Bell Tower
Hello internets!
I have a new scene that I am going to be working on. It is an Eat3D "small contained scene" challenge. I wanted to post on here because I love the feedback that I have been getting on all my scenes
Here is the link to the challenge over at Eat3D:
http://eat3d.com/forum/contests-and-challenges/challenge-3-nextgen-small-scene
Reference photos coming.
I have a new scene that I am going to be working on. It is an Eat3D "small contained scene" challenge. I wanted to post on here because I love the feedback that I have been getting on all my scenes
Here is the link to the challenge over at Eat3D:
http://eat3d.com/forum/contests-and-challenges/challenge-3-nextgen-small-scene
Reference photos coming.
Replies
Let me know what you think of the reference.
( Sorry )
I will have more time later this month to upload and work freely on everything.
Until then!
Bell Tower:
I have more recent textures and some more modeling done, but I am going to bed right now...soooooo
Hello ErichWK - I will be putting this into UDK very soon! Also, WOW! That tutorial is amazing! I will definitely be trying to do that once I get a little further along with this project.
Other then that keep it up and I def think you should get rid of the grime cards for the vertex painting in UDK it will look so much better and you have more control over the brick exposure.
Hugh
I started filling out the silhouette a bit more and adding some interesting shapes into the scene, building up a better looking foundation and I will being working with a new set of textures tonight and getting rid of the ones that are on the models right now.
I have also placed the model into UDK and put a small light system on it, but the textures are not doing for me anymore, so I'll post those pictures once I get some better looking textures onto them.
Don't crit me too hard on my lighting
Some rock tests that I have been working with. Better ones coming as well!
Thanks for watching
Starting to build a small scene around the Bell Tower now.
I may have to get rid of the statues for polycount reasons, or I need to condense them down to a lower mesh.
S2Engine - I'm not trying to expand it too much, but I do have that problem so I will listen to you and stop now before I get too carried away haha. That is a huge problem I have with projects, I spread myself too thin and then I kind of forget where I was and then lose interest and direction. Do you guys ( or gals ) have any suggestions on how to not lose interest/direction on a project?
Also, I have a 10,000 tri limit and a accumulative 4096 texture sheet for the entire scene. I will be optimizing the scene even more, but I want to get more of a finished scene put together first.
Thanks again to both of you for the help and feedback!
New posts to come, I SWEAR SOON!
New screenshots from UDK!
If anyone was wondering.
First, although the stone bricks are nice and varied, they're a little too contrasted and it makes it really obvious where the tiling is happening. Maybe either tone that down in the texture, or you could possibly split up the large supporting columns into sections and rotate the sections differently so that the repeats are offset from each other and not as apparent.
Also your alpha planes are very clearly just that, and that's never good. Have a look at Hourences's Decals tutorial. While that will help, I think a major part of the problem with those textures is that they're very clearly just photos with no processing, so a lot of the light information from the photo is still in the texture and it's fighting with the lighting you have in your scene. One way to minimize that is to take what you have for your texture in Photoshop and paint in some "fill" colors in a layer below it; these would be the base colors you want your texture to use and should match the style of your other textures/scene. Then use blending modes like multiply/overlay/screen etc. along with the Blend If function to get a more natural, less photosource look.
Finally, smoothing groups; that's what they're called in Max. In Maya it's Soften/Harden Edges. This basically controls how shading is handled between two faces, as in whether it will be a hard edge or a soft one. There's a lot of good info here on the differences between the two and how to go about getting your desired result. In the case of your temple for example, I think you need to harden your window edges. Hope you don't mind, I did a quick paintover as an example.
Green edges should be softened and orange hardened. Those are just some of the smoothing errors I'm seeing, but the rest should be pretty obvious once you go through those. If you're not sure which way to go, try softening an edge and if it gives weird shading errors go the opposite way with it. Good luck!
I have fixed the edges and I shouldn't be getting that weird shadowing effect anymore. The tree needs more love which I am doing today. I am also going to be placing the objects in better places and figuring out what I need to do to make this scene and actual scene without adding anymore polygons :P
I have also started playing with the mesh painter brush in UDK and thanks to S2Engine I will be able to start applying the snow effects to my materials the way I wanted to.
A lot of work ahead of me still.
BAM!
I have been working on the scene still though because I want to finish it and create an entire environment out of the work I have done so far, along with adding onto it and creating more.
Here is the work so far:
People were trying to point out the problems in your piece earlier (which is mostly the approach on the texture) and you just kept going ahead without addressing it there. (Well you did allegedly restart the texture, but you did the exact same approach again).Now you're in the engine trying to show off your work, nobody's commenting because your skipped to the end too fast. It's a dangerous thing when people stop commenting, it means they give up trying to help.
You won't improve if you choose to just go ahead the same way when people are trying to point out problems at an early stage. Unless your only intention was only to practice importing and setting up scenes in UDK, which I don't think was your plan.
You can't rely on god-rays and fancy lighting to make up for weak textures or modeling, because in a pro scenario, you don't control presentation as a modeler. You need to deliver a piece that will stand up in any lighting, including your editor viewport.
Your tower model was looking fine until the textured version. People told you that the texture had problems, which you left intact. As a result it still looks bad when lit. It would be a good exercise to scrap the texture, re-read the comments, ask for clarification if you're unsure how to do it 'right', and try texturing it again. It needs to look good by itself, before you slap on the extra layers from an engine.
You don't only have to be attentive at the comments, but also your reference. You had excellent reference images, with a great guideline for how the texture should look. But compare your model in max to the reference shots. It should be easy to see the miles of difference between them in colour, texture, variance, wear, even the brick patches are nowhere near the same look.
I'm not saying this to dig into you, but as someone who is also mostly self taught, I think it's important that someone tells you this. You won't grow unless you are not only open to learning from comments/reference, but also actively interested in putting them into effect. You might say that since this was a competition there was no time. I would reply that in that case it's too soon for you to be doing competitions, it's time better spent for you on taking it slow and doing it to the best standard you can muster.
You're tossing in rocks and trees and a skybox... While your tower is a long way from being called 'finished'. Take it one piece at a time, and take your time and these comments to do it as well as you can. That's how you'll learn and grow.
I'm also seeing that you're happy with just the 'impression' of a tree, or a rock, or a building. You're happy if we can tell what it is, but you're not asking yourself "Is that what it really looks like?" Is a boulder usually a giant smooth sphere shape sitting on top of the ground? Is a tree really just a fat trunk with a bush of leaves at the top? Does that really look like my reference? A boulder is usually more broken up and faceted than round. A tree has a certain logic to how it's built. You can simplify these things as a matter of style, but at the core of it should still be this understanding in how these things really look.
I understand where you are coming from and I agree with what you are saying. Now that the competition is over I will have more free time to do this scene. I know I have a lot to work on and I understand that the scene is nowhere near completed. This is only my third attempt at creating a completed scene so far and I am happy with where I am. I would never say that I am at the professional level of work right now, but I do hope to get there at some point.
Hearing, "You're happy if we can tell what it is..." sucks but I will be working on getting better with each new scene that I do. I don't think I was hiding behind post effect from within UDK but I will work on creating better base models and textures and then showcasing them from Maya instead of UDK. I like to put my work into UDK so my friends and I can run around within the level and find faults for me to fix, it's just another way for me to get criticism.
I will be re-texturing the entire Bell Tower as you said to do. This time I hope to have it look better than the crap you see before you now.
Hey proximity - I have already started on doing just that. I'll also be touching up some of the geo since that is what is giving me that weird hard edge in my screenshots.
I need to showcase the branches more so I think i might start adjusting the alpha to be more see through.
j/k, the rock is decent enough but I can spot using a straight texture from cg_textures a mile away.
I will be working on the wall first out of the tower. Trying to fix the geo, so the edges don't show up in engine.
Also you might want reference and observe how branches grow out and the shape that the leaf masses will take, it looks very random right now and unnatural. You don't really see branches that twist down like that very often. Also leaves usually tend to grow out in a canopy to better catch light, if that helps.
I may be wrong, but I think showcasing in UDK (or any engine) is fine if not better than presenting in Maya as you get a better feel of what it will be like from the end users point of view. I think what Artmachine was trying to say is when you present them try and keep it minnimal. so simple lights to show what needs to be shown, and not much else realy, maybe BSP brush for a floor to put in context if it needs it. Just avoid going overboard in adding post proccessing affects and the like until the model itself is done. I think thats what he was trying to get at anyway
Looking forward to seeing this peice go further good luck! :thumbup:
http://wiki.polycount.com/VertexNormal?action=show&redirect=Vertex+Normal
glottis8 - Hey and thanks. I will read through that and try it out. S2Engine and another one of my friends showed me this, but I will read through it again and try it out finally.
Thanks for the comments guys
I'll post my Maya shots of the vertex normals tonight if I ever get over this cold.
Wireframe:
At present it's obvious in certain areas (circled in red) that it's one close-up photo scaled across a giant surface, and that's a problem. You could just stamp/heal out those details and probably get away with it, but I think what might work even better is to break up the surface into smaller chunks, something like how I've outlined in orange. That way, you can map tiling textures to smaller areas for higher resolution, and you can also get in with some texture variations such as the green paint. Again, excuse the terrible quality of the example, just did a quick bucket fill and erased out some pseudo-wear at the top. Finally, you can make the arch of the doorway terminate to tris by following the blue painted topology if you don't mind having tris. If it's kept to a small scale it usually doesn't present a problem for me.
I obviously still have a lot of work to do on it, but I really really like your idea for the modular sets/pieces of wall, it would break up the texture and give me more to use throughout the scene later on. I will work on the geo that you suggested and see if UDK likes it and won't give me weird looking shadows on it. Fixing the texture right now as well. Thanks
Wireframe: