elements in and the props, I may add some animals, maybe even simple characters. I will need to concept some out first, so I guess I'll just worry about that when I get to it.
@Pbcrazy - My 2d skills are a bit weak. I know the perspective on the church is definitely off. The main reason I stopped working on the painting was that I felt I should move into the 3d, as I'm not looking for concept art jobs. But I may go back to the painting later and fix it up so that I can throw it in the gallery along side my stills of this scene. Glad it made you happy too. I like post apocalyptic, grungy scenes as much as the next guy, but colourful scenes are great too.
@travesty - Thanks for the crit. I want to put some houses and a blacksmith behind the "camera" of the painting, in the lower part of the village. A stream with a little bridge is something I want as well, but water scares me, hopefully it won't be too hard to pull off in Unreal.
@gsokol - Thanks. Ya that's kind of what I was going for. The main things in my mind when starting this were saturated, fantasy, cartoony, happy. Although I'm not really a fan of them anymore, the Pokemon games were something that I spent a lot of time in, and they have an interesting look. Fable 2 had a big influence on me as well, although I wouldn't really say that my scene looks much like Fable 2.
Anyways, I'm not sure if I will be able to post anything until Saturday. I'm trying to hand paint all the textures, so I'm creating some big base textures right now, and it's taking a while. So hopefully I will have a nice building ready to show this weekend. Thanks again all.
@DarthNater - Thanks. With the contrast thing, I'm kind of not sure. Just gonna keep moving forward and see how the scene ends up looking in Unreal.
Small update, nothing major. Just want to get into the habit of posting progress.
i would suggest swapping the position of the car and the tree round, it would make a better focal point, and perhaps curving the whole scene around the camera more, would make it a touch more organic feeling its a too grid like in layout at the moment IMO
@SHEPEIRO I agree completely about the tree and the wagon. I'll make that change in the 3d version. Same goes for the grid - ness of the scene.
Right now the roof looks good, but it has way higher detail frequency than the rest of the texture. You might want to make the roof tiles a lot larger and infrequent.
The wood is an overall improvement from before, but it now looks milky. Add more contrast and get some sharper, darker cracks and veins in there to really make it pop.
I like the rocks you have around the bottom of the building, you should try to use them more around the walls of the building. Which leads to my next crit. The walls are really bare. I'm not sure what you could add to the walls to make them more interesting but I'm sure you can think of something. Don't be afraid to create some alpha planes over top of things for unique detail that won't repeat all over your uvs.
It's looking preetty goood. Hopefully some of this is helpful. Let's see more.:)
keep it up!
@Frump The thing with the roof being higher detail is that I think most of my camera shots will be tilted down, making the roof fairly prominent. I agree though, I could probably make the shingles a bit bigger.
I agree about the wood. Painting wood from scratch was way harder than I thought it would be.
Those damn walls. I actually gathered quite a bit of reference for the walls, both real life materials, and some in game stuff, and honestly it's been the most annoying thing. None of the stuff I have seen in games looks like a real material, and they all seem a bit too simple (low frequency, low noise) for what I'm doing. At the same time, the real life stuff doesn't exactly match what I want either. Does the alpha plane thing work in UDK? Or will it create weird shadows? I dunno, maybe I'm being an idiot, I'll do some more work on it this week. Thanks mang
Please critique, and thanks for all the posts so far
I am really liking the scene so far, if you continue to push the buildings in terms of contrast, get some nice colours in there, it should work wonders to make the scene look more appealing.
Everything is looking good though!
i think either it should be more clearer that the stones are actually modelled or you could just delete them and bake it into one flat wall texture.
@marq4porsche I'm working on the rocks now. I painted the walls just before you posted. I think I'm going to take it into unreal and see how it looks before painting grass or dirt on top of my textures.
@AstericAs requested here is the diffuse map with UVs:
@chaosquack @Acumen Thanks guys. Ya I have been critiqued on the rocks by a few friends as well, so I will definitely make it my goal to fix those up by the end of the weekend. I'm going to try removing some geo, the alpha plane method, and just putting them into the wall texture.
@travesty Ya I was inspired by their concept art when they dumped a bunch of it on conceptart.org a while back.
that is a huge texture with alot of waste, for starters there is not enough difference in a lot of the panels, window frames, glass panels roof tops etc slap them all on the same part of the T page and you will save possibly 2/3rds of the texture
in fact i would split the texture up into several textures that could tile wouldnt look any different and when it comes to making new houses its easy to swap them out....
if your going to do it like this then you need to be using all that uniqueness, which currently you arent and i dont see how it would be necessary
the base stone work could aslo be a laterally tiling texture with an alpha applied to a floating poly, no need for that dense mesh
also the roof textures is too dark in the shadows, lighten them up
Any C&C is welcome as usual, and hopefully I will have another update within the next week.
Made the garden shed that's in the foreground of my concept. It's not finished. I still need to put the window on it, and there is a fair amount of texturing to do still. Right now, it's sitting on it's own 512 x 512 diffuse. Can't remember the tris off the top of my head. Anyways, here it is. C&C plz
When you say "it's sitting on its own 512 x 512 diffuse", I'm assuming it means you are still giving everything unique texture space? Like Shepeiro said, why not work with tiling textures instead? It'd be faster to slap it on the similar buildings, you'd probably save on texture sizes and it would also make resizing the roof, for example, a piece of cake.
Also with that in mind, You can use more polygons in areas where the camera get closer. On Warhammer, we'd often put more detail in the ground level of buildings and slowly work our way up to mostly silhouette detail.
The pixel density is actually pretty close, maybe the wood is slightly smaller. I think the main thing that you guys are seeing (I see it now as well) is just that the "style" that this one is painted in is sort of different from the rest of the building. I guess more specifically, the noise frequency is higher in the other elements. Also, the texture has suffered a bit from me scaling it down from the House's 1024 texture. I'll try to fix this up asap.
About the tiling textures thing:
I can see how it would be efficient, but I think I would loose more than I would gain. I would lose most of my dirt and damage uniqueness, I wouldn't be able to paint the ambient occlusion/shadows on the textures, and a lot of the buildings would end up looking the same.
On a more whiny note, I have not done that kind of workflow before, and I plan to take this into UDK, which is another thing I have not done before. The ground textures and paths and stuff will definitely be tiling, but I think making unique textures for the buildings is fine. Plus I have fairly limited time since I'm working full time (not an art job) and I really want to try to get this done.
Sorry, hope that didn't sound too defensive. I just want to play it safe and go with what I know for this scene. I may try a tiling texture workflow in the future, but for now, I'm gonna stick with the single page diffuse and spec maps for each building.
What I would suggest though is that since the house and the shed are pretty much identical when it comes to the textures, just use the house texture for the shed. Overlap your shed UVs over your house UVs. Since you're already copying from one texture to the other anyway, you'd save a lot of work and lose no detail.
If you want to have some unique parts for the shed (for example the roof), just make a small separate texture with only those new parts and apply it as a second material.