Chapel Ruins: Mini environment
polycounter lvl 10
Hey everyone! I've been hard at work on my third project for a while now, and while I was digging up references for the ruins of the chapel for part of the larger scene I have planned, I swung directions and decided to do a much smaller environment for the moment. I really want to be applying for Environment artist jobs now and I feel that this final project added to my portfolio will help me out.
Anyway, this is made with assets I plan to use again in my larger scale Fantasy setting environment. The back story for this chapel is that it's obviously really old and just in ruins. The triangular altar is a symbol of what these people held dear: They worshiped/venerated triangular shapes. That's why some of the items in the ruins are triangular in some way. I just thought that perhaps I should rearrange the chapel to more triangular than a rectangle. If you think that's a good idea that's extra votes. Maybe I'll mess with that after the rest of the items are ready to go.
The style I've been sort of aiming for is to be similar to Oblivion/Fable. Mostly Oblivion when it comes to the object color. I think LoTR, strong yellow lights to symbolize good, has played a part too, and that's why the light is strong and yellow. God rays are also fun to play with.
I have some assets left to texture and I have to re unwrap and re High poly the back wall. Lighting, Post Process, and further texture and object refinements are still WIP as well, though further along. The trees are something that I'd like a few suggestions on. My leaves are kind of high poly and I have a plan to reduce it (and fix the light map errors on half of the leaves) but I wanted crits/suggestions form you guys first. I also plan to add some extra items to the scene as well after the meat and potatoes are done.
Anyway, this is made with assets I plan to use again in my larger scale Fantasy setting environment. The back story for this chapel is that it's obviously really old and just in ruins. The triangular altar is a symbol of what these people held dear: They worshiped/venerated triangular shapes. That's why some of the items in the ruins are triangular in some way. I just thought that perhaps I should rearrange the chapel to more triangular than a rectangle. If you think that's a good idea that's extra votes. Maybe I'll mess with that after the rest of the items are ready to go.
The style I've been sort of aiming for is to be similar to Oblivion/Fable. Mostly Oblivion when it comes to the object color. I think LoTR, strong yellow lights to symbolize good, has played a part too, and that's why the light is strong and yellow. God rays are also fun to play with.
I have some assets left to texture and I have to re unwrap and re High poly the back wall. Lighting, Post Process, and further texture and object refinements are still WIP as well, though further along. The trees are something that I'd like a few suggestions on. My leaves are kind of high poly and I have a plan to reduce it (and fix the light map errors on half of the leaves) but I wanted crits/suggestions form you guys first. I also plan to add some extra items to the scene as well after the meat and potatoes are done.
Replies
K done.
This is a nice start, but I have a couple of crits. First you need to dial back that sun, while it's nice to try to give an ambience to your scene, keep in mind if you're using it for portfolio work the potential employer wants to be able to see your work and you should present it in a way that does just that.
How are you doing your leaves? Can I suggest that you just use planes with alphas? I'd break up the canopy more too, it looks very blocky and unnatural.
It's nice to hear that you're using zbrush in your work! Now here is the bad thing... I can't really tell that you're using zbrush in your work. I wouldn't be afraid of throwing more polys into the scene, but only where it is needed to help define the shapes of things.
Careful about the textures you use too, since you're doing an outdoor scene everything can start to look pretty noisy, so you might want to go in and try to reduce that a bit.
I'd grab a few more reference pictures, and good outdoor CG scenes to work from while you do this. I think you'll be able to see what they did right and emulate that but put your own spin on it. Remember what I say... you need to be producing work as good or better than what is currently out there now, or at least aiming for that. Take a look at Crysis/uncharted 2 they have beautiful ourdoor areas.
The stuff that is working for you right now (or at least I think damn sun) is the grass/flowers/boulders.
the grass looks pretty decent but really work on the tree alpha and texture. the texture on that ruins piece on the right on the foreground seems really low res. looks like the scene is promising man, lookin forward to the next update.
PixelMasher, the texture on the ruin is a 1024 map. Textures have actually been my enemy on this piece so far. I'm thinking that I might run back over all those ruin pieces and see what I can do about the textures after I get the rest of the scene (what you see that is) more up to snuff. God rays...yea, I'll fix that down the road here lol.
Trees: They are alpha's planes. Problem is that they are a bunch of alpha planes grouped in Maya in a particular configuration and then rotated and whatnot for variation. The problem is that they barely look ok and I know that. They also push the polycount of the tree up into the 20K range (for the Oak trees, the Aspen's are about 9K? ). My first run with the trees was not so good, the textures were huge on the planes of which there weren't a whole lot, so yea. That's a big hurdle.
Not fixed:
-Anything Tree related
-Lighting, light shafts look better due to camera angle.
-Back wall was edited but still is messed up. Need to fix it again.
-Post process was not touched
-Fog was not touched
That should do it. Please let me know what you think and I'll post a bit more in detail/answer questions and comments tomorrow.
Thank you guys!
I feel that I'm going to remove the arch so that the view I intend to show is better. I don't want to have to be fighting it when only a small portion of it will be in the shot. If I back away then I see less of the inside of the ruins unless I chose to do some fun scaling which I don't feel is a good idea.
I think the specularity on the right side wall with the square in it needs tweaking.
Does anyone have any suggestions for how to work with lightshafts effectively? And tree building too, I'd like to avoid using speed tree for the experience of modeling a tree myself. I think I really just need to fix the leaves but I'm not 100% sure on that.
the leaves on the trees look better ... you need to add lighting int he background its gray atm..
Cheers..
This isn't exactly the final camera view, this is more to show the kind souls of Polycount what's going on. I wanted darker overall lighting in the environment while the middle area was warmer and better lit. I have done this through the use of two spotlights shining down on the middle of the scene, while the DDS is casting on everything and giving the nice God Rays. So far I'm pretty happy with it, I might boost the intensity of the spots a bit. Only the DDS is doing anything with the shadows.
A problem I'm having is that arch. Before I started adjusting the lights I had no problems with the normal maps or the color maps or anything else. My previous setup was point light in the middle of the scene and a point light outside the scene casting on the arch. Unfortunately, I can't use light inclusion volumes anymore I don't think. I've looked around. Are there any suggestions? Does UDK have a similar ability to light link like Maya does?
Second problem: My own skydome/box likes to block out my light shafts. Lighting is fine and dandy but it just won't work. I can use an Epic skybox and it half works, the color is no longer the color of my light shafts but the color of the skybox's emissive material. Anyone know what I'm doing wrong?
Other than that I plan to add some little butterflies and trinkets on the altar, fix what I see wrong/you say needs fixing up and be ready for a Polycount Portfolio rapi....I mean review.
atmosphere is nice, but the design is lacking somehow.
i figure you'll want to blend it with the environment too so some overlaying vines/plants would work well aswell as texturing moss and grass onto some of the stone walls
Illusive, thanks for the crit. I agree with you they aren't exactly natural. I appreciate the example too. I'm going to work that into my current sculpts (have the ztools saved I think) and if it looks like shit I'll just do it over. It'll only be like the third time.
Ok here are the two shots. Enjoy!
A couple crits I have; I think your rock pieces are a bit too vague. Like Illusive mentioned. I think you need to add in some breaks and cracks in the rocks. I find it hard to believe that those pieces could be made from one rock each.
Try breaking up the rock in several different pieces.
I would also love to so some pixie dust floating about.
Lastly, I would either edit the skybox to look more like a sky, or fill in the back ground with trees to give a sort of deep woods feeling/vibe.
Looking forward to some more updates
Pixie dust sounds awesome! Does UDK have some sort of emitter I could use to create that effect? Thinking of other ways I could do that.
Skyboxes have been giving me a problem, hence why one isn't in there. I would like to add one. And brandoom, I think I'm going to take you up on extra trees. I think I'll also take my current trees and make a super low LOD mesh, like 4-6 intersecting planes based on renders of those trees and use them for extreme far away positioning.
Hope to have a new shot for y'all at the end of the day!
I agree with everything else that's been said too about the sky/breaking up the rocks etc.
Watch your texel density, you have some objects like that rock in the foreground that look great, but your rock walls look a little muddy and like the texture is being stretched.
I think your glass material needs a bit more work too, though that'll probably be a little difficult. I like it, but it just needs to be pushed. Along those same lines, the way the glass shattered doesn't really make logical sense. So maybe try working on that some too.
Your trees look loads better, but I'd through a few more edge loops towards the trunk, as I'm starting to see a pretty polygonal silhouette, get rid of some edgeloops ion the branches if you need to (covered by leaves anyways).
I also think you need to frame the shot a little better and add a real focal point of interest. Right now it's the glass... which is ok, but really not all that interesting and "wow" factor.
All in all though this is some of your best work to date, and pushed a little more could turn out really nice.
I feel it's an improvement but I'm not sure how much. Suggestions comments?
This is my latest WIP. I redid the stones and I accomplished better normal bakes with less polys and a more efficent texture map. Win. I also decided to add in my arch asset again. I can't decide weather to keep or ditch it. Speaking of, on that asset and on my back wall (which I intend to keep) I added a stone wall texture that makes it look more wall like. I made it during my artist block stages for stone concepts.
Please let me know what you think. I need to be done in a few days, I go to visit my grandparents in SC soon and I intend to be doing some job apps while I'm there or even before I go. I'll have my portfolio up for "review" tomorrow or Wednesday with a WIP of this included.
As of right now though, those stacks of bricks aren't doing your scene any justice. As I mentioned before, I think the best approach would be to model several ( 5 or 6 ) different blocks, texture and detail each separately, and then construct different bits and pieces with them.
But for now, post your references.
And an Oblivion example I was trying to use for help/style guide.
I'm currently redoing my arch thing to be more ruined than it currently is but yea I'll definitely come back to fix those bricks/walls. I've been watching my bro play lots of Uncharted and I'm going to check out Gears PC for extra examples. Probably jump back into Oblivion too. Thanks for the help!
I'm going to finish the walls. I'm going to bring in some of the bricks I used to create the texture and place them in the walls so where is some extra geometry pop. I'll apply similar principles to the wall in the back and the pillar, and see how it looks. I also got a few other things to fix and plenty of grass to move...not looking forward to that.
This last arch picture is not looking like an arch. Sorry. You've got to arrange your stones like it would be done in real life so the arch does not fall on the ground.
I suggest you to sculpt each stone of your arch (or make a group of stone, sculpt it and then clone it) instead of doing a big object and try to sculpt splits into it. It'll look less blobby.
Prophecies, I've been putting off my environment dome for a while. It messes with my god rays and thus I've pushed it to the side. Thanks for reminding me though. I also need to do some extra low poly trees to help out with that too.
After any location has been built on by humans, we tend to clear out and smooth the floors. This stays the same even after a building is destroyed as large stones aren't casually thrown around. Instead, any stones left lying around within the wall boundaries are likely to be stones from the building itself, and thus be things like brick, or large masonry stones with flat sides, as opposed to being rounded.
You can try and say the stones were made round again by weathering, but you must realize that anything that would weather large building stones back to being round, would also likely wear away the entire building in the process.
Prophecies, that's exactly what I was thinking. I love his thread btw, I've learned so much from it.
SnakeDoctor my workflow has varied by object. In this case, I used very little BSP because the scene it's self is not complicated. I've done basic BSP block outs before though. In this case, I created an objects and then decided weather or not it needed a high poly bake. If it did, I took it to zbrush and divided it a few times either with or without the smooth modifier on in zB and then divided it until 7 or 8 sub divs with smooth on. Took it back down to 3 or 4 and started sculpting. Once I was done with that that, I exported a High poly and a lower poly model and baked the maps I needed via xNormal. I used the .ase exporter in Maya to get the low poly model to Unreal. Most of my texturing has been done in Unreal.
On a larger scene, I would totally suggest a basic BSP block out, especially for something playable like a level to gauge game play flow.
Back to work!
For once, a blog image link.
I'm about 90% happy with the walls. I'm going to attempt a parallax map see if I can't get any extra pop out of the texture but if not I need to move on. Short list of what I'm going to do:
-Rock formation to surround the majority of the scene
-Minor light fixes
-Modified pillar, MAYBE a new one that's more correct, or just take it out completely and have no super far out shots
-Try to fix up that glass in the back
-Attempt some color grading via custom LUT's if I have time
-Possibly a enviro dome depending on cliff face results. Might be an asset from Epic since it's managed to work fine with the God Rays