Lowpoly handpainted little RPG scene
polycounter lvl 12
Hello ! 
Your critics have been very helpful for my last project, so this time I start this WIP thread from the beginning to improve as mush as possible this one
So.. again some lowpoly handpainted stuff, more or less following the Blizzard style that I love so much. I will try to take care about the tricount and textures sizes more than in my previous project because it's really not my cup of tea and I really would like to know more about technical constrains in video games (especially blizzard's ones :poly136:) and how pros optimize scenes.
This little scene is supposed to technically fit to any RPG action game (like diablo 3
)
The "background" is more or less the same than Diablo 3 too : Abandoned and destroyed stuff because of evil creatures living on earth ^^
I don't want something too bright, something closer to dark fantasy would be cool. For example I really like the feeling of this environment
Anyway, I'm currently at the modeling process. I'm in lack of ideas to fill the scene, so ideas would be greatly appreciated :poly142:
Objects tricount (everything except ground and stones) : ~ 4800
Stones (bottom faces that are underneath ground are not yet deleted but I'm wondering if the tricount is enough important nowadays to spend time to manually delete faces that will not be seen in game...:poly141:) : ~ 7000
Ground: 2000
About the stones : it's 8 different models that I duplicated around the scene, so the idea was to make 1 single texture (or even a little tillable tex) for the whole set of stones but then if I do that I can't work with AO and baked lights anymore for these stones, and that really bother me :poly122:
Personally I prefer to have larger textures with uniques UVs so I can work with AO but if I make one unique UV for each stones I think it will end to a pretty big texture.. :poly118: Any ideas ?
Hope you like it so far
Critics & ideas more than welcome !
cya
Your critics have been very helpful for my last project, so this time I start this WIP thread from the beginning to improve as mush as possible this one
So.. again some lowpoly handpainted stuff, more or less following the Blizzard style that I love so much. I will try to take care about the tricount and textures sizes more than in my previous project because it's really not my cup of tea and I really would like to know more about technical constrains in video games (especially blizzard's ones :poly136:) and how pros optimize scenes.
This little scene is supposed to technically fit to any RPG action game (like diablo 3
)The "background" is more or less the same than Diablo 3 too : Abandoned and destroyed stuff because of evil creatures living on earth ^^
I don't want something too bright, something closer to dark fantasy would be cool. For example I really like the feeling of this environment
Anyway, I'm currently at the modeling process. I'm in lack of ideas to fill the scene, so ideas would be greatly appreciated :poly142:
Objects tricount (everything except ground and stones) : ~ 4800
Stones (bottom faces that are underneath ground are not yet deleted but I'm wondering if the tricount is enough important nowadays to spend time to manually delete faces that will not be seen in game...:poly141:) : ~ 7000
Ground: 2000
About the stones : it's 8 different models that I duplicated around the scene, so the idea was to make 1 single texture (or even a little tillable tex) for the whole set of stones but then if I do that I can't work with AO and baked lights anymore for these stones, and that really bother me :poly122:
Personally I prefer to have larger textures with uniques UVs so I can work with AO but if I make one unique UV for each stones I think it will end to a pretty big texture.. :poly118: Any ideas ?
Hope you like it so far
Critics & ideas more than welcome !
cya
Replies
Looking forward to seeing this textured.
I wouldn't worry about deleting unseen faces on the stones until the very end if you do it at all. Maybe you'd end up doing it if this was actually for a game, but I don't think it's important for a portfolio piece.
For the texture, there's a way to add AO/shadows on top of tiled textures. I'm not an environment artist, but I know my colleagues use something called Mod2x all the time. If I'm not mistaken, you lay out unique UVs on another UV set and then "bake" a texture that the games uses for the AO/shadow effect. I'm not really sure how you'd do this on your own unless you're going to display it in a game engine though. I suppose this is similar to light maps and stuff in UDK?
So.. between Torchlight games, I managed to update my little scene. I decided to make it a little bit bigger.
I'm close to start uvmapping now.
I still need to improve the dead fallen tree, add little branches on the big one and optimize the ground tricount + tweaks depending on your crits :poly142:
Tricout :
Objects+Trees : 9351
Stones : 2354
Ground : 12K :poly122:
REKLAS > Billboard for grass and stuff like that will come later cause I'm not sure of what I'm going to do for the ground texture yet. I know blizzard use a lot of billboard textures, even to make tree which is pretty awesome o_O I wonder how this tree looks like ingame when you move the camera :poly141:..
haikai > Yep the idea to use a second uv layer to bake AO came to me a few days ago. I tried it and it works perfectly. Blender and most of engines nowadays support multi uv layouts (like UDK lightmaps yep) so it will solve my problem :poly142: I don't know why this idea came to me that late :poly136:
Feel free to give any critics !!
Now I'm going to sleep, 4:48am here...
ZzzZz Cya !
Quite awesome, really; can't wait for textures!
Maybe some closeups? 'twould be nice.
i really like the rock piles, how'd you go about blocking those out?
keep it up
Sorry for the late answer, these uvs gave me nightmares :poly127:
So, what's new : basicly, nothing. I spent the whole week unwrapping this scene.
Objects has a 1024 ao map that use a first uv layout but I'm not very happy with it.. There are some glitchs to be fixed and I have some troubles with edge blending because some uvs island are very very small and very close to each other. It's not looking that bad but I hoped to go down to 512 so I think I'll tweak/optimize this first uv layout.
Stones has 256 ao map that also use a first uv layout. Second uv layout will be used for a tiling texture.
Ground has a 512 ao map
Then I spent a lot of time thinking how to unwrap the second uv layout for the diffuse map. I ended with this and I'd like to know what you think of it. :poly122:
How you'd unwrap this scene ?
Feel free to give any advices/tips/critics or to ask for informations/other pics
I can't wait to start the texturing process, I'm bored of uvs maps :poly124:
UV are most likely done. I improved objects' uv layout used for AO. I had a 1024 ao map before, now I managed to get it down to 512x256 with even a better resolution.
Time to texture... :poly142:
A try for the first ground tile. I'm really not happy with it, 'need your help guys
Also I made a quick light test (quick post-prod for the glow and color management with gimp)
House isn't finished.
Ground texture will be made of 4 tiles with a blending map.
Do you have any advices for the brick texture ? How to add colors in it ? It's all gray atm
Also do you have how to or tips to paint ground textures like grass/dirt ? I'm pretty stuck with the ground tex right now :poly122:
Advices and critics are greatly appreciated !
thanks !
c u soon
Maybe do a bit of color toning on them to pull them back a bit and give them a little bit of a color hue. Otherwise, everything else looks fantastic so far. Nice stuff.
Arcan is correct about the brix standing out, not only cuz its too-artificially 100% grey (moss, anyone?), but also cuz they shaded quite differently (and directionally) then all other assets. Kill the top-down highlights, define the edges more overall and it'll be fine.
Amazing start - subscribed!
One thing that really struck me though as I was scrolling down the page at your progress was your choice of palette once I started to see the texture progress - for some reason I just assumed it was going to be bright and colourful, without the heavy AO. Not saying its wrong! Merely pointing out my surprise, take from that what you will!
Looking forward to seeing it evolve!
Sorry for the very late update. I wish new years parties went good for everyone, happy new year anyway
glottis8 > Thank you !
Hazardous > Thank you
Shotgun & Arcanox > Ok ! Critics are very helpful, thank you
So.. too much progress to list everything but here are a few notes :
- Floor Tile 3 and 4 on the work. Atm it's just an ugly flat brown color.
- Seams will be fixed later (trees, rocks)
- Water, second grass type, flowers, dead branches, dead leaves will come later (+ maybe tree bush)
- The black outline of the giant leather thing on the big tree is a little viewport bug, will be fixed later. Also, improvements on this leather texture are to come : folds and scratchs definitly needs to be painted on it.
- AO on trees still need to be fixed (that's why it's dark at some random areas).
- I really had no idea on how to paint trees bark texture, any advices/pictures/idea are welcome.
- I'm not really satisfied with the rock texture. 'Will think on it later.
- Still heavy WIP
shadeless :
lighting :
Critics heavily required :poly124:
Thank you for the help so far, I really tried to take care of all your critics.
And btw, sorry for my bad english
Cya !
Anyway update soon
Sry for the double post hehe :poly136:
Also, any tips on the creation of the grass texture?
The shapes and layout r quite nice here.
some points which I think could be improved:
1) The textured house is quite hard to read with the texture applied to it. The reason is mostly in the texture having too much highlight contrast and actual big size of highlights. The contrast between highlighted and shaded areas is so big that it kinda breaking the overall perception of the building's shape imo. If surfaces would be more uniformed and balanced it would be easier read the surface. That especially applies for the "night" scene.
2) Tree texture asks for better integration with the ground. You could have some sort of moss transition to make wood-grass meeting point less harsh. Right now the tree placement feels not natural because of this.
3) The terrain could have more texture variations like a road or soil patches since in this view one sees the ground most of the time. Some bushes would help too.
4) I would use grass polygons being oriented more towards the top. Your grass polygons r placed as if we would be looking at the scene from FPS point of view. In top view your grass obviously reveals its "planar" nature. Also I would arrange the grass shading a bit, because now it is darker lit than the ground which makes grass polys stand out unnaturally.
jimmypopali > yep, there are some glitchs with the grass when the lighting is on, I'll see what I can do
About the grass texture, I'm not sure if you'r talking about the grass planes or the grass texture of the ground but.
For the ground texture, it's very simple. I used one single blade of grass that I duplicated, moved and rotated randomly on the texture until I had the amount of grass I wanted, then I made a new layer to add some color variation with a cloud texture, added some noise and a little detail texture too and that's all
For the grass planes, it's also very simple. Paint few blade of grass in yellow/green, add a white and black top down blend and set it to overlay. Make foreground blades cast a little shadow on background blades and basicly that's all too
Matroskin > Thank you
I agree on all your points, I'll work on that for the next update :poly142:
duxun > Yeah the grass definitly need some love especially since it is supposed to be viewed from a top view. And you'r right, the grass looks really better from a FPS view
SimonT > Thx
Update soon !
Keep it up, it's looking amazing!
My 2cents would be to add some color to occlusion, so it would look more natural and less "black dusty".
:thumbup:
I worked on this thing for so long now that I can't stand it anymore, it has become unproductive, so I'm waiting for your last critics to do some final tweaks I'll call it done. I like the progress I made since the last update so I guess it's not that bad overall :poly142:
Something's wrong with the ground AO, it does some strange strong black outlines near objects. It'll be fixed.
Critics welcome !
Hope you like it
cya
No ideas? I have some free ones
-the AO looks too strong, especially the main tree bottom.
-everything looks to dead, maybe some life could break this, flys, bat, rabbit, bird, pig, cow. (this is a very personal opinion)
-maybe you can add some plants on the lake, sugestion: http://www.edupic.net/Images/Plants/lake_with_aquatic_plants142.JPG
-a light coming from inside the house?
-smoke from fireplace
That is all could think for now...
Really like where this has gone. I am doing my own hand painted project atm and I am getting to the same point. Working on it to a point where I am becoming unproductive.
Looks great though man! Love the textures. This is my first go round on hand painted textures so they don't look as nice as yours but I am trying.
currently the grass looks like rows of straight grass that has been rotated
the scene is looking great, like the run down look of the house
Is this realtime or post rendered? I know in 3dsmax sometimes you have to change materials to Art&Design or mrShader and use cutout as the opacity is sometimes unaffected. Also depending on your shadow raytrace solution it might cause the planes to shadow like that.
For the grass I would consider having a green and yellow green grass tile, and a dirt, and road/rubble tile. Then use mix / blend maps with noise to create a nicer and more varied grass. Also you can use a defined opacity for the "road" to put around the building and make paths. You should be able to get some nice works, even with a very small opacity map if you have a falloff/blend on the edges.