Hey, Paul! I really appreciate the kind words, I've been a huge fan of your work since forever and your opinions and words mean a lot to me! You are right, he is too glossy. I always have trouble in Marmoset getting a good balance in the specular map. And Enodmi's pic is awesome.. but I feel like going a fresher blacker paint makes him a little more, I guess bad ass. Especially in night time renders. I think he won't glow as much if his paint job was more diminished. But I could very well be wrong! I do really enjoy making robots and There are other robots from WWR I would love to create so that concept can be saved for later
Anyways! I'm not much of a wacom concept artist..I'm better with a pen and paper but here is a quick block out of the daytime shot I did. Be mindful that Bertie is at least 10 feet tall, though some perspective may still be wonky. Also I didn't paint in any destruction, but don't worry the street will be a lot more worn torn..I just wanted to get color and composition..
I'm to capture the mood and desolation and colors of Ashley's paintings. The Architecture is going to be heading towards European. All of this takes place in the mid 80s so I'm going to keep that in mind.
Coming along great, Erich, very clean model and texture work as always! I agree with Huntard, could use some more color variation to add more interest to the model when viewed as a whole. The fine details are great, but a little more forest and a bit less attention to trees at this point and i think you can call this sucker done and move on to the environment.
Did a paintover, just used the reddish section from one of the concepts and overlayed it with a color dodge, you could do the same with your textures and get some very fast results, really wont take much to add some variance in the character at this point with such a strong base.
You might consider putting a lot of color variation in the spec and leave the diffuse mostly unsaturated to see what kind of results you get.
Edit: I'd love to see this guy in a mexican day of the dead celebration (a la Grim Fandango), possibly with a sombrero on! Ha, i don't even know why but i think that'd be perfect, maybe in a gun fight.
Would be a really cool scene to make since you could make some simple geometric pinatas which haven't to my knowledge been done to death and experiment with some simple alphas to give them a frizzy look. Wouldn't be a far stretch from what you have going already with your concepts.
Hey Jeff, Love the paintover. I'm gonna add a little more saturated Red rust when go over the texture one last time.. probably not as heavy as yours but somewhere like that. I love your idea of the city he will be walking through being mid celebration when the War happened.. or Maybe he were celebrating the end of the World War Robot.. and then the Zombie invasion happened.. who knows. A lot to work with.
Started blocking out in Maya...before I get into the juicy stuff.
Here is a top down view of everything.
This will give me plenty to work with for a night time render also. Needless to say, I'm a huge fan of Hiten's work and have been itching to do a City or town scene. Hopefully I can do it as fast him!
*Also, I didn't do all the small stuff..ie:chairs, tables, firehydrants, etc etc. This is just an overall feel and composition and theme!
So. I've modeled and textured the first building set, a couple of tile-ables and two store fronts with unique textures cause of how close it is to the camera. This is my first large scale outdoor UDK render so I'm still learning... reading/watching as many lighting tutorials I can find, but for some reason I can't get my first preliminary lighting working.
What these tutorials tell me, is I can get decent global illumination with a directional light+lightmass. but everything seems pretty dark and gross. The stand in Skydome isn't interfering with my light (to my knowledge), and I've been toying with this for an hour and a half. What am I doing wrong/not understanding as far as outdoor lighting goes?
Also, here's a nasty maya viewport diffuse screengrab of the first building set.
go to the world properties and mess with the environment color for the color and darkness of your shadows, and the environment intensity effects the overall brightness of the scenes
Really? Thanks for the tip, austin..but I feel like it may be more tricky than that. I've noticed if I point the light in the direction of the buildings that are finished, it lights up, but the untextured stand in buildings block the light... I will overcome this, haha. Maybe I should just worry about pushing further with the props.
Today I worked on the street and sidewalk! Tiles pretty well, and with the more intense post processing I am probably going to go for, looks swell. At least I think so.
For whatever reason I'm unable to see your latest images (last two posts). This makes me a sad panda.
Same in every browser I've tried (ie. opera. chrome) I get the 403 error from DB when i try to follow the link manually.
Jeeez! Thanks, Grim..I had no clue. Well. Thats what I get for using Dropbox. God knows I'm probably doing it wrong, somehow. haha. But I re-upped to my photobucket account
One thing tho, buildings here in Europe are way taller than the ones in your scene, you should make them 3-6 stories high if you really want to capture the feel of a mediterranean street.
Also, right now you have bricks going partly trough the concrete part in the middle of the street. Its kind of weird because that middle part usually consists of giant marble or concrete slabs, its not cement.
hah, no problem man. Its something we all go through with dropbox I think, or at least I did.
To link images from DB just make any folders/sub-folders/files inside of your "Dropbox->Public" folder.
ex.
Dropbox -> Public -> Polycount -> Filename_#.jpg
and copy that link. I'm sure you can turn your photos folder to public I just never bothered to learn how. :P
You can tell for certain if it'll link if the link you copy is https or just http. Http = https =
Lookin' spiffy, would be nice to see a bit more transission between the dirt and the brick though, just some dustiness around the road to help transition from the brown to the blue.
Had the same problem with dropbox last night myself, none of my images were showing. Seems to be working now though.
The post processing looks very nice too!, looking forward to seeing the show down.
Rad, let's see if I got DB working. Anyways, Kwakkie! Thanks for the tips on European Architecture, I never noticed but you were right about the height. I am basing my area from a fictional town called Le Cascades (also known as town 23). The only painting Ashley has ever done of the town is this one. (he's really only done two paintings of towns)
Like the rest of his paintings it's super loose and doesn't show a ton of detail, so I'm kind of filling in the gaps of hyper detail with what I feel comes closest to the architecture, being European. but I was planning on making the entire right hand side 3-4 stories and the buildings that go farther down.
(sorry for the crappy scan...each page of the book is like twice the size of my scanner!)
Great Job with the textures Erich I am really digging the sidewalk! The street looks weird tough. No sure what you are trying to portray with the broken looking diver. Your reference shows a clearly defined divider element. Overlaying the brick on top makes it look like linoleum. Keep up the Good Work!
It is a great idea but I would still have a clearly defined cement dividing element that is damaged but retains its edge. This way the broken brick doesn't intersect the divider. In the broken street reference it looks like they used cement to fill in areas with the broken brick they don't lay in more brick over the divider. You may want to have broken brick sections in other places besides the center as well. You got the right idea just try to think of applying damage as if you were a city worker fixing the damage as fast and as cheap as you can so you can get to lunch. It would also be great to see a little grass poking through the cracks in the brick near the sides of the street and sidewalk.
So I'm starting to set up my materials, Get Vertex Paintable Shaders set up, basic lighting, and mood.. Probably going to start the right side of the street. It should get quicker the further down the street I go, since it will be practically Vertex Painted buildings.
**Oh, also whats the best way to bump up the normal map in UDK? Usually I have to overlay it in Photoshop but I would like a little more control in my shader.. Thanks again!
**Oh, also whats the best way to bump up the normal map in UDK? Usually I have to overlay it in Photoshop but I would like a little more control in my shader.. Thanks again!
the way i do it is plug the normal map into a multiply with a 3 constant and set the red and green channels in the constant to anything more than 1 and the blue channel to 1 exactly. you can fiddle with the red and green channels numbers (just make sure they are the same) until you get your desired height.
So I hit a little bit of a problem involving my shader for my Building Textures. I posted it in the Technical Talk - UDK forum, but so no one misses it here is the link. http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=78597
I'm going to continue working and tinkering, but any tips will be awesome!
Okay! So here is the scene currently...
As you can see my shadows are having problems.. I don't know why, Was tinkering with it for a an hour or two and couldn't figure it out for the death of me. All the buildings and big stuff are done and dealt with. So now I need to worry about the little stuff that goes on buildings. ie: piping, wire, electrical boxes, pots, chairs, signs, etc etc. Also need to make my own skydome texture.
The lighting is just stand in..need to look up some sweet lighting tutorials and then lastly I will worry about post processing and the frosting. Here's a paintover of what I thought would be more fitting.
Still trying to figure out the most interesting angle and Bertie Pose. Comments totally welcomed!
Here's my latest shot. Made the pose better, worked on the lighting, added a few extra props (gonna add a couple more..) I won't make too many new props cause I feel the scene is pretty full already, sometimes less is more. Also worked on some Post Processing stuff.
The Depth of Field that comes with the Postprocessvolume is becoming tricky to work with and I don't like the results. Also I wish I could sharpen the scene but I can't really find any Post Process Shaders online or tutorials that I can make/work well. I found this thread http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=78153 and recreated the material but it doesn't work well for me, and the link to the Epic forums had some amazing stuff but can't seem to find a post where he shows how he created it. I'm still a n00b when it comes to Post stuff! But I will keep trying.. any help would be greatly appreciated.
Update! Messed with his size, added a tint of pink to the shadows, worked some more on the D.O.F..still looking for a better alternative where I can get crisper edges on Bertie.. messed with the lighting a little, pushed some normals. I still need to work on Bertie's leather handbags, change the color cause they are too dark. Trying to add a mood fitting for a post apocalyptic zombie filled world that Robots also control..
Lookin Good Erich, a couple of things I noticed were that Bertie is really big in the scene and doesn't look like it would fit in door of any of the buildings even if it crouched. The sidewalk looks like it is lighting funny, and why is it only on one side of the road? There also seams to be some weird bounce effect hitting the underside of the balcony that Bertie is closest to. I am pretty noobish on UDK also but I will mess around with post processing this weekend and let you know if I come across any good tutorials. Its turning out Great man keep up the good work!
Hey Hunter, thanks for the comments. Bertie is around 10+ feet tall.
Yea..the sidewalks are getting weird shadows, which I'm assuming is the AO, I need to figure out how to isolate it. I only had the sidealk on one side of the road because the original idea was to have it a one way street, I guess it doesn't read clear enough. And yea, I weird bounce light going on. =P I'm still new to this, so teaching myself how the hell this crazy engine works. But I will get it all worked out!
I'd like to see some damage decals from the bricks cracking under his weight. He's gotta be pushing a couple tonne with feet that are maybe 1'x1'. Thats a lot of weight to be resting on two small points and not cause any discernible effect.
Theres a certain lack of mood thats found in the paintings as well. The paintings tend to have more drastic exposure levels. Maybe crank up the intensity on the light so it more silhouette's bertie or swap it to a nightscene with some bold color soft light-lights and a hero rim on bertie so it gets the silhouette with the lifeless glow of his eyes.
Also maybe some kind of altered fog feild. Never really messed with that in UDK so can't give any advice. But what comes to mind is dust particles in the air to help give it some weight.
This is my latest build..I think I am almost done. I can't think of what else I can do to it.. I changed the leather texture on his pouch, desaturated it, brightened it, added broken tile, blood splatter in the back, messed with the color a bit more.. Changed the Camera angle. Oh, here is one last issue. I really wanna make gun smoke come out of his barrels, but the opacity map is so..fickle in UDK. I can never get it to look right or stop looking so dang harsh. (i modeled and textured my own smoke) What do you guys think? I'd love a critique before I call it done and move on to the night shot.
but fix the barrel smoke. It looks like milk in a fish tank. maybe 30% of the opacity it is now, and if its not make it white or at the most 10% grey thought it may just be the light effin with me/it. (because of that the screen right gun makes it look like bertie sharted.)
Edit: also first thing to try, possible easy fix. Plug the diffuse into an emmisive slot.
Took the files you sent me and did a quick mashup of how a gun fight between two robots might look, shopped in a quick sombrero. Series' cannon be damned.
Just a quick mashup with a crappy photoshopped sombrero, lighting could obviously be better. Run with the idea if you want to dude.
I feel like theres too much text in the scene- the little quarantine posters especially seem to noise things up a bit- Id try taking a stab at making the scene complete without the text noise. might be a cool challenge to try and nail the gestalt and simplicity of Ashley woods painterly style.
Hey, Konstruct. Thanks for the advice, I did it and actually makes the entire scene look bleaker, which is pretty rad.
What do you guys think? I think I like it, and might keep it for my final shot, and finally start on my nighttime shot. Any last Critiques would be majorly appreciated!
Just an idea. Darken everything a bit, make duplicate of berties texture for the night shot and try throwing a fresnel effect on it and pulling it back to just be a quasi rim light/pencil effect with a very soft pink/red hue throw a light behind bertie and link it to him specifically and wiggle it around some to see what kind of effect you can get from it, maybe toss a blue tint into it.
Just ideas. Colors I was using in photoshop.
Also maybe a stronger dof?
Can't say how well they'll work hah.
The scene is looking a lot better Erich! It is still a little too clean though. An ally in with buildings and a street with the level of wear that you are showing needs more clutter. Trash cans, a road sign or two, signs for the buildings or at least addresses, and streetlights. I agree with Konstruct about the quarantine signs but the shop signs I think need to be there. You can erode them away but you should leave a hint that the building was once a shop. An abondoned car or bike might help as well. Also for the night scene you need to illuminate you objects a little more using cool colors to project the idea of night while establishing you scene. Right now too much of Bertie is being lost to the black in the surrounding area. Great work man can't wait to see whats next!
Hey, guys! Thanks for all the critiques and guidance and telling me when I sucked ass so I can make it not suck ass. I am going to call it done for now..I had to send my portfolio to a few studios and i feel like I could be working on this forever. I'm pretty happy with it! And I am itching to get started on a new scene. here are some of the final shots!
And because Polycount is rad as hell.. Here is Bertie. The Polyfucker.
Really amazing work ErichWK!
I love the texturing work on Bertie around the edges of her arms and where the head swivels.
I want to see more work from you!
Replies
Anyways! I'm not much of a wacom concept artist..I'm better with a pen and paper but here is a quick block out of the daytime shot I did. Be mindful that Bertie is at least 10 feet tall, though some perspective may still be wonky. Also I didn't paint in any destruction, but don't worry the street will be a lot more worn torn..I just wanted to get color and composition..
I'm to capture the mood and desolation and colors of Ashley's paintings. The Architecture is going to be heading towards European. All of this takes place in the mid 80s so I'm going to keep that in mind.
Anyways, I'm totally open to ideas and what not!
Did a paintover, just used the reddish section from one of the concepts and overlayed it with a color dodge, you could do the same with your textures and get some very fast results, really wont take much to add some variance in the character at this point with such a strong base.
You might consider putting a lot of color variation in the spec and leave the diffuse mostly unsaturated to see what kind of results you get.
Edit: I'd love to see this guy in a mexican day of the dead celebration (a la Grim Fandango), possibly with a sombrero on! Ha, i don't even know why but i think that'd be perfect, maybe in a gun fight.
Would be a really cool scene to make since you could make some simple geometric pinatas which haven't to my knowledge been done to death and experiment with some simple alphas to give them a frizzy look. Wouldn't be a far stretch from what you have going already with your concepts.
Here is a top down view of everything.
This will give me plenty to work with for a night time render also. Needless to say, I'm a huge fan of Hiten's work and have been itching to do a City or town scene. Hopefully I can do it as fast him!
*Also, I didn't do all the small stuff..ie:chairs, tables, firehydrants, etc etc. This is just an overall feel and composition and theme!
What these tutorials tell me, is I can get decent global illumination with a directional light+lightmass. but everything seems pretty dark and gross. The stand in Skydome isn't interfering with my light (to my knowledge), and I've been toying with this for an hour and a half. What am I doing wrong/not understanding as far as outdoor lighting goes?
Also, here's a nasty maya viewport diffuse screengrab of the first building set.
Same in every browser I've tried (ie. opera. chrome) I get the 403 error from DB when i try to follow the link manually.
One thing tho, buildings here in Europe are way taller than the ones in your scene, you should make them 3-6 stories high if you really want to capture the feel of a mediterranean street.
Also, right now you have bricks going partly trough the concrete part in the middle of the street. Its kind of weird because that middle part usually consists of giant marble or concrete slabs, its not cement.
To link images from DB just make any folders/sub-folders/files inside of your "Dropbox->Public" folder.
ex.
Dropbox -> Public -> Polycount -> Filename_#.jpg
and copy that link. I'm sure you can turn your photos folder to public I just never bothered to learn how. :P
You can tell for certain if it'll link if the link you copy is https or just http. Http =
Now keep em coming. :thumbup:
Had the same problem with dropbox last night myself, none of my images were showing. Seems to be working now though.
The post processing looks very nice too!, looking forward to seeing the show down.
Like the rest of his paintings it's super loose and doesn't show a ton of detail, so I'm kind of filling in the gaps of hyper detail with what I feel comes closest to the architecture, being European. but I was planning on making the entire right hand side 3-4 stories and the buildings that go farther down.
(sorry for the crappy scan...each page of the book is like twice the size of my scanner!)
**Oh, also whats the best way to bump up the normal map in UDK? Usually I have to overlay it in Photoshop but I would like a little more control in my shader.. Thanks again!
the way i do it is plug the normal map into a multiply with a 3 constant and set the red and green channels in the constant to anything more than 1 and the blue channel to 1 exactly. you can fiddle with the red and green channels numbers (just make sure they are the same) until you get your desired height.
hope that helps.
I'm going to continue working and tinkering, but any tips will be awesome!
As you can see my shadows are having problems.. I don't know why, Was tinkering with it for a an hour or two and couldn't figure it out for the death of me. All the buildings and big stuff are done and dealt with. So now I need to worry about the little stuff that goes on buildings. ie: piping, wire, electrical boxes, pots, chairs, signs, etc etc. Also need to make my own skydome texture.
The lighting is just stand in..need to look up some sweet lighting tutorials and then lastly I will worry about post processing and the frosting. Here's a paintover of what I thought would be more fitting.
Still trying to figure out the most interesting angle and Bertie Pose. Comments totally welcomed!
The Depth of Field that comes with the Postprocessvolume is becoming tricky to work with and I don't like the results. Also I wish I could sharpen the scene but I can't really find any Post Process Shaders online or tutorials that I can make/work well. I found this thread http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=78153 and recreated the material but it doesn't work well for me, and the link to the Epic forums had some amazing stuff but can't seem to find a post where he shows how he created it. I'm still a n00b when it comes to Post stuff! But I will keep trying.. any help would be greatly appreciated.
Critiques would be swell!
Yea..the sidewalks are getting weird shadows, which I'm assuming is the AO, I need to figure out how to isolate it. I only had the sidealk on one side of the road because the original idea was to have it a one way street, I guess it doesn't read clear enough. And yea, I weird bounce light going on. =P I'm still new to this, so teaching myself how the hell this crazy engine works. But I will get it all worked out!
I'd like to see some damage decals from the bricks cracking under his weight. He's gotta be pushing a couple tonne with feet that are maybe 1'x1'. Thats a lot of weight to be resting on two small points and not cause any discernible effect.
Theres a certain lack of mood thats found in the paintings as well. The paintings tend to have more drastic exposure levels. Maybe crank up the intensity on the light so it more silhouette's bertie or swap it to a nightscene with some bold color soft light-lights and a hero rim on bertie so it gets the silhouette with the lifeless glow of his eyes.
Also maybe some kind of altered fog feild. Never really messed with that in UDK so can't give any advice. But what comes to mind is dust particles in the air to help give it some weight.
but fix the barrel smoke. It looks like milk in a fish tank. maybe 30% of the opacity it is now, and if its not make it white or at the most 10% grey thought it may just be the light effin with me/it. (because of that the screen right gun makes it look like bertie sharted.)
Edit: also first thing to try, possible easy fix. Plug the diffuse into an emmisive slot.
Just a quick mashup with a crappy photoshopped sombrero, lighting could obviously be better. Run with the idea if you want to dude.
Jeff, I don't even know what to say. . . Thank you? haha
Why would a robot even be wearing a Sombrero?!?! WHERE WOULD THEY MAKE A SOMBRERO THAT BIG?!
What do you guys think? I think I like it, and might keep it for my final shot, and finally start on my nighttime shot. Any last Critiques would be majorly appreciated!
*edit*
Or maybe a shot thats a little bit higher
Just an idea. Darken everything a bit, make duplicate of berties texture for the night shot and try throwing a fresnel effect on it and pulling it back to just be a quasi rim light/pencil effect with a very soft pink/red hue throw a light behind bertie and link it to him specifically and wiggle it around some to see what kind of effect you can get from it, maybe toss a blue tint into it.
Just ideas. Colors I was using in photoshop.
Also maybe a stronger dof?
Can't say how well they'll work hah.
And because Polycount is rad as hell.. Here is Bertie. The Polyfucker.
Did you put a bullet into the cylinder backwards or is that a spent casing?
I think your good yo, hah, its just hard to tell because of the extreme angle, no worries
I love the texturing work on Bertie around the edges of her arms and where the head swivels.
I want to see more work from you!