BEAT-EM-UP! | Kysterama
Hi everyone!
A couple of mates at work are entering this challenge so they've inspired me to do the same. My idea is to create a Honey I Shrunk The Kids / Arthur and the Invisibles style environment.
The main challenges I expect to face are:
- Using UDK. I'm familiar with unreal3 editor basics from the Scene from a movie challenge I did last year, but to push the boundaries in terms of style and engine features will be a challenge.
- Creating a whimsical environment for a miniature person. My background is in doing real world scale scenes and objects so this will be a fun challenge.
- Dialing back on high poly modeling. I tend to get caught up in this lately, but want to work on increasing my work speed and getting that sweet spot in terms of concept to polish without getting bogged down unnecessarily along the way.
Well, onto the concept:
I suck at drawing, so i started blocking out a scene in Max with some throw-away textures to give me a sense of scale, colour and lighting. This is a few hours work and doesn't represent anything more than a sketch.
And here's a mood board of sorts. I want to make one of the sections have more depth with some far background shenanigans going on. Ideas on this are welcome!
At the moment the depth of the scene is very shallow.
A couple of mates at work are entering this challenge so they've inspired me to do the same. My idea is to create a Honey I Shrunk The Kids / Arthur and the Invisibles style environment.
The main challenges I expect to face are:
- Using UDK. I'm familiar with unreal3 editor basics from the Scene from a movie challenge I did last year, but to push the boundaries in terms of style and engine features will be a challenge.
- Creating a whimsical environment for a miniature person. My background is in doing real world scale scenes and objects so this will be a fun challenge.
- Dialing back on high poly modeling. I tend to get caught up in this lately, but want to work on increasing my work speed and getting that sweet spot in terms of concept to polish without getting bogged down unnecessarily along the way.
Well, onto the concept:
I suck at drawing, so i started blocking out a scene in Max with some throw-away textures to give me a sense of scale, colour and lighting. This is a few hours work and doesn't represent anything more than a sketch.
And here's a mood board of sorts. I want to make one of the sections have more depth with some far background shenanigans going on. Ideas on this are welcome!
At the moment the depth of the scene is very shallow.
Replies
Mhh I think a coin is smaller than a leaf btw
Anywayz Ill be keeping an eye on this, good luck mate
I'm still very much in block out and testing mode, but I did commit to a few meshes like the grass and drain pipe in the scene. I've had those buzz3d UDK videos playing on the other monitor while I work so I know what to do when I start exporting from max!
I've just quadrified up the terrain and am about to take into zbrush so that should be fun!
Notes:
- not convinced on adding the lawn mower yet (hence its rough block out stage)
- Grass is not scattered yet, only the test stuff is thrown in the scene
- The terrain will have more interesting elements added in zbrush
- Some sort of natural bridge to be added to the little river
- A far background element to be added like mountains or high rises
Anyway, here's some more WIP shots. Thanks for watching
Remember you were going to dial back the high poly stuff a bit tho :P
Yeah, i couldnt resist a little bit of zbrushing on the pipe to make it a little misshapen and used looking lol. I meant more about not spending hours in max adding edge loops on complex objects. The pipe was super easy to spit out to zbrush, and then bake down to a normal in max later
I've been getting my head around UDK and have exported a few meshes to see what is what. Here's a little test screengrab of my spartan little scene.
and a tree stump mesh i made in zbrush
Terrain textures are placeholders at the moment too (I realise there are elements like leaves etc in the texture which are no where near the right scale)
This part is a lot of fun!
keep going
Make sure to give some massive Depth of Field effects ago as well! will really hit home the fact of this being a tiny scene.
WICKED!
Here's we're I'm going with the DOF look. I had planned from the start to get foreground elements like blades of grass to blur out and also have the same effect in the background of the image to naturally draw the eye to the player position in the mid-ground
Hopefully its shaping up nice
edit-> okay scaled up the grass and brought in some more foliage
Only thing I'm wondering about is the terrain texture. If the whole world is scaled down I'd expect the cracks to be much bigger but maybe you have a different idea in mind.
I really want to get that rough debris style look that is more representative of dirt at this magnified level
eg:
I dont think normal maps will cut it at this level or camera angle so i might try a few experiments with random debris and low poly scattered elements to really give a sense of that roughness in real life. Bark, pebbles, bits of fallen folliage, vines and tree roots etc.
Here's another update with a few more elements in the mix
I threw in a random windmill pic on an alpha plane to see if i wanted that as a possible prop. Still totally undecided on what to do with the background. Also added a wet look to the terrain material.
if it is a real one you need to blur it a lot more. same for the sky. that's one of the big problems with dof in realtime rendering. you need loads of samples to blur something far away without making it look like crap.
im also not sure if the ssao is doing you any favors. maybe use the lightmass AO.
the wet stuff looks really good and overall it's coming together rather nicely. good progress
Its all looking good art wise i think the thing that stands out most for me is the scale of stuff. I think things have to be alot bigger compared to say that hose and coin.
I might suggest some cracks get modelled in, thats how big they would be at this level. and your like u suggested lots more low poly rubble and stuff, bigger grass and getting things closer to the camera, really getting us into the scene.
one more thing :P, what about more real life stuff down the tracks, massive dogs nose, super soaker, shoe, spider, background element of a house, (massive bricks). etc, My mind is going crazy!!!!!! Sorry!!!
http://allears.net/tp/mgm/m_histk.htm
I'm on holidays in Thailand at the moment, and although I did install Max on my netbook, i'm reluctant to do 3d when i'm supposed to be on holiday away from my 9 to 5, which is 3d lol.
It means I'll have one week to finish this scene when I get back so I'll hopefully bust it out before the deadline!
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4050/5081673537_bc22f41f9c_b.jpg
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4152/5081673283_7ceb979ec2_b.jpg
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4090/5082268032_a5e7c53f95_b.jpg
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4020/5081673449_f1c7ca059c_b.jpg
Yours looks much better but reference is all ways good
I'm back from Thailand and have very little time left, but I managed to spend most of today building and texturing more assets. One of my biggest problems is lack of grime/dust/dirt on my actual props, but I'm not sure I'll have to time to do this before the deadline unfortunately. Lets just pretend the kid only just opened his toy train set from its pristine box minutes ago shall we? :P
The dirt/soil is still falling way short of what's in my head but one of the last things i'll be doing is filling the remaining poly budget with ground debris, sticks and general nature doohickies to help eradicate that smooth look.
2 Days left, so crit me now! GO!
The List of frantic deadline doom:
- Some sort of far background element like mountains or something
- toy wooden train half buried to help sell the look of the train track set
- Much larger tree trunk hollow at the far right
- More ground debris, twigs, sticks, pebbles etc
- Window in side of building
- Garden tap on side of building that hose plugs into
- Extend and drape hose along new assets
- Drain pipe down side of building
Remember its a side scroller so focus on what that camera angle will see!
Your list hits a lot of what I'd like to see done. Mostly more background detail.
Decals would be very helpful for you right now to quickly melt oganic thins together. Here's some info
http://www.hourences.com/book/tutorialsue3decals.htm
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/UsingDecals.html
Thanks for the comments and suggestions :thumbup:
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And say hello to the Polycount Express!
Cant wait to see your finals! Time is ticking....
TICK, TOCK..... lol
Needs more bloom, crtl+b
I surely will Adam!
Love the style, the DOF and your assets.
It's unfortunate because I took a nice HD video of the scene also, but my upload speed is so slow that it's taking 60 minutes to upload, even though technically I finished everything before the deadline. Oh well, I'll post it here once it's uploaded anyway.
Thanks to everyone for the encouragement and ideas, this challenge was a lot of fun and learning UDK made it even more worthwhile. Good luck to the everyone, there was some truly stellar work being done!
Okay, video finally uploaded ->
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The lighting setup is super basic.
Just one Dominant directional light at 1.25 brightness
Light Colour is:
R - 0.92
G - 0.81
B - 0.78
A - 1.00
And AO is on, but it is greatly tweaked down in the post process chain to so its more subtle
Occlusion Power 1.0
Occlusion Scale 1.3
In the World Properties I tweaked -
Scene Highlights to .8 / .8 / .85
Scene Mid Tones to .8 / .8 / .85
I spent a lot of time finding the sweet spot with the depth of field blur settings and generally gave nearly all models a 2 or 3 level chamfer on edges to give a more natural look.
I also set up a second UV set for each model and gave each a decent lightmass resolution which is super easy in UDK thankfully. The Lightmass render took about 20 minutes (which was very disconcerting as I didn't do a proper one until the last hour of the competition! lol)