BEAT-EM-UP | 3DK.P. / Bobbaganoosh

3DK.P.

Well count me in!

The biggest challenge I think we are going to have is nailing the art style in the environment. This environment is going to be heavily inspired by Torchlight with some small influences of borderlands and classic beat-em-ups like Knights of the Round and Cadillac and Dinosaurs.

With that being said, here's a couple of screens from Torchlight to give an idea of what we're going for.





Also, here is a rough sketch of the general layout of the level, I'm pretty sure some things will change throughout the process but we'll just have to see once we get started!



Let me know what you guys think!

naturon

Looks cool man, I love that art style ... can't wait to see what you come up with

3DK.P.

It's been a while since I posted so here's our big update! I did a block out of the level in unreal with some placeholder assets just to get a feel for the whole scene. Also I have been playing with materials all this week and I wanted to get a slight edge detection post process effect going so that's what the 80% gray outline is in the screenshots down below.







This is one of the rock assets I'm sculpting for the inside cave area. I'm hoping that this mesh can be sort of an uber rock and I can throw it around the whole level. This one of my biggest challenges since I haven't done too many rock meshes at all and another big challenge is getting it to look right once in the editor. I just did one screen for the sculpt by itself and another with a filter for the look I want within the engine(with textures of course).




Also Bobba has been workin on various pickups for the stage that will be scattered around. I am also going to be looking into making another material for the pickups that will have a panner running on the outline that will give the effect of them blinking or shimmering.



I wash checking out Adam's thread on making the rocks and I am trying the first idea approach and if it doesn't work out then I'll try something else. What would you guys suggest for doing rocks for a scene like this?

drelectro

cave looks good but the grey outlines kill the depth rather supporting them. get rid of them or make them much more subtle.

woody_294

Great work, I kind of agree about the outlines, less is more!

TootingChicken

Loving some the collectables so far (particularly the chests and swords/axe). Good work so far!

3DK.P.

Oh man, haven't updated in a while, it's been a long busy week. Still trying to nail down the kind of style I want for the scene, I've been experimenting with materials and how they go along with the edge detection in UDK. I've thrown the rock in the editor with the AO and a really rough pass on the texture with some lines on the hard edges here and there. Let me know what you guys think. For some reason I've always tried to avoid doing rocks in an environment, but I've had a lot of fun so far trying different techniques to get the desired result. Here's a couple of screens of how it's looking in UDK now.





All comments and critiques welcome!

cholden

There are fundamental things you are doing wrong here. More than one, so I have TWO answers below based on the look you want.

1) If torchlight is what you're going for, hand paint your entire scene and apply that to meshes to add depth. They aren't using any special shaders or rendering techniques (diffuse on a model). You can put their rock wall texture on a flat wall and it'll look great because they painted it all in so well.

So far, you've got a good eye for the shapes, but have put no effort into the textures. To achieve the look of torchlight, almost all your efforts need to be in painting the textures.


2) This latest update is almost the exact opposite of the development process for the style of torchlight. It's a LOT of polygons, almost no texture at all and a fairly advanced shader.

With that in mind, I'm curious if this is the direction you are wanting to take as opposed to something like Torchlight

Even IF this is a completely new direction you planned to take, you still need to research the way these techniques are supposed to be used.

The idea behind outlining models is to get that hand animated show look. With that, you need to reference a cartoon that has the look you want and take a look at how games based on similar cartoons may have handled their look.

One of the things you may discover is the higher contrast outlining is ONLY used for active characters or things they interact with in the scene. The backgrounds are often always painted without outline, and only objects closer to the camera begin to receive them. This is a standard of (pretty much) all visual art so that everything doesn't blend together. Also, in real life because if you look over a distance, farther things lose contrast.

Looking at your scene, it's a cluttered, high contrast white mass covered in black lines. It's near impossible to read any depth or shape.

Point is, if you go with this technique, you'll need to make this level of contrast scalable with depth or customize each asset based on scene depth.

On the bright side, you may have just answered the question of "how do you model a crumpled up piece of paper?"

3DK.P.

cholden wrote: »

There are fundamental things you are doing wrong here. More than one, so I have TWO answers below based on the look you want.

1) If torchlight is what you're going for, hand paint your entire scene and apply that to meshes to add depth. They aren't using any special shaders or rendering techniques (diffuse on a model). You can put their rock wall texture on a flat wall and it'll look great because they painted it all in so well.

So far, you've got a good eye for the shapes, but have put no effort into the textures. To achieve the look of torchlight, almost all your efforts need to be in painting the textures.


2) This latest update is almost the exact opposite of the development process for the style of torchlight. It's a LOT of polygons, almost no texture at all and a fairly advanced shader.

With that in mind, I'm curious if this is the direction you are wanting to take as opposed to something like Torchlight

Even IF this is a completely new direction you planned to take, you still need to research the way these techniques are supposed to be used.

The idea behind outlining models is to get that hand animated show look. With that, you need to reference a cartoon that has the look you want and take a look at how games based on similar cartoons may have handled their look.

One of the things you may discover is the higher contrast outlining is ONLY used for active characters or things they interact with in the scene. The backgrounds are often always painted without outline, and only objects closer to the camera begin to receive them. This is a standard of (pretty much) all visual art so that everything doesn't blend together. Also, in real life because if you look over a distance, farther things lose contrast.

Looking at your scene, it's a cluttered, high contrast white mass covered in black lines. It's near impossible to read any depth or shape.

Point is, if you go with this technique, you'll need to make this level of contrast scalable with depth or customize each asset based on scene depth.

On the bright side, you may have just answered the question of "how do you model a crumpled up piece of paper?"

Cool, thanks for the info. The texture right now is, like I said, a really rough base texture for now. I was trying to go for a combination of borderlands and torchligh. I am definitely going to be doing many iterations of the texture map to see what works best in the scene. It's possible that I will even throw that model out entirely and try a different approach. I'm going to try and look up some more reference for some cartoony type rocks besides Borderlands.