UE3 Medieval scene workthread

JordanW

I figured I could start a thread for this instead of continuously posting in what are you working on.

I'm still working on this and I've just now placed some grass meshes and generic foliage. I still need to get some junk growing on top of the ruins and I'd like at least a couple more larger plants.

Habboi

I like it. Very...Elder Scroll'y. Reminds me of that quest in Oblivion...with the lightning pillar and the book. Keep it up.

Xoliul

Well this will be interesting
Can I ask, how are you doing your grass? Decolayers? How are you personally fixing the whole "pitch black on backside" issue you normally get with grass?

JordanW

grass using custom lighting shader that fakes scattering through clumps of grass, uses world position to generate normal instead of faces. The meshes have []use twosided lighting and []shadow indirect only enabled. I'm playing 5ft radius clumps by hand with the static mesh placement tool

Xoliul

Interesting, this is exactly why I knew i should ask you!

JordanW wrote: »

grass using custom lighting shader that fakes scattering through clumps of grass, uses world position to generate normal instead of faces. The meshes have []use twosided lighting and []shadow indirect only enabled. I'm playing 5ft radius clumps by hand with the static mesh placement tool

Would you mind explaining that part a bit more, perhaps just a screenshot of your nodes? I'm trying to think of how you translate a position into a vector that can be used as normals?

seforin

are you putting atmospheric effects or just gonna keep this flat for beauty renders sake?

(sky moving, sun setting, transition of time/day etc?)


edit: Also looking forward to this one , probably should had mentioned that

Jeff Parrott

Jordan! This is great man. Loving what you're doing here. Please put up as much walkthrough as possible. Looks great so far.

PogoP

This is going to be really interesting to watch, I'm making a similar sort of scene with the foliage and I would be really interested to find out how you made it look so good.

Edit - One thing that sticks out to me is that those stone steps look really blobby and look like they're made of clay. Needs some harder edges!

JordanW

Xoliul: WorldPosition - ObjectWorldPosition then normalized and translated from worldspace to tangent space gives spherical normals based on position

Seforin, I'm going to probably make a better sky (static right now) no transitioning time of day, I like the baked shadows/indirect lighting

PogoP I agree about the softness of the stairs, I should harden them, I just need to figure out the easiest way without remodeling

divi

subscribed!

Bobby J Rice 3rd

Great work. I like how your ground grass texture holds up.
About your stairs, I've found that the Zbrush Trim sets can go a long way. (ex: dynamic Trim) If you are working in Zbrush Layers then backtracking should be easy enough.

Trim Front is also really good for creating nice contrast between smooth and damaged stone.

Kevin Johnstone

Pretties

haiddasalami

Already tonne of info here Looking forward to more.

duxun

can we get a close up on the ruins ... i really want to see them ...

JordanW

Added a moss component to the stone and rock materials and painted some in, i'll probably continually refine the moss placement as i work on the scene. I also added some volumetrics to add localized fog to areas of the background and some in the ruins.

polybeast

Actually, I think the stairs look just fine - stone staircases that have been exposed to the elements for quite some time, especially those that are well trodden tend to be quite smooth in appearance where otherwise there'd be harder edges.

roosterMAP

im lovin the bushes and the stone materials. makes it kinda look like a canvas.

cholden

A thread for this, fantastic! I'll be watching.

haikai

These shots are really nice. I appreciate how detailed the scene is without being overly busy (which is what bugs me most about game environments).

This could just be because of the vignetting effect, but the shots feel a bit "underexposed."

snow

this is great, i've been working for the last month on something similar to this, would you mind posting wires for the walls please? Or an explanation of how you approached them? I really need help in bettering mine.

Is that geometry in the background. ie the mountains?

I hope you're able to help!

Edit: p.s. way to crap all over mine! /sadface =[

tda

Really nice dude, will be watching

paulsvoboda

Stairs are looking much better now. The atmosphere, mountains, clouds are all looking fantastic.
Just a quick question, how are you going about constructing this? Is it brick by brick in UDK or modular wall 'segments' duplicated around the place, or something else entirely?
Only thing by way of critique I have is the bricks look a tiny bit too soft, similar to the how the stairs used to look. But it could just be the depth of field/lighting.
Great stuff.

dtschultz

JordanW wrote: »

Xoliul: WorldPosition - ObjectWorldPosition then normalized and translated from worldspace to tangent space gives spherical normals based on position

This is looking great! Looking forward to seeing more. Thanks for sharing that last bit. I'll have to see if this type of shader network is used in the new engine demo, so I can grab it.

PogoP

Something is really not right about the scene atm and I can't really figure out what. It does looking amazing, but something is letting it down. I think it might be the hills/trees in the distance, they look a little odd.

adam

Interesting! Curious to see where this goes. Whats the plan for a focal point? Those ruins, or something more prominent?

Also, the scale of the moss feels off. Less dense on the right side of the top of the stairs then other areas while overall the scale of the noise common with moss feels too large.

Pedro Amorim

man.. awesome man!
those last 3 shots look like photographs !

Purplepaint

He wins.

metalliandy

Looking great man

duxun

i have a question abbout the green moss on the ruins there... did you create that moss by meshpainting or did you paint it in the texture ( sorry have not read the whole thread...

cheers...

glottis8

Looking nice! I don't know about that much fog on the back tho... in some spots it looks just like a smudge. You should try to keep it low... so you can clearly see the top half of the mountain. I really like the attention to detail tho. very nice.

Striff

Looking great. What is used for the lighting? Dominant directional and what else?

Contrails

Love it! I'd also like to see how you did the moss

Are you planning to do anything more with the ledges on the right? Maybe some trees and bushes growing on the top and a dead tree hanging over?

BradleyWascher

A+ nice job man, I really like how you added in the distant mountains to give a greater scene of scale and location. I feel like that something a lot of people over look. Keep up the good work!

Seanfac3

Awesome composition. I'm looking forward to seeing more.

ivan0v

You can try to sharpen the stairs through a high frequency normal map overlay-ed on the original (Photoshop). But not too much because your stairs are already good looking.

mixeh

Is JordanW still alive, would love to hear his process on the walls!?

Thanks mate!

JordanW

thanks for all the kind words, I probably won't get to work on this until the weekend again. The week is usually too crazy to do fun projects.

I agree the fog starts to abruptly and the distance stuff doesn't look quite right yet, although I'm not sure what to do. The mountains are modeled and I have some forest billboards.

Lighting is just dominant directional for sun, then environment color+ subtle soft directional light facing down for everything else.

moss is meshpainted and the scale is a bit busted right now, all of the stone uses the same material so I need to make some instances where I scale it for different size objects


Right now I'm just trying to decide where to stop with this, I want to mesh out the natural path areas some more and I may add some structure inside the mountain but not sure how far I'll take it.

shotgun

Goof stuff Jordan, as always.
I feel like there need to be a greater color depth to the vegetation, the leafy bushes tend to desaturated at the top, which doesn't contrast well with the already grey surroundings. Not sure that's the root of it, but some glorious touches of color could pump this up significantly.

snow

Can we please see a wireframe of the wall Jordan, i'm so desperate to know your process so I can stop making crap.

JordanW

Created a flyby, haven't done much work on this as I'm getting kind of bored with it and would like to mess with some other things.

http://vimeo.com/18036161

Kevin Johnstone

Morelens Flare!

Looks great though, what lives in that cave?

Builder_Anthony

I did alot of lighting in neverwinter nights toolset.I really dont think theres anything wrong with the models but i think if it was a night scene it would change the entire feel of eveerything.Maybe have some torches in there to light up the stones or have the moon shining in there and on the mists and clouds.

Irodex

Wow...beautiful video man. Was that all shot with Matinee in UDK? How did you get such epic lens flare and focusing effects?

Jeff Parrott

Man! This is phenomenal. It would be nice to see a dash of color here and there. But otherwise it's amazing. Great stuff man.

JordanW

<Was that all shot with Matinee in UDK?

Yes.

<How did you get such epic lens flare and focusing effects?

Just built a lens flare with a ton of elements and mixing flare quad textures with textures aligned to the screen, so bokeh from dirt on the lens was fixed in place yet the mask that unhid it stayed around the lightsource and edge of screen.

adam

Cool flyby! I found myself often trying to see through the flare, which got a bit annoying, but at times it works. My favourite spot was the change of focus from the rock in the foreground to the ruins in the background.

Speaking of rock - those huge ones that the door/cave entrance is leading to - are they finished? It feels like they could get some loving by way of form.

PogoP

Looks really good but that lensflare is just way too much. I thought we had eradicated excessive lensflare years ago!

Impressive environment though, looks very natural.

EMC3D

Nice scene and fly through but way too much lens flare, found myself wincing at parts.

jayoplus

Nice scene. I actually didn't mind the lens flare for the most part.

Firebert

me likey.

i do agree with some comments about the postfx, but i would just say they are only a tad bit strong (vignette, LF, etc.), it all still works, looks simple, and is absolutely gorgeous.

cman2k

Lens flare technique is really intriguing, thanks for sharing with that. I personally don't find it too heavy, but I see this as much more of a cinematic technique and it's pretty fantastic in that respect.