[UDK] Helms Deep & Fort HornBurg
polycounter lvl 9
Final Daytime Images:
And bonus: the flats (used a bit more texture space than what I wanted, but meh).
Today I'm starting a new thread that I hope to keep up to date during all the production of a new map I wanted to do for a long time now.
I'm about to start a UDK portfolio map that will be a realistic reproduction of Helms Deep and fort HornBurg from Tolkien's saga before the battle. I've been searching the book, the films and the web (even the games released with the films) to gather a good amount of data from the fort.
I searched for people that modelled it for realtime gaming but didn't find anything except game screenshots (that are really inaccurate to me:)).
Still it's gonna be a hard time getting all the fort details in at the right scale considering amount of work. I expect this project to take around two months if I'm able to work -almost- every day on it.
Topics like adam's environment inspired a lot of people, and I will inspire myself too putting some goals here and the main features I'd like to explore, discover through this project:
So, in other words my goals are:
-Do an accurate reproduction of the fort and valley
-Create a level of detail equal to a FPS game standard (you'd be able to play it at human scale)
-Use the advanced terrain tools of UDK to push the detail limits texturing wise
-If terrain does not suit well, model the land by hand and use advanced blendings per vertex.
-Get a good lighting. Not yet decided about day or night.
-Try to make a bit of modularity in that pretty unique shaped fort.
-Push the details, push it more.
-Add the inside rooms?
Here's little top view I've been doing with splines in 3Dsmax:
And a very very early block out of the thing to experiment with the verticality and check every thing's scaled all right.
There might be a lot of LOTR fans on the board so if you see errors punish me with paintovers and criticism, before I go forward.
Ah and yeah, here's a part of my moodboard/inspiration:
And bonus: the flats (used a bit more texture space than what I wanted, but meh).
Today I'm starting a new thread that I hope to keep up to date during all the production of a new map I wanted to do for a long time now.
I'm about to start a UDK portfolio map that will be a realistic reproduction of Helms Deep and fort HornBurg from Tolkien's saga before the battle. I've been searching the book, the films and the web (even the games released with the films) to gather a good amount of data from the fort.
I searched for people that modelled it for realtime gaming but didn't find anything except game screenshots (that are really inaccurate to me:)).
Still it's gonna be a hard time getting all the fort details in at the right scale considering amount of work. I expect this project to take around two months if I'm able to work -almost- every day on it.
Topics like adam's environment inspired a lot of people, and I will inspire myself too putting some goals here and the main features I'd like to explore, discover through this project:
So, in other words my goals are:
-Do an accurate reproduction of the fort and valley
-Create a level of detail equal to a FPS game standard (you'd be able to play it at human scale)
-Use the advanced terrain tools of UDK to push the detail limits texturing wise
-If terrain does not suit well, model the land by hand and use advanced blendings per vertex.
-Get a good lighting. Not yet decided about day or night.
-Try to make a bit of modularity in that pretty unique shaped fort.
-Push the details, push it more.
-Add the inside rooms?
Here's little top view I've been doing with splines in 3Dsmax:
And a very very early block out of the thing to experiment with the verticality and check every thing's scaled all right.
There might be a lot of LOTR fans on the board so if you see errors punish me with paintovers and criticism, before I go forward.
Ah and yeah, here's a part of my moodboard/inspiration:
Replies
I agree with the night-time lighting suggestion - acres of potential.
Go go go!
It still lack a tremendous amount of details everywhere but soon enough it'll be enough detailed to decide what parts are going modular and what not.
Night lighting is really tempting and it would be a challenge for me since I almost never made any. If you have any advice on this !
almighty_gir: Yeah it was indeed that way for the film, I remember in that DVD the dummy of Minas Tirith at that scale. And good idea, i'll go for a first pass of details that are close to that one, and then a second pass with human scale details.
Zack Fowler: I have some paths to explore for the mountains, like this one for example:
-Sculpt the terrain completely on low frequency details
-Bake an heightmap from it (and eventually normal map)
-Apply HM to terrain actor in unreal (and see if the quality is there for vertical cliffs
-Set the terrain textures tiling
-paint 'super'masks in an app like 3Dcoat directly on the mesh for each terrain material and that way have the terrain transitions done in one material, texture for masks could be around 4096 to have a good detail/m² and avoid linear blends. And why not add more details to the supermasks using smaller tiling masks
Now it's a new approach for me to the terrain editor so it's gonna be try and fail until I get it to work.
Visceral: Oh if you do it i'll follow you for sure! I wanted some time ago to start a Moria Cave like map but quickly stopped in the idea because of light sources being problematic. But AFAIK Balind's tomb room has a strong ray of light coming from the outside so it would work well.
I was not sure about the set of arches and doors inside the fort corridor/alley to the keep, so I created them based on the film shots.
Also one thing bugs me, it's how the tunnel that starts at the outside wall intersection goes trough the wall of the fort.
At the moment I made it follow the curvature of the walls and meet the fort entrance arch but I have a total lack of image support there.
I'll post more pics of the inside walls parts so you can crit, Because you'll hardly ever see anything on today's update:
I didn't work a lot last two days, but have a small update:
Mostly added details to the wall, added stairs to visualize vertical distribution of space. Revised distance between some objects, and captured with more precision the lower part of the walls.
Still have to add the main entrance small door that Gimli and Aragorn use to go outside and jump on the bridge in the film for example.
I'm not too far away from the 'think modular' step I guess.
Visceral: Great, looking forward to seeing stuff from that tomb.
Skullburn: Helm's deep is already a really hard time to block out, so Minas Tirith would be like trying to model hell without the help of Weta guys. But yeah, I remember seeing guys doing it in the past.
I decided to bake from the raw highpoly since the destination texture was 2048*2048. Computer was struggling but the result is there.
Should I do a specular map for it?:poly121:
Bricks sure look fresh cut though, it should be rather windswept, chipped, burnt and blown up.
I have tried sculpting normals in mudbox now to be moore fancy, but it ends up looking messy. Cant figure out what im doing wrong.
Sorry dude dont wanna thread jack but im kinda worried as a complete texture noob.
looks good but i hope you'll somehow break up the tiling a bit or make it less obvious.
I tried to break the tiling, and think it works well on rounded geometry which is what you're going to see almost all the time in the piece.
Visceral: dont know if it helps, but the stone bricks I sculpted in Zbrush used only claytubes and planar brushes. Stock alphas too. I don't know for mudbox tho.
pliang,roosterMAP: Thanks! I added more overlays on the texture since your post, and also added some dead moss (white/black) at some places. Cant go too far with damage on the texture itself, the rest should be done into the shader using vertex color and masks.
I did one more tiling texture that to complete that set. I'm not really happy with it in the way the crevices in that one are different to the first one, but would like to hear your comments about it.
Some UDK tests with parallax to get off 3dsmax a bit tonight..
Maybe it'd work even better if those stones looked a bit deeper and more worn (as someone mentioned earlier). They do look very clean-cut right now which is contributing to them looking a little flatter than they perhaps should.
Keep it up!
Did a modular top tower asset, 1024*1024 as planned. Under 1k tris.
Searching a way to fix the bent bricks on the walls corners as it doesnt look so realistic. I thought of using alpha masked overlays, but i'm unsure about the quality of the results.
If you have any idea other than sculpting every brick at it's very position tell me !
Just make a mesh of it and use it on all corners if you want. Keep it suttle so it doesnt stand out.
Oniram: Thanks, well the lighting is dead simple actually: it's one dominant directionnal and one skylight. (I think the skylight is still white color with that), here's some setups:
Did the stairs today, but I'd like to show the asset within the walls so closups might wait a bit
This part is like 10% of the whole thing.
Been a bit lazy last few days.
Visceral: Thanks, I will start on terrain when I have most of the Fort done, maybe in one week from today, as my current rhythm for assets is one per day.
Two new picies, with top wall meshes and stairs around. Lots of UVs to fix, with stretches here and there.
Terrain is a proxy mesh, with a shader from Epic Games. Didn't work on it since day one.
Is it just me or does the way it's being rendered in UDK right now look a tad Bordelands-ish?
With all the deep shadows on the edges and stuff. But that's fine, I like that style =]
Nice work.
so how much of these are meshes, and how much are BSPs?
EVIL: Yeah, it does look new indeed. I'm going to have to do some destruction passes using decals, overlays, broken stone models around, and vertex color blending.
I will try with those destruction passes to make it look unique at each meter.
Oniram: Zero BSPs, all the block-out was done in meshes, and now all the assets are meshes.
Picies time
haha im probably going ahead of myself here
I assume you are going for something like this then.