[UDK] Desert Scene Environment

Arcanox

This is my latest project that I've been working on. It's a simple little desert scene in UDK and it's the first attempt I've made at making an environment in UDK. This is by no means finished. There are still some rough structures that haven't received the proper care and attention they deserve, a couple models that are placed are simple block ins (like that dreadful windmill and aquaduct). Lately I've been purely focused on filling in the entire scene and getting all the major elements rendered, and then I'll move on to the process of filling the scene with props.

Also it should be noted that I'm generally not satisfied with the color grading and shader qualities of a couple materials. Once I finish constructing all the major elements in the scene I'm going to spend a bit of time achieving the effect I want.







I'm borrowing some stylistic influences from Blizzard, but rendering them in a detailed fashion. This scene in particular is intended to be a small desert port that's quite friendly and colorful. Obviously you don't get that impression right now, but as I move on to the props it's going to be a bit more apparent.

I've been working at this for a couple weeks so far, any thoughtful remarks or criticisms would be appreciated.


Almost forgot! An abridged to-do list:

-Add lanterns for effect lighting
-Wagons, boxes, cloths, urns, and market stands are in order
-Trim style meshes/textures will be added to enhance detail of structures
-Red cloth awnings & flags will be added, animated to blow in the wind
-Windows will have cloth drapes added
-An additional rock mesh type will be added to blend the single cliff mesh together
-Minor foliage and grasses will be added to the cracks in the cliffs.

Jonathan Marshall

Very appealing. I want to play this. It looks very professional, I think. Populating it a bit will help, but honestly, I think this looks very welcoming, and it has a good feeling of direction, regardless of whatever plans you have for the shaders. The ONLY thing I will crit is maybe the bricks on the road look a bit too deep, like I would imagine tripping a falling easily on those stones.

iniside

Very nice. (not to mention I'm working on desert from about three month and can't finish ;p).
But! On bottom screen floor bricks, look quite I don't know just look odd. You most likly got screenshot from bad angle.

And corner pice, looks like it have to strong normal map, which also look odd, because mesh looks like it's new and polished. It cloud use some damage on corners, top and bottom.

Arcanox

Dialing down the normal intensity and reducing the contrast on a couple materials is probably a good idea. On a lot of materials, I constructed all the shader from scratch and haven't had a good look at how each material plays off of each other.

I also plan on having a variant material which overlays some normal map and an extra shading pass on the diffuse to simulate cracks. I made that already, but it's generally too costly to carry on all materials so I need to go back and pick and choose exactly which pieces I want to damage up.

The bricks do look a bit deep with the textured pavers. One thing that I definitely need to do is run my source maps through crazybump and soften the depth on them.

There are actually some geometry pavers there as well, but I need to reduce the polycount on those and generate a couple LOD's for them as well. I get the feeling that you're thinking that the geometry pavers look a bit out of place based on the AO that's getting rendered there. I can probably fix that by reducing the Z scale and having a backsplash material a little bit closer. Right now the cracks between them drops about a foot or two in UDK scale, so it definitely needs some asset placement fixes with those.


Will have some more updates soon. Just working on finishing up my latest prop and will work out some of the issues you mentioned.

Arcanox

Ok some updates:

Some new props, a simple crate, and some big epic lanterns to provide a source of my back lighting.



The large awnings are complete. Spent quite a bit of time getting the shading of the material to look good but I'm quite happy with it.


Foliage! This is my first attempt at making any sort of foliage and I'm quite happy with the way it turned out. It took me forever to orient the leaves to make proper texture strips for this though.


Overall shot of the scene. Still need to work on the placement of assets a little bit more and crunch out some more props.




Also, I didn't have time to implement all the advice I've received so far, but I plan on getting around to it when I start working on the placement of assets and tweaking all the materials. I'm purely in asset creation mode right now and I'll save all the fine tuning till a little later. Still a ways to go so I'm really open to anymore criticism or suggestions to fire away.

Sandro

This is kool! Love color scheme and atmosphere.

Textures look a bit too harsh to me. As whole lighting/shapes look pretty stylized I'd make textures more painterly and not as intense.

Arcanox

You may be right about that. Like I said, I didn't have time to tweak the normal map for some of these objects. That's contributing to some of the harshness as they have a backlit sheen to them. Dialing that down would help, but I also think it would be good if I spent a bit of time toning down some of the details and simplifying the texture sheets.

The wall blocks, terrace blocks, pavers, and wall texture sample a lot of the same thing. They don't seem to be meshing all that well, so I can spend a bit of time on that in a few days and paint down those details.

jackalope

just my opinion but: i think if you are going to have as much atmosphere effect as you do you should consider desaturating the color, its looking very blue-green. And also add some mist particles around that falling water. Try adding some color to the scene, banners, decorations? I really like where this is going though.

Baddcog

Looks cool, kindof Myst like.

Gonna have to borrow that circluar brickwork for my TDM map
(just flat, but it would look great around the city well.)

itsmadman

Looks good. The place where the water fall meets the ground, the tiling of the brick seems to not match up with the water catcher. maybe some grass could cover up the seam. But u are definitely just tweaking what is already pretty solid

Oh sand decals and weeds could really add to the realism of the scene

Arcanox

For the brick that meets the water pool, that's going to be replaced. In the scale of the scene it's actually quite difficult to step up on that area so I'm going to have a series of wooden planks there that form a deck. I'm not too hot on the over usage of that particular texture so that feature needs to be added.

I'm going to wait until I have all the assets I need to build it though.

BlvdNights

Very nice! Reminds me of a TF2 map.

duxun

good work !!!

Highelf

Really loving the way this looks.

Vailias

Its very brown.. well constructed and nicely lit, but incredibly the same shade of brown everywhere.

maybe you'll add some color variations in lighting, but I really think this could do with some decorative love. If the inhabitants of this place can make iron lanterns, I'm sure someone found a way to make some form of paint, plaster, or stain.

Arcanox

It's getting there. I still need to focus on the props a bit and get the folded types of cloth looking a bit better. What I imported was mostly a quickie model and it needs to be adjusted so you don't get put off by the planar look of them at certain angles.

I also think I need to bump the midtones down a tad. It seems a little bit on the bright side.

It's getting close to the end, so if anybody has some good ideas, I'd appreciate them at any time.

chadabees

I love this.. It's looking very nice with more stuff added in. It's very relaxing for me to look at for some reason. XD

SimonT

pretty nice, but i feel more coasty then deserty because of the blue fog.