BEAT-EM-UP | iansmithartist
polycounter lvl 15
Old Forest Type Environment - (Ill update this once I have a more defined concept.)
Challeneges-
Develop UDK Skills, in particular:
Idea 1:
An environment shifting between seasons, so shifting between sun, rain and snow, trees shedding leaves then re-growing them, rivers freeze, etc.
This would feed into the game-play, meaning either the player can control the season to their own effect, or they are fighting to restore the seasons and can use the shifting weather to their advantage.
The main reason for this idea is so that I can attempt to use some of UDK's more advance feature such as Cascade and Kismit that I have yet to use. It's seems like alot of work, but i'll attempt to see it all through.
Challeneges-
Develop UDK Skills, in particular:
- Complex Materials
- Vertex Paint
- Unreal Cascade
- Kismit
- Trees
- Foliage
- Tillable organic structures such as rock, vegetation, etc.
Idea 1:
This would feed into the game-play, meaning either the player can control the season to their own effect, or they are fighting to restore the seasons and can use the shifting weather to their advantage.
The main reason for this idea is so that I can attempt to use some of UDK's more advance feature such as Cascade and Kismit that I have yet to use. It's seems like alot of work, but i'll attempt to see it all through.
Replies
Looking forward to seeing where this goes!
A scan from my sketchbook, just generating ideas.
I have got to work on a few props, starting with some trees. Still early stages. I was going to use speedtree but after some playing around with it I decided to have a go at modelling it myself, best way to learn I guess.
Started with a bark texture first. I painted it up in photoshop and took it to speedtree just to see what I could do.
Obj2Spline Align script and Object Randomizer came in very useful for the highpoly. The leaves them selves are just a few variations aligned to a path, created from a box using some turbosmooth,ffd and noise modifiers.
Here is it so far in UDK.
Here is a link to a flat shaded render if anyones curious: Link
Try to ignore the plane white branches, those braches are just planes with alpha channels and still need to be worked on. Id like to get some vertex colour in there, along the bottom around the roots etc. Still early stages, more to come...
This arrangement is purely just to test props, and in no way represents the layout of the level.
I have also been experimenting with the udk material editor. Iv seen around polycount and a few other sites the concept of having a shader that places a colour blend on the upward facing surfaces only. It took me a while (ok quite a while) but I got the basis of after a while I think. I just used 'snow' to show it off and it still needs tweeking, i.e. there is very little snow on the leaves (although I suppose most trees would shed their leaves in the winter).
However, in all honesty its not really heading in the direction I want in terms of style, so I have been making some more sketches to try and steer myself in the right direction.
A material that allows me to paint in a couple extra damage details, its not as swish as Virtuosic's material from his "ThePit thread", and as efficient in terms of shader complexity, which is something im going to have to figure out. The levels of detail use the red and green channel, im hoping to use the blue channel to paint sand or dirt over the top.
There are some changes that need to be made, but most of it is cosmetic, I think the basis of the material is in place. Once I actually get into the scene and lit properly then I'll be able to see what needs changing, at the moment I think the cracks are a little hard to read.
@roosterMAP I may be swapping out those rocks, but keeping the stacked style.
I am not sure I am going to be able to implement the season shifting idea for the deadline but im still pressing forward.
Just to give an idea of the progression I have been making since my last post. This is the small test scene I had going at the end of the last week.
I was playing with up vector materials and attempting to get some interesting moss covered rocks. I was taking refference from a forest id visited a few times, its well known for being a pretty interesting place. (these aren't my photos but an example of what I'm talking about).
It wasn't going well to say the least. I think a large part of the problem was the way I created the rock formations. I created a tiling rock wall map from a high poly bake and worked up a repeating low-poly model that I then deformed into lots of different shapes to get variations. But this just created to much stretching and just made a mess of things.
So I went back to the drawing board and tried a different approach.
I created a single rock that could be rotated and scaled to create more than enough variations.
It started from a box in mudbox, that I then sculpted and took back and forth to 3dsmax applying displacement maps and then sculpting again in Mudbox until I got an interesting shape. The I used the height map (baked from the previous approach) to help sculpt in cliff detail. In UDK I combined this with a tiling detail diffuse and normal map, so that when the mesh is scaled up it still looks pretty detailed.
Its not perfect but Im far more happy with it. I used it as smaller rocks, large boulders, even as distant mountain formations. However I think im going to have to create different LOD meshes for different rock sizes, there isn't not much point in having the same level of detail in a small rock and a huge boulder.
The rocks still need to be played with to get more interesting compositions, and also I only began working on the river area today so its very rough, but criticism is always welcome. I want it to look like the river is flowing over a water fall at the end to. I have an idea to repeat a few water falls through out, with a large water fall as a set piece at some point.
A little waterfall inspiration:
[ame]
Keep it up!
@DaBeast Agreed, I went with the white type bark because early on I liked the way the white stood out from the rest. But now that the scene has progressed I think I might work up something that suits a little better.
Once the dust has settled I'm going to push on with more updates, but whether or not the environment will be done before or after the deadline is another matter!
I have a little update however, I have been looking to change the weird birch trees I have but I still liked how the trees with white bark stand out among the greens and browns. So Im playing with the idea of expanding river area, to have a huge white tree, tree of life/fountain of youth style, with water falls gushing from between its roots. Id wanted a few interesting focal points and this gives me something to work around. A rough and ready paint over just so you get the idea.