Cheers for pointing that out Rex, I will see if toning that down will make it better. However, it's not really the diffuse which is at fault here (it does not have that much lighting tbh) but the material.
Small update:
Here's a quick sculpt of a dead tree. I've never had a chance to sculpt wood before, but I am fairly satifsied with the results. Will do a test bake tomorrow; if it doesn't turn out well I will probably redo the sculpt. Still, feedback would be great
Ged: Good point. I was originally planning to simply paint it into diffuse but went back and sculpted some additional details. Will post the finished model tomorrow. I'm happy to hear you like my recent progress.
Small update; I finished the fallen trunk. I've got some empty space left on my texture sheet, so I will make a similar tree stump later on to fill the space.
It's 2048x2048 diffuse atm (due to it's length), but I'm thinking of going down one step. Tricount is around 850.
It uses the same material as rocks, so once I add procedural moss it shoud appear on the trunk as well.
As always, I'm looking forward to your feedback, guys
Love the renders, reminds me of Adams Evil Genius enviro.
Thanks mate Adam's recent work is a great source of inspiration and has encouraged me to go for a full blown environment myself; glad to hear that there are some similarities
Heh i thought the first screenshot was a reference image of that pathway... We're switching to UDK next year in our final game-art degree, can't wait, this is definetly an inspiration piece for a game-art student like myself.
When you get the time, would it be possible to go through your workflow for creating some of the foliage / trees?
That tree looks great textured although (and excuse me if I don't know what I'm talking about ) isn't 2048 huge for a single asset? I definitely think possibly staking UV's on the diffuse may be one way to reduce the size but then I don't know what you have planned.
In any case what you have so far is inspiring work and I'll definitely watch this one.
Mr Bear: Cheers. My workflow is fairly simple since I've been using SpeedTree for all of my trees. The most challenging part was creating the textures themselves; however, I found a good method of making them in SpeedTree. I will explain this further later on if you are interested.
paulsvoboda:
Good point paul; I was concerned about this myself. Now to think of it, that rock on the last screenshot uses 512x512, yet it does not seem to look any worse than the trunk. I will go down to 1024x1024 and blend in a detail map. Glad to hear you liked it, btw
easterislandnick:
Thanks I have one dominant directional light placed in my level. It's brightness is set fairly low (4.0) compared to the older maps included with UDK. My lightmass settings are based on the GDC demo, with small tweaks here and there.
To reduce the overall sharpness, I have added a full screen DOF effect - you might want to set DOF Focus Inner Radius to 0 and DOF Max Far Blur Amount to something between 0.01 and 0.1. Combined with fog and bloom it creates some nice atmosphere. You might also want to brighten up the shadows in postprocessing settings. Hope that helps.
Lovely stuff, enjoying the updates. The fallen log looks a bit more like petrified wood rather than anything fresher but given the stateliness of the whole scene it fits. Nice work.
gauss: Thanks gauss. Really glad you liked it I've always liked your work and comments like this make me feel like I'm moving in the right direction. Kudos.
spahr: Thanks mate I will try to make some more updates once I'm done with my uni work.
I don't have much to show at the moment; during the past few days I've been working mostly on the hedges, vines and some bushes. Once I'm done with these, I will try to work a little bit on the terrain surrounding the mansion and apply some basic materials to the mansion itself.
Hey guys, sorry for the late replies; I've been really preoccupied lately.
Anyway, here are some screenshots from the area surrounding the mansion. There's still plenty of work to be done and I certainly need a better variation of foliage but I figured out I should focus on the scene itself, rather than endlessly pimping single assets. Hopefully, in the following days I will finally do some progress on the garden and the mansion.
Looking forward to your crits guys
gsokol: Cheers mate. The process is pretty simple; I made a cylindrical basemesh in Max, which i brought into Mudbox. Using the Sculpt, Wax and Scrape brush I sculpted the major forms (very blobby at this point). Then, I have downloaded some bark textures from CGTextures and processed that through Crazybump, to get a displacement map. In mud, I projected the displacement onto my mesh, using strong brushes with low falloff. Once I got some bark detail, I created a new layer and used wax to emphasize the bigger forms once again; then simply adjusted opacity of that layer until it looked good. Finishing touches were done using Amplify brush. Texturing was done in Mud and the whole process was pretty straightforward.
premium: Hehe, cheers mate
3DRyan: The grass is pretty simple actually; just a couple of criss-crossing planes. Non-directional lighting mode works fairly well on it. You might want to use Match Colour function in Photoshop to make your ground and alpha'd grass have the same colour values.
ZacD: I see what you mean, though keep in mind that Im going for a dry, summer look. Some edges might be indeed a little bit too sharp, but guess there's no turning back now
The reason why I'm doing this in UDK is simply because I had no experience of using it prior to starting this scene. I thought it would be a good opportunity to learn it. Looking back, I think I would make much more progress in CryEngine; vegetation placement and terrain editing tools are far superior in Sandbox. Placing all this foliage is giving me a headache; foliage volumes and deco layers are hardly precise and Static Mesh Mode has to be tweaked every time I switch objects. Still, I love UDK's material editor and Global Illumination. Epic's documentation is also much more extensive than Crytek's. It would be great if object placement tools were the same as in Sandbox (substractive selection box, woot); putting it all together is generally much smoother in CE.
Then again, I originally planned to make a much smaller scene; had I known it would grow this big I would stick to CE.
Really love the way this piece is moving forward,
I'm presuming that's a river shown on your previous screen shots? Its looks to me like it could do with a bit of work with the material, specificly I think it would be a good idea to make it so near the edges it has a little transparency, this tutorial should explain how to do it, http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/UT3_Water_Reflection_Tutorial.html
Once you've done that you could go ahead and add a fog plane below it. Other than that little niggle, I really like the way this is going
myles: Thanks mate, glad to hear you like my progress. You're spot on; I was meaning to change the material later on, for now I'm simply using Epic's standard ocean material. I will certainly make my own sometime in the next few days; that tutorial you gave me will certainly come in handy. Thanks!
acapulco: Cheers man! Now I only have to finish the whole envo and put up that goddamn folio, haha. It will probably take me another month or so
Great update TnC (lol, thats short form for you name becuase I was too lazy to type the whole thing out...lol...)
Anyyyway, the foliage is looking great. Love the small brook too, nice touch. I don't really have anything to crit on. Maybe you would concider making a bee hive at some point? Just for some subtle detail.
bbob: Cheers mate I've got more free time nowadays, so I will make sure to make some good progress on this envo.
brandoom: Thanks Brandon, glad to hear you like it. I dig the idea of adding some beehives; it's something that people rarely put in this kind of environments. A beehive and some particle-bees might add more life to it. Kudos!
Thanks gamedev. I haven't touched the mansion in days I'm afraid. I've been putting it off all the time since I wasn't satisfied with how my foliage was turning out. Now that I'm fairly happy with the results I can get back to it. I'm planning to get some base textures placed onto it tomorrow.
This is UDK? That foliage is rendering far too well for me to think its UDK!
Was going to ask the same thing :P
Vegetation looks incredible! Can't wait to see this with more foliage and color variation. More flowers could really help too
What really would push this scene to higher levels would be to have more organic/decomposing matter on the ground imo. It looks a bit too clean and flat right now. Stuff like fallen leaves and small roots coming out of the earth would help. Here are some refs, hope it helps:
Thanks for the replies guys I'm glad to hear you like it.
Thanks Adam
I've spent quite a lot of time reverse-engineering GDC demo map, which came with the April beta. Epic had some sick ideas when making it; you should have a closer look at their materials. For instance; M_Gen_Foliage1_Trees_Leafy_Master looks pretty damn good on trees and I'm currently using a stripped down version of it. The sad part is that though I have managed to tweak it to my needs I don't fully understand how the Custom Lighting works. While the shader looks pretty much like the mix between these two examples, the UDN page doesn't fully explain what's happening there.
I feel a little bit embarrassed for using it; although I do understand how to replicate it, I would have never been able to come up with it myself.
The rest of the foliage uses something more conventional to get rid of the nasty lighting; diffuse plugged into emissive and multiplied by a value between 0 and 0.1 (kudos to Xoliul for looking that up). It works well for smaller plants such as bushes or grass, since they don't face the sun directly.
Cheers Minotaur,
I will certainly put some more fluff on the ground; fallen leaves and dead branches would add a bit more colour to the scene. But that will have to wait I'm afraid; once I'm done with my medieval cellar, the first thing I'm going to do is finish that bloody mansion :P It is supposed to be the subject of this environment after all :P
Since I'm still at the stage, where I merely bring the assets into UDK, I have given up on baked lighting for the time being. Otherwise, I would have to rebake it every time I make some major changes. Surprisingly, even when the scene is fully dynamically shadowed, the performance is reasonable; foliage heavy areas run at 25-30 fps with the exception of mansion itself (which is being reworked anyway) where FPS drops down to 15.
While I do plan on using static lighting on static objects, I believe that foliage might be better of using dynamic lighting. Otherwise I would need have to set my lightmaps to insane resolution to get the same level of quality.
I have yet to dig in deeper into these new shadows but I'm sure they can be properly optimized. Changing Cascade Distribution Exponent alone has a very dramatic effect both on performance and quality.
I would love to write a more lenghty post but it is really time for me to get some sleep before I go to work. I will try to give some more details on this once I finish my shift.
Replies
Small update:
Here's a quick sculpt of a dead tree. I've never had a chance to sculpt wood before, but I am fairly satifsied with the results. Will do a test bake tomorrow; if it doesn't turn out well I will probably redo the sculpt. Still, feedback would be great
really good progress on the scene overall
must say the rocks look nice ;D
Ged: Good point. I was originally planning to simply paint it into diffuse but went back and sculpted some additional details. Will post the finished model tomorrow. I'm happy to hear you like my recent progress.
Jungsik: Thanks! Glad to hear you like them.
It's 2048x2048 diffuse atm (due to it's length), but I'm thinking of going down one step. Tricount is around 850.
It uses the same material as rocks, so once I add procedural moss it shoud appear on the trunk as well.
As always, I'm looking forward to your feedback, guys
Defiantly watching this!
Thanks Jason! Glad to hear that from you; your Demon's Throne scene was simply amazing and I've been following your work for a while.
Thanks mate
When you get the time, would it be possible to go through your workflow for creating some of the foliage / trees?
Keep up the good work, will be watching!
In any case what you have so far is inspiring work and I'll definitely watch this one.
paulsvoboda:
Good point paul; I was concerned about this myself. Now to think of it, that rock on the last screenshot uses 512x512, yet it does not seem to look any worse than the trunk. I will go down to 1024x1024 and blend in a detail map. Glad to hear you liked it, btw
easterislandnick:
Thanks
To reduce the overall sharpness, I have added a full screen DOF effect - you might want to set DOF Focus Inner Radius to 0 and DOF Max Far Blur Amount to something between 0.01 and 0.1. Combined with fog and bloom it creates some nice atmosphere. You might also want to brighten up the shadows in postprocessing settings. Hope that helps.
looking good man. Not much input from me right now, just watching from afar. Love the colours in the renders, very rich but not overwhelming.
spahr: Thanks mate
I don't have much to show at the moment; during the past few days I've been working mostly on the hedges, vines and some bushes. Once I'm done with these, I will try to work a little bit on the terrain surrounding the mansion and apply some basic materials to the mansion itself.
Reminds me a lot of the biltmore mansion in NC. I took a lot of photos of the outside just in case I may make a scene like this.
I
is
envy
Anyway, here are some screenshots from the area surrounding the mansion. There's still plenty of work to be done and I certainly need a better variation of foliage but I figured out I should focus on the scene itself, rather than endlessly pimping single assets. Hopefully, in the following days I will finally do some progress on the garden and the mansion.
Looking forward to your crits guys
gsokol: Cheers mate. The process is pretty simple; I made a cylindrical basemesh in Max, which i brought into Mudbox. Using the Sculpt, Wax and Scrape brush I sculpted the major forms (very blobby at this point). Then, I have downloaded some bark textures from CGTextures and processed that through Crazybump, to get a displacement map. In mud, I projected the displacement onto my mesh, using strong brushes with low falloff. Once I got some bark detail, I created a new layer and used wax to emphasize the bigger forms once again; then simply adjusted opacity of that layer until it looked good. Finishing touches were done using Amplify brush. Texturing was done in Mud and the whole process was pretty straightforward.
premium: Hehe, cheers mate
3DRyan: The grass is pretty simple actually; just a couple of criss-crossing planes. Non-directional lighting mode works fairly well on it. You might want to use Match Colour function in Photoshop to make your ground and alpha'd grass have the same colour values.
ZacD: I see what you mean, though keep in mind that Im going for a dry, summer look. Some edges might be indeed a little bit too sharp, but guess there's no turning back now
Is there a reason your doing this in UDK as i noticed your previous work was in CE2?
The reason why I'm doing this in UDK is simply because I had no experience of using it prior to starting this scene. I thought it would be a good opportunity to learn it. Looking back, I think I would make much more progress in CryEngine; vegetation placement and terrain editing tools are far superior in Sandbox. Placing all this foliage is giving me a headache; foliage volumes and deco layers are hardly precise and Static Mesh Mode has to be tweaked every time I switch objects. Still, I love UDK's material editor and Global Illumination. Epic's documentation is also much more extensive than Crytek's. It would be great if object placement tools were the same as in Sandbox (substractive selection box, woot); putting it all together is generally much smoother in CE.
Then again, I originally planned to make a much smaller scene; had I known it would grow this big I would stick to CE.
I'm presuming that's a river shown on your previous screen shots? Its looks to me like it could do with a bit of work with the material, specificly I think it would be a good idea to make it so near the edges it has a little transparency, this tutorial should explain how to do it, http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/UT3_Water_Reflection_Tutorial.html
Once you've done that you could go ahead and add a fog plane below it. Other than that little niggle, I really like the way this is going
acapulco: Cheers man! Now I only have to finish the whole envo and put up that goddamn folio, haha. It will probably take me another month or so
Anyyyway, the foliage is looking great. Love the small brook too, nice touch. I don't really have anything to crit on. Maybe you would concider making a bee hive at some point? Just for some subtle detail.
Looking good though, can't wait to see more
brandoom: Thanks Brandon, glad to hear you like it. I dig the idea of adding some beehives; it's something that people rarely put in this kind of environments. A beehive and some particle-bees might add more life to it. Kudos!
Was going to ask the same thing :P
Vegetation looks incredible! Can't wait to see this with more foliage and color variation. More flowers could really help too
What really would push this scene to higher levels would be to have more organic/decomposing matter on the ground imo. It looks a bit too clean and flat right now. Stuff like fallen leaves and small roots coming out of the earth would help. Here are some refs, hope it helps:
Thanks Adam
I've spent quite a lot of time reverse-engineering GDC demo map, which came with the April beta. Epic had some sick ideas when making it; you should have a closer look at their materials. For instance; M_Gen_Foliage1_Trees_Leafy_Master looks pretty damn good on trees and I'm currently using a stripped down version of it. The sad part is that though I have managed to tweak it to my needs I don't fully understand how the Custom Lighting works. While the shader looks pretty much like the mix between these two examples, the UDN page doesn't fully explain what's happening there.
I feel a little bit embarrassed for using it; although I do understand how to replicate it, I would have never been able to come up with it myself.
The rest of the foliage uses something more conventional to get rid of the nasty lighting; diffuse plugged into emissive and multiplied by a value between 0 and 0.1 (kudos to Xoliul for looking that up). It works well for smaller plants such as bushes or grass, since they don't face the sun directly.
Cheers Minotaur,
I will certainly put some more fluff on the ground; fallen leaves and dead branches would add a bit more colour to the scene. But that will have to wait I'm afraid; once I'm done with my medieval cellar, the first thing I'm going to do is finish that bloody mansion :P It is supposed to be the subject of this environment after all :P
Xendance is spot on, here's the note on UDN
Since I'm still at the stage, where I merely bring the assets into UDK, I have given up on baked lighting for the time being. Otherwise, I would have to rebake it every time I make some major changes. Surprisingly, even when the scene is fully dynamically shadowed, the performance is reasonable; foliage heavy areas run at 25-30 fps with the exception of mansion itself (which is being reworked anyway) where FPS drops down to 15.
While I do plan on using static lighting on static objects, I believe that foliage might be better of using dynamic lighting. Otherwise I would need have to set my lightmaps to insane resolution to get the same level of quality.
I have yet to dig in deeper into these new shadows but I'm sure they can be properly optimized. Changing Cascade Distribution Exponent alone has a very dramatic effect both on performance and quality.
I would love to write a more lenghty post but it is really time for me to get some sleep before I go to work. I will try to give some more details on this once I finish my shift.