Thank's for the tut's, they will be a great help to me when I expand my little forest/chapel scene. I need a terrain mesh for it. Plus, just the workflow you explained is awesome. Great breakdown!
Man, now you know you have to do a nighttime shot and possibly try and get a heavy rain one too right? :P
This looks sick, really loving the textures and light so far
Also, you thinking about making some smaller rocks and pebble collection and instancing them around the terrain? It looks great at a distance at the moment but It'd be really awesome if you added actual rock meshes more places
Just awesome so far man
Could you possibly give us a quick run down of how you painted your materials onto the terrain geo object? also i'm guessing the terrain geo has a lightmap on it - if so what size is it?
Thanks everyone, of course I wont stop this until it's done. I try to always finish things I start.
Skamberin: followed your advice and made a collection of pebbles I can place everywhere on the terrain, works well close, and bit harder to see them from the first pic.
breakneck: yo! Terrain lightmap is quite big and not yet big enough in my opinion to catch all the details I would like: 1024*1024 res.
Terrain is all vertex color blending with heightmaps. That's why I wanted to sculpt anything for my textures. It's not perfect and the shader is awful (long but commented) but it works!
Coming in the next days: the HornBurg's Horns (at least some metal in this stone world!) and props like wood barrels and proper standing flags.
And after I'm happy with daytime pictures I'll try a night time + rain one just for fun.
Added the decals today, smaller pebbles around terrain and some more trims:
Looking really good man, I would say you need to find a way to make the structure pop out from the mountain. Granted it's probably made from the same stone but what I'd do is give the mountain maybe a hue shift towards red, or slightly grey-er and darker. The low shot blends way too much. It'd help if the walls and tower looked more sun bleached than the mountain itself.
This is looking fantastic! I love the scale of the whole thing and the lighting is working really well. I agree with JordanW on the stone texture, though, and I also feel that, while the green wall hangings add a lot I think their saturation is just a bit too high - so much so that when I look at that first image that's all I see. Otherwise, great job.
Would love to see the nighttime rain as well. If you haven't yet heard of it yet, Hourences just came out with a new DVD over at Eat3d that goes into some great effects for that sort of thing (I haven't watched it personally, but the video shown looks great). Here: http://eat3d.com/udk_cinematics
I agree with Jordan, slight hue change to the Mountain and slight bleach to the fortress it's self. The nice thing will be at night I could imagine this popping out more because of lights coming from the fortress its self.
from a artistic stanpoint it would be better if it where clearer that the structure was sticking out from the mountainside and i agree with people here that it would look better.
but however if you want it to be realistic the stone from the structures should look very simmilar to that of the mountain since they probably used stone mined from the mountain to make the fortress on spot rather than having stone shipped from some otherplace.
im totally digging the grass man, thats allways been a thing i have been bad with in the UDK making it look good. but you seem to have pulled it off. good luck with finishing it up man. i would love a 1920x1080 screenshot for a desktop image.
Agreeing with the general consensus about colour-separating the structures from the cliffs, perhaps also painting more of the variation into the cliffs would help with that. Also, the crater damage marks you have on the walls could be brought out stronger.
The grass is cool but maybe a little more variation, especially in the height. It looks more like scrub land so having a couple of differerent plants would work well and maybe not looking so lush.
This is all minor stuff though - The overhead shots are pretty spectacular - more please!
i'd definitely look into some form of vertex blending to add in some randomised moss growth on the rocks, to break up the obvious (from a distance) tiling.
Not sure if people have made this crit before or not...but it'd be really beneficial if you somehow try to push the color of the stone further from the color of the mountain. You lose a lot of the castle detail and definition because their colors are too similar. The castle pieces are made up of the mountain, but as a design choice i feel it should be slighting adjusted to a lighter level.
I also see some tiling issues, but i'm sure you have plans to fix those.
It looks awesome though. I had just finished up on the trilogy and then seeing this, you've done a damn good job. I can't wait to see it finished.
JordanW: Thanks, means a lot coming from one of Epic heads . I took in consideration the lack of contrast in the previous screenshots with the rock walls and fortress, and darkened the rocks, brightened the fortress stone a bit.
I also played with a tad of red hue on one of the tiling rock texture, because it was very greenish.
paulsvoboda: Cheers, I also took the green flag out and replaced it by a red one as suggested by roosterMAP, and even if it's not the real flag of rohan colors, it works better in my opinion.
I'll make sure to reach the quality of what Hourences did on his tutorials if I do a night time version + rain.
ZacD: Yeah I, reducing noise coming from detail normal textures can be an option if the new screen-shots don't show the fortress first.
Visceral: I'll give you a trick for the grass; render it without mipmaps and do tiledshots 5 to 6 times the size of the realtime image, resize in PS and admire perfectly smooth masked alpha and filtering.
Without this trick I end up with the geometry and blurred mipmaps showing green rectangles instead of clumps of grass at far distances. Of course use only for still images.
nullfed: Thanks for the input, I added more small grass around and for the decals being too bright, I hope that the recent stone brightening has fixed that too. I'd like to add more variety in vegetation too, will see what I can do before the end of the week.
almighty_gir: I added more grass and pebbles on the distant cliffs to hide the tiling of the rock textures you pointed out. Unfortunately I used all the vertex color channels on terrain and all the texture samplers, so I cant add any more layer, unless I pack my textures tiles into atlases and that's a huge job just for one more layer I think.
roosterMAP: Yeah indeed man, I have a really hard time removing the patterns in the stone wall textures but I think I've nailed it in this update. Let me know. Changed the flag too.
Here's some pictures, I'd like to know which view you prefer for a beauty shot. :poly142:
I'm going to chime in and agree with Paul on this one. There seems to be a pretty heavy push of a medium frequency of normals on the bricks, making them look a bit noisy and muddy. Depending on the size of your tiles, I think you can vary the noise but keeping them at a lower frequency.
I also think the values of the tileables are blending with the mountainside a bit much, making it difficult to really pop out the architecture of helms deep. Even at night you can see the the fortress pops out nicely and will accent with lighting even better.
Drapery is appearing a bit too saturdated and bright, try to keep your levels even overall.
If the last sky shot is going to be one of your main shots as well, i'd consider keeping an eye out for the grass down on the ground level. You can see the cross hatching. A possible solution would be to paint some darker blending grass texture to hide the clipping from that angle.
On that note, the overall scene is definitely coming together and looking fantastic!
For what it's worth on vertex blending, you can set vertex colors to mask each other and get essentially 16 separate channels. That being said, I don't really see the need for it here as this looks FANTASTIC.
I think the second and the fourth shots work the best. I'm not a huge fan of the red - the green was working it was just way too saturated. Pretty much the same for the red.
The barrels, a small thing to the overall scene, add a lot. I think continuing in this direction by adding other things to fill up the walls such as fire pits, possibly weapons laying around (if they would be). It's looking beautiful as is but right now there is too much 'just stone'.
Otherwise, fantastic job.
Oh, and the texture stretching on the inside of the castle (the entrance) is really bothering me .
This is coming along really nicely, but to add one thing to the crits others have said about the castle wall material - it is too high-contrast! Lowering it a bit will help it look more sun-bleached, stand out and be more readable and realistic. Seeing too much of the stone pattern also messes with the perception of scale. It is just a bit too intense atm, try "bleaching" it a bit and maybe add some smaller stone pattern here and there.
Wow it looks awsome! I agree though a night time setting with rain would look really nice. But I still like your day time as well. Good job! Looking forward to save it to my desktop
This is looking really great man, very nice work! I have a suggestion -- try getting cloud shadows into your lighting to help break it up a bit across those broad surfaces and help sell the scale and sense of distance. The terrain on the right side of The Oxbow by Thomas Cole is a good example.
Hey folks!Thanks for all the excellent feedback you gave during the process of making this piece. Now I consider it done -at least daytime version- and will move to other things (my portfolio needs a one year of work refresh!).
Really, thank you for all the tips and tricks we shared along this topic, I feel like I've progressed since my last environment.
I will post the night time version screenshots in this thread when I have it done for sure
Zack Fowler: This really was an excellent idea! I did a little light function material with clouds and it worked perfectly well. Thanks.
almighty_gir: Yeah, but how do you use vertex shaders in the UDK? Isn't all the shaders in UDK per pixel instructions? I don't know that much about the material editor except the soup I usually do:\.
Highelf: Thank you, I might do one, but not sure at all at the moment.
gibson543: shhhh, adam might hear you (-thanks)
paulsvoboda: Fixed, I added some medieval doors at those places as intended. I was a bit slow to get em done
whats_true, kaburan, rasmus: I tried to tone down the normal strength of the brick wall without killing it. I also reverted to green for the flag and desaturated it more. Thanks for the crits.
And bonus: the flats (used a bit more texture space than what I wanted, but meh).
I've been watching and drooling on each update of this thread! Stunning work!
I would scrap the 3rd shot that is from behind the wall looking over. If you put something in the background (more mountains, snow caps, etc.) then I say keep it, but if you're calling it done, I wouldn't use it.
The tents look awesome! I really love this man. You did a really great job here!
Replies
There's a breakdown post on last page that you might have missed due to page switch!
Very light update this week. I'm afraid I'm losing a bit of motivation lately on this one, I hope to get it done in the coming week.
Some grass added and flag test, early work in progress still. The fort need more props for the scale.
This looks sick, really loving the textures and light so far
Also, you thinking about making some smaller rocks and pebble collection and instancing them around the terrain? It looks great at a distance at the moment but It'd be really awesome if you added actual rock meshes more places
Just awesome so far man
Skamberin: followed your advice and made a collection of pebbles I can place everywhere on the terrain, works well close, and bit harder to see them from the first pic.
breakneck: yo! Terrain lightmap is quite big and not yet big enough in my opinion to catch all the details I would like: 1024*1024 res.
Terrain is all vertex color blending with heightmaps. That's why I wanted to sculpt anything for my textures. It's not perfect and the shader is awful (long but commented) but it works!
Coming in the next days: the HornBurg's Horns (at least some metal in this stone world!) and props like wood barrels and proper standing flags.
And after I'm happy with daytime pictures I'll try a night time + rain one just for fun.
Added the decals today, smaller pebbles around terrain and some more trims:
Would love to see the nighttime rain as well. If you haven't yet heard of it yet, Hourences just came out with a new DVD over at Eat3d that goes into some great effects for that sort of thing (I haven't watched it personally, but the video shown looks great). Here: http://eat3d.com/udk_cinematics
All the best.
but however if you want it to be realistic the stone from the structures should look very simmilar to that of the mountain since they probably used stone mined from the mountain to make the fortress on spot rather than having stone shipped from some otherplace.
im totally digging the grass man, thats allways been a thing i have been bad with in the UDK making it look good. but you seem to have pulled it off. good luck with finishing it up man. i would love a 1920x1080 screenshot for a desktop image.
The grass is cool but maybe a little more variation, especially in the height. It looks more like scrub land so having a couple of differerent plants would work well and maybe not looking so lush.
This is all minor stuff though - The overhead shots are pretty spectacular - more please!
looks really natural!
but it does look rather yummy
I also see some tiling issues, but i'm sure you have plans to fix those.
It looks awesome though. I had just finished up on the trilogy and then seeing this, you've done a damn good job. I can't wait to see it finished.
I also played with a tad of red hue on one of the tiling rock texture, because it was very greenish.
paulsvoboda: Cheers, I also took the green flag out and replaced it by a red one as suggested by roosterMAP, and even if it's not the real flag of rohan colors, it works better in my opinion.
I'll make sure to reach the quality of what Hourences did on his tutorials if I do a night time version + rain.
ZacD: Yeah I, reducing noise coming from detail normal textures can be an option if the new screen-shots don't show the fortress first.
Visceral: I'll give you a trick for the grass; render it without mipmaps and do tiledshots 5 to 6 times the size of the realtime image, resize in PS and admire perfectly smooth masked alpha and filtering.
Without this trick I end up with the geometry and blurred mipmaps showing green rectangles instead of clumps of grass at far distances. Of course use only for still images.
nullfed: Thanks for the input, I added more small grass around and for the decals being too bright, I hope that the recent stone brightening has fixed that too. I'd like to add more variety in vegetation too, will see what I can do before the end of the week.
almighty_gir: I added more grass and pebbles on the distant cliffs to hide the tiling of the rock textures you pointed out. Unfortunately I used all the vertex color channels on terrain and all the texture samplers, so I cant add any more layer, unless I pack my textures tiles into atlases and that's a huge job just for one more layer I think.
roosterMAP: Yeah indeed man, I have a really hard time removing the patterns in the stone wall textures but I think I've nailed it in this update. Let me know. Changed the flag too.
Here's some pictures, I'd like to know which view you prefer for a beauty shot. :poly142:
Also, do you prefer 4:3 or 16:9 ?
Stick with 16:9, looks fantastic on widescreen
I'm going to chime in and agree with Paul on this one. There seems to be a pretty heavy push of a medium frequency of normals on the bricks, making them look a bit noisy and muddy. Depending on the size of your tiles, I think you can vary the noise but keeping them at a lower frequency.
I also think the values of the tileables are blending with the mountainside a bit much, making it difficult to really pop out the architecture of helms deep. Even at night you can see the the fortress pops out nicely and will accent with lighting even better.
Drapery is appearing a bit too saturdated and bright, try to keep your levels even overall.
If the last sky shot is going to be one of your main shots as well, i'd consider keeping an eye out for the grass down on the ground level. You can see the cross hatching. A possible solution would be to paint some darker blending grass texture to hide the clipping from that angle.
On that note, the overall scene is definitely coming together and looking fantastic!
The barrels, a small thing to the overall scene, add a lot. I think continuing in this direction by adding other things to fill up the walls such as fire pits, possibly weapons laying around (if they would be). It's looking beautiful as is but right now there is too much 'just stone'.
Otherwise, fantastic job.
Oh, and the texture stretching on the inside of the castle (the entrance) is really bothering me
This is extremely awesome, I have nothing more to say.
Really, thank you for all the tips and tricks we shared along this topic, I feel like I've progressed since my last environment.
I will post the night time version screenshots in this thread when I have it done for sure
Zack Fowler: This really was an excellent idea! I did a little light function material with clouds and it worked perfectly well. Thanks.
almighty_gir: Yeah, but how do you use vertex shaders in the UDK? Isn't all the shaders in UDK per pixel instructions? I don't know that much about the material editor except the soup I usually do:\.
Highelf: Thank you, I might do one, but not sure at all at the moment.
gibson543: shhhh, adam might hear you
paulsvoboda: Fixed, I added some medieval doors at those places as intended. I was a bit slow to get em done
whats_true, kaburan, rasmus: I tried to tone down the normal strength of the brick wall without killing it. I also reverted to green for the flag and desaturated it more. Thanks for the crits.
And bonus: the flats (used a bit more texture space than what I wanted, but meh).
I would scrap the 3rd shot that is from behind the wall looking over. If you put something in the background (more mountains, snow caps, etc.) then I say keep it, but if you're calling it done, I wouldn't use it.
The tents look awesome! I really love this man. You did a really great job here!
Well done.