lol. no im not being sarcastic, it really does look great! keep it up! I still have tons to learn! especially with low poly modeling, texturing and rendering... sorry if it came across that way.
busy with an art test but had enough time to play with the lighting and post on this, its not quite there yet but Im starting to like it
thanks BigErn and JonathanF your too kind ha
theres a wierd bit of smoothing going on on my pillars! I assumed the normal map would sort the fact that its just got one smooth group on the pillar out but I guess udk doesnt work that way
I'm really liking the new render style, much more evocative of the original games. I agree with Sampson, you could make the metal bits on the tiling a bit less in your face by either darkening the concrete it's connected to or making the metal bits smaller. I seem to remember the water having some lighting under it, like a public pool would have. Keep up the awesome work and good luck with that art test.
. I seem to remember the water having some lighting under it, like a public pool would have. Keep up the awesome work and good luck with that art test.
Yeah I definitely want to have lights under the water, not sure how to achieve this, maybe luminance materials on some long rectangles?
Ive made a brick wall with 2 variations and reworked the tiles a bit but I think I will ultimately need some new tiles for the floor.
I want to have a kind of watery/damp feeling to some of the textures, like in batman arkham but a bit more gritty than this screenshot as this is smooth tiles. http://videogamesdaily.com/content/batman-arkham-asylum-5.jpg I assume its a cube map and some kind of noise texture added to the specular channel somehow...anyone done this kind of thing before?
yeah I got my mom to buy me syndicate wars when I was about 13 used to play syndicate plus before that lol, megabiv I plan on putting screens in there but I dont know if I can get away with putting those in although that would be cool haha.
thanks warby and creation oh and electro
to play syndicate you might need the application dosbox for windows, dont know if it will work.
I believe what he was referring to was most likely the chromatic aberration effect; it also seems to have some type of sharpen on it as well, although that might be a by product of the CA... I am interested in the render setup, because I too have noticed this on others renders but don't know if it's a render thing (like a vray setting, etc), or a photoshop plugin like PTlens. Any info would be valuable, I've sent PMs to many artists about this but no one has spilled the beans :P
hmmm weird smoothing on your pillars..... ive had this befor....
looks like its smoothing from your low poly coming through, i wouldnt split the LM uvs here, are your LMs directional? what does it look like lit by a realtime light (this would test if its the asset ro the LM)
some LM renderers dont take into account the normal maps when rendering so large differences in angle can be problematic, easy fix would be to re-bake the low with a double chamfer rather than a single, this should fix it and doesnt really add much in this case, other wise you could try hacking it, if you can render the LMs with hard edges here then soften again after, though this may be impossible as you are doing it in udk not max or maya
another possiblity (think its this now i think about it) is that the LM resoloution here is too low on the pillars therefore at each edge there is 1 pixel across two sides giving you an innacurate normal offset in the pixel shader, you could try upping the horizontal resoloution and reducing the vertical in the tpage or just upping the res altogether, it does seam a bit low maybe
Thanks for the tips Shep I tried upping the lightmap res and changing to a dynamic movable spotlight but it didnt make any difference, I think it must be the smoothing groups from max. Ill have to add a chamfer or inset the flat area or something. Ill figure something out
Oh and mattq86 thanks for the luck the art test went well
good stuff man!
i say dramatic-ize the lighting more, if u muted it post-proc. then leave out some light-beams, volumetric style. give the air a little buzz
Anything that mixed syndicate and bladerunner sounds awesome by my book.
Pillar looks good, i really like the dangling wires, although they look like they need to be elaborated on the give them some purpose.
ha ha in the cryo vat image it says the robot has 3 dicks
hey people thanks for you comments and crits, I will take them into consideration when I next get some time on this, might be a little while before I get a chance as Im starting a new job and moving house at the moment.
I plan on making some windows for the building blocks around the square next and then a whole lot of holographic TV display things with more wires to scatter around the environment
Finally had a day to work on this, reworked some stuff and added in some walls and windows and got light shafts displaying, removed post processing completely, might go back and do some post when its nearly done. Next step is roofs and some doors and a cluster of wierd scifi tv things.
I should probably add some lights to make the lighting tower tops more visible but the light shafts seem to create blackness around themselves somehow?
I might not have time to make a massive scene out of this as originally planned so I might just make a mini scene within this environment.
ged, i think u've went overboard with the lights, way too shiny. the muted colors of the prev post where it. i mean, it all depends how much u want to capture the synd look, staying true or making it more q3-ish (which isnt bad!)
regardless, i say remove the disco lights from the wall (on some areas its just this murky brown = good) and grey-up the black vertical stuff (pattern doesnt fit anything else, not by shape and not by contrast)
Syndicate is too damned good. I suck at the original, hardcore though. I only got to the second level, ever.
And syndicate wars is broken for some reason
Still, glad to see someone showing some love for the game.
ged, i think u've went overboard with the lights, way too shiny. the muted colors of the prev post where it. i mean, it all depends how much u want to capture the synd look, staying true or making it more q3-ish (which isnt bad!)
regardless, i say remove the disco lights from the wall (on some areas its just this murky brown = good) and grey-up the black vertical stuff (pattern doesnt fit anything else, not by shape and not by contrast)
probably cause I removed all the post processing and added lighting effects haha yeah it does look like a disco with all those lights, I will tone them down and add post processing on the colours at the end so it will look a bit more like the old screenshots.
Thanks for the comments Gmanx,Honkey and Wyldcard
Question: how do I get tiledshot 4 to work properly in this new build of udk? it seems to put a vignette on each tile destroying the image with a vignette grid.
Hey guys Ive decided to come back to this and block out the environment properly this time. Sorry there hasnt been an update in so long, life gets in the way hehe, moved house changed job sold 10million apps lol.
Only problem now is that Im stuck between 3 software choices. At work I used to use cinema 4D but at home I would use 3dsmax to be more knowledgeable about industry standard software but now my new work might switch to maya soon =0
Anyone got a good tip for maintaining scale between max and udk so that you can make your objects edges snap to the grid perfectly? Ive set my grid to 2.54 centimeters and it seems to work
I was talking about the original a couple of days ago to my friends... absolutely loved it... spent way too many hours getting peons to become my meat shields
Incidently, how did things with Jagex go? Just wondering as I have some of my friends going for some kind of 2nd programming test next week.
thanks yeah Im following that now. Gonna start fresh on my blocking out of the level.
Badgerbaiter, I never heard back from Jagex, dont know why but it doesnt matter now as Ive been working at a startup for the last year and now Im more or less the most senior artist in the company.
heres my basic blockout of the environment, its meant to look good rather than play well so its not a very complicated play space. Still got lots to do! might get a chance to work on this again in 3 weeks when Im done snowboarding in france.
Unfortunately I cant do reflections like that, turns out I dont have a gfx card capable of doing dx11, Ive got a geforce gtx 260 and it runs really well so Im not going to replace it
Cryengine does something very similar automatically in dx9. no need to place any actors.
something to remember for my next project then, Ive just about nailed the look I want now, got some emulated wetness through rendertotexture stuff and some messing about with materials. Ill post the screens soon, still gotta make some glowy scifi screens/cameras to place around the scene.
still a bit confused about making the rendertotexture blurred through a post process chain, its not really blurring it, more like creating duplicates of the render and spreading them out too much. Also trying to figure out how to make a mask so that it looks like puddles of wetness.
Heres my latest efforts, still struggling with the reflections, any idea what to add to my reflection (render to texture) to boost it when I plug it into the spec channel? I want it to have significantly brighter reflections
Also wip techno signage has no screen model yet so its just kinda hovering in the air for now.
looking good ged, the atmosphere n lighting is much better
put some dummy buildings around (can be same one just parts of it over and over so its higher), that can really pull it together into a city
also, try eliminating those clean surfaces like the road lights or.. stripes. they're not really illuminating to the point of being so shiny clean, so dirty em up a lil
Ah, using the cubemap in specular channel only works with the image-based reflections in DX11 really, add the cubemap to your diffuse channel instead and control it with multiplys : ))
Hey thanks shotgun and snefer, took your advice on some of the new stuff Ive added. Not done yet by any means but heres another video to show my progress.
Im using udk generated lightmap uvs, is that the problem? these lines only show up when I render a lightmap so Im guessing so.
Pretty much. UDK's automatic unwrap tool produces very messy lightmaps by default.
But
In the recent builds of UDK, Epic added an option to create Lightmap UV's based on your texture unwrap
In the Generate Unique UV's tab you just need to select the "Layout Using 0 channel" and it will try to pack your texture UV's within the 0-1 space without producing overlaps.
It's not perfect and in complex scenarios you would still want to unwrap your lightmaps manually, but depeding on your texture unwrap it can do a decent job.
general question: how do I make some things glow more even if they are far away eg neon billboards? I cant seem to find bloom settings that help and I think my height fog is also killing the effect.
You can get to bloom and other post effects in view/World properties/Rendering/Default post process, if memory serves. You could also change the defaul post process chain, If you were creating a series of maps that you wanted to all have the same properties.
To make things glow more, Height fog could kill the effect depending on how far away it is. as long as you dont get too carried away you can just crank emmissive up some. I'm not a pro in UDK , But thats what i would try.
Past that there might be some post process values you can tweak, or manipulate the fog a bit.
This is really hard not to like ) I just wish there was... moar!
Reflections looking very nice btw. Make some generic bg buildings and flesh the scene out a little... With this much fog you could really get tons of mileage out of an instanced cityscape There's also a depth-node in UDK that you might want to look into, like multiplying the intensity of your billboard emissive over distance, if that's what you were looking for. There's something about the ground tiles though that makes it come off as a miniature bathroom... it might be true to the original (too lazy to check), but I'd try switching it up with something else to see if the scale reads better.
thanks for the tips s620 and rasmus. Happy you are enjoying it, I may still try changing the floor tiles not sure what would look good though as plain old concrete squares sounds a tad dull and not very futuristic, maybe the hex tiles just need to be scaled up a bit. Still gonna make one more building out of my tiling pieces already in engine but after lots of learning Im finally starting to understand out kismet and matinee Im actually pretty happy with this result.(damn mouse cursor was on video grr)
Awesome stuff Ged. Looks just like the Syndicate I remember. Which is odd, because I was 6 when I played it for the first time
I think that reflections might be a tad too strong. Are you masking them out by a specular map?
Thanks, yeah I must have been about 12 years old when I was playing syndicate.
I am masking them with a black and white tiling splat texture but I found it really hard to get a shader that looks right as Im in dx9, the specular creates a large dot effect which I dont want and close object reflections look good but objects in the distance seem to reflect just as much as objects that are close and I dont really want that.
Nice stuff man. You're ahead of me. I remember I was about to do a scene from the old Syndicate too. You definitely conveyed the atmosphere! I have one concern though. You put a lot of job into your light pillars and road but surrounding buildings look a bit lowres. Put some diversity on them. Keep up the good work.
Replies
thanks BigErn and JonathanF your too kind ha
theres a wierd bit of smoothing going on on my pillars!
Yeah I definitely want to have lights under the water, not sure how to achieve this, maybe luminance materials on some long rectangles?
Ive made a brick wall with 2 variations and reworked the tiles a bit but I think I will ultimately need some new tiles for the floor.
I want to have a kind of watery/damp feeling to some of the textures, like in batman arkham but a bit more gritty than this screenshot as this is smooth tiles. http://videogamesdaily.com/content/batman-arkham-asylum-5.jpg I assume its a cube map and some kind of noise texture added to the specular channel somehow...anyone done this kind of thing before?
I believe what he was referring to was most likely the chromatic aberration effect; it also seems to have some type of sharpen on it as well, although that might be a by product of the CA... I am interested in the render setup, because I too have noticed this on others renders but don't know if it's a render thing (like a vray setting, etc), or a photoshop plugin like PTlens. Any info would be valuable, I've sent PMs to many artists about this but no one has spilled the beans :P
looks like its smoothing from your low poly coming through, i wouldnt split the LM uvs here, are your LMs directional? what does it look like lit by a realtime light (this would test if its the asset ro the LM)
some LM renderers dont take into account the normal maps when rendering so large differences in angle can be problematic, easy fix would be to re-bake the low with a double chamfer rather than a single, this should fix it and doesnt really add much in this case, other wise you could try hacking it, if you can render the LMs with hard edges here then soften again after, though this may be impossible as you are doing it in udk not max or maya
another possiblity (think its this now i think about it) is that the LM resoloution here is too low on the pillars therefore at each edge there is 1 pixel across two sides giving you an innacurate normal offset in the pixel shader, you could try upping the horizontal resoloution and reducing the vertical in the tpage or just upping the res altogether, it does seam a bit low maybe
Oh and mattq86 thanks for the luck the art test went well
Looking cool though!
i say dramatic-ize the lighting more, if u muted it post-proc. then leave out some light-beams, volumetric style. give the air a little buzz
Pillar looks good, i really like the dangling wires, although they look like they need to be elaborated on the give them some purpose.
ha ha in the cryo vat image it says the robot has 3 dicks
I plan on making some windows for the building blocks around the square next and then a whole lot of holographic TV display things with more wires to scatter around the environment
I should probably add some lights to make the lighting tower tops more visible but the light shafts seem to create blackness around themselves somehow?
I might not have time to make a massive scene out of this as originally planned so I might just make a mini scene within this environment.
danananananana
dun dun dun
danananananana
dun dun dun
For anyone that doesn't know
[ame]
The combat music starts pretty much right at the start.
regardless, i say remove the disco lights from the wall (on some areas its just this murky brown = good) and grey-up the black vertical stuff (pattern doesnt fit anything else, not by shape and not by contrast)
And syndicate wars is broken for some reason
Still, glad to see someone showing some love for the game.
probably cause I removed all the post processing and added lighting effects haha yeah it does look like a disco with all those lights, I will tone them down and add post processing on the colours at the end so it will look a bit more like the old screenshots.
Thanks for the comments Gmanx,Honkey and Wyldcard
Question: how do I get tiledshot 4 to work properly in this new build of udk? it seems to put a vignette on each tile destroying the image with a vignette grid.
[ame]
I think the floodlights look about right. If you look at any screenshot of Syndicate Wars the lighting is really bright at the source.
Only problem now is that Im stuck between 3 software choices. At work I used to use cinema 4D but at home I would use 3dsmax to be more knowledgeable about industry standard software but now my new work might switch to maya soon =0
Anyone got a good tip for maintaining scale between max and udk so that you can make your objects edges snap to the grid perfectly? Ive set my grid to 2.54 centimeters and it seems to work
You might find this page useful.
Incidently, how did things with Jagex go? Just wondering as I have some of my friends going for some kind of 2nd programming test next week.
thanks yeah Im following that now. Gonna start fresh on my blocking out of the level.
Badgerbaiter, I never heard back from Jagex, dont know why but it doesnt matter now as Ive been working at a startup for the last year and now Im more or less the most senior artist in the company.
heres my basic blockout of the environment, its meant to look good rather than play well so its not a very complicated play space. Still got lots to do! might get a chance to work on this again in 3 weeks when Im done snowboarding in france.
Nice looking block out so far!
wish I could figure out a good way of making the floor look like its lightly dusted in some reflections from water puddles.
heres the modular pieces I used to create this other than the light towers.
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ImageBasedReflections.html
something to remember for my next project then, Ive just about nailed the look I want now, got some emulated wetness through rendertotexture stuff and some messing about with materials. Ill post the screens soon, still gotta make some glowy scifi screens/cameras to place around the scene.
still a bit confused about making the rendertotexture blurred through a post process chain, its not really blurring it, more like creating duplicates of the render and spreading them out too much. Also trying to figure out how to make a mask so that it looks like puddles of wetness.
Also wip techno signage has no screen model yet so its just kinda hovering in the air for now.
[ame="
put some dummy buildings around (can be same one just parts of it over and over so its higher), that can really pull it together into a city
also, try eliminating those clean surfaces like the road lights or.. stripes. they're not really illuminating to the point of being so shiny clean, so dirty em up a lil
http://youtu.be/a3WmpC8aq9U
[ame="
Quite exited about the new game
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=AxiD5Bd9Lh0
Im using udk generated lightmap uvs, is that the problem? these lines only show up when I render a lightmap so Im guessing so.
Pretty much. UDK's automatic unwrap tool produces very messy lightmaps by default.
But
In the recent builds of UDK, Epic added an option to create Lightmap UV's based on your texture unwrap
In the Generate Unique UV's tab you just need to select the "Layout Using 0 channel" and it will try to pack your texture UV's within the 0-1 space without producing overlaps.
It's not perfect and in complex scenarios you would still want to unwrap your lightmaps manually, but depeding on your texture unwrap it can do a decent job.
ah I see! thanks tea! Ive hooked it up and it works almost perfectly. I will post up another vid soon to show my progress. Thanks a lot Noodle!
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and some screenshots so you can see it high rez.
To make things glow more, Height fog could kill the effect depending on how far away it is. as long as you dont get too carried away you can just crank emmissive up some. I'm not a pro in UDK , But thats what i would try.
Past that there might be some post process values you can tweak, or manipulate the fog a bit.
Looking awsome BTW
Reflections looking very nice btw. Make some generic bg buildings and flesh the scene out a little... With this much fog you could really get tons of mileage out of an instanced cityscape
[ame="
[ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=wse3kXme1Vg[/ame]
I think that reflections might be a tad too strong. Are you masking them out by a specular map?
Thanks, yeah I must have been about 12 years old when I was playing syndicate.
I am masking them with a black and white tiling splat texture but I found it really hard to get a shader that looks right as Im in dx9, the specular creates a large dot effect which I dont want and close object reflections look good but objects in the distance seem to reflect just as much as objects that are close and I dont really want that.
For spec you need a Blinn model instead of a Phong.
Check this shader : http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=101107.
... let's install Dos-Box for playing to this good old great game.