UDK Vignette - South American cliff road
polycounter lvl 13
I threw this together starting Monday as a proof-I-can-do-realistic organic modeling and texture demo for a local studio. Basic inspiration(s) were some of the crazy mountain-road South American rally car courses, so the pteridium ferns and large-leaf phylodendron plants are sourced from South American species. The tree is a SpeedTree that looked right. (shrug) I wanted to incorporate Eric Chadwick's cool double sided fake-subsurface scattering normal trick for the large leaf plants, but didn't have time.
Guard rails were done with a composite shader that allowed me to paint blends between bare metal, rust coated, worn paint, and warning stripes using vertex colors.
Terrain textures are quickies from my library.
Everything in the scene except the stock UDK skydome is my work.
Tear in and give it to me straight, guys. As usual, this is going to be me selling myself, so I want to at least look my best...![:\](https://polycount.com/plugins/emojiextender/emoji/twitter/confused.png ":\")
Guard rails were done with a composite shader that allowed me to paint blends between bare metal, rust coated, worn paint, and warning stripes using vertex colors.
Terrain textures are quickies from my library.
Everything in the scene except the stock UDK skydome is my work.
Tear in and give it to me straight, guys. As usual, this is going to be me selling myself, so I want to at least look my best...
Replies
looks great though
In my opinion your railing is the weaker asset in your scene. It seems more like just faded paint than rusted,worn with exposed metal. That said, I guess if you make the degradations too distinct it would become noticeable that you're repeating the same geo as the railing goes down the road. Hmm, that's a tough one. Food for thought if nothing else.
Anyhow, nice job also on the curvature of the road. It really makes me want to know what's just on the other side of the hill.
Yeah, the warning stripes don't come through quite as much as I'd like with the 4-layer Lerp shader and the low vertex density on the guardrail mesh. If I was to actually build this as a level, I'd probably extrude the railing along a spline instead, much like I would with the road (it's kludged together from a Terrain mesh right now).
I've got a very strange glitch going on right now with Foliage layers on the terrain materials... when I add a simple fern mesh as a Foliage object, viewing the scene from certain angles causes the viewport to completely freak out (looks almost exactly like the image corruption from an overheated GPU, except it's viewing location and angle dependent). Also appears to be cause with FoliageFactory volumes. No clue what's going on with that, but it sure makes plant-covered hillsides a bitch...
Besides the 6k poly speedtree (yecch), everything else is very simple - just your average alpha-mapped ferns.
...major Potempkin village, huh?
When I was doing the yellow stripe down the center of the road, I was trying to find something that would let me place a spline or something similar along the path I wanted the stripe to go, and have it follow the Terrain mesh. I ended up using multiple DecalActors, but they're a bitch to control and they didn't blend well on top of the Terrain materials (BLEND_Modulate was too dark, BLEND_Masked gave it a "sticker" look instead of painted onto the asphalt, BLEND_Translucent didn't work).
Is that kind of spline object mapping something UDK has, or is that the sort of thing I just go bug the Technical Artist for? (the one I don't have...