WIP: Last Stand - Desert Alien Invasion Base

Kawe

Haven't been on these boards for many years. You'd think that people would get better over time but I haven't touched anything related to graphics in very long time now.

Anyhow... so finally I got some time over to actually create graphics. I'm currently working on a little indie game project that will hopefully be completed late summer.

I'm responsible for creating the environments and seeing how the only thing I've made so far was some crappy student project 2 years ago... I'm a little nervous. So basically I decided to put up a little WIP thread here to get feedback as well as some motivation to push myself to the finish line.

The environment is supposed to be desert with some half-futuristic military bases. The desert will also extend into some canyons/cliffs so we can keep the players locked up good - don't want people getting lost in the desert. Haha.

So yeah... for the past few days I've been learning ZBrush and getting things into UDK. So finally I managed to get something that is close to the quality I was hoping for. In fact it looks better than I had hoped to achieve in a couple of days.



I'm obviously still far from my goal but ya.. thought I'd share. Would be nice to get feedback and what not. I mean there's probably a thousand of things that I could do that I haven't even thought about.

Kawe

I'm working on some drop pods for the humans right now. They are supposed to be quite current tech so I made them look like a missile. However they are also supposed to be able to come up through the ground so I outfitted them with a drill.

There's a door that swings open on both sides of the pod. It isn't very visible yet... will fix that with some textures.

Oh, and these pods won't contain actual people. It'd be quite hazardous to travel inside a missile



I'm still texturing these things as I got tired of my hipoly mesh looking like crap and producing shitty normal maps.

What I'm aiming for is something semi-realistic I guess. Or rather.. it won't be realistic until I figure I actually need to make it realistic. Heh. I don't think I want to do things like putting dirt in places that "should" have dirt. Makes things look so.. dirty. But maybe I'll resort to that when i can't figure out what to put in specific locations. Heh.

The aliens will have more advanced looking drop pods that will actually go back into the sky after dropping people off.

EDIT: I just realized I have the worst topic name of all times. haha.

SaferDan

I like what you have so far the rocks are fantastic!

The texture on the pods needs work though but they are wip so i will just sit and watch!

Having said that you might want to look at the metal again, its not reading like metal very well atm

Kawe

Hey, thanks for the feedback.

Here's how it's looking. Got rid of all the noisy stuff. Trying to keep it clean and simple. Added a little dirt just to make it less boring. Not a lot though.



Having problems making the white core look like metal but I figured it looks fine. Maybe more like a matte metal?

At least I think it looks more "fun" now. Like... I want to have one of those at home.

EDIT: Also don't ask me about the polycount on that drill

Kawe

Customizing a sand blending shader from 3dmotive.com. It's pretty damn cool. Sadly it doesn't blend very well with the terrain... and you kinda have to make your mesh support the whole blending thing. After starting painting around I realized that this mesh isn't very good for painitng on. Haha.



Don't think I can fix the seam sadly Maybe

Also this vertex blending stuff is amazing cool. Was looking at the Epic Citadel assets and they solved the water really nicely. I was pretty amazed when I looked at it.

SaferDan

I see what you have done there! They look better now! Although imo the rockets now don't fit with the rocks? I don't know i might be wrong!

Also the grunge looks a bit out of scale?

Also I now really want to know the polycount of the rockets!

Kawe

Heh, I'm prolly gonna redo the rockets if I get time. Not very happy with them at all. My hipoly modeling sucks so... gonna practice that a bit

Mike Yevin

i think part of the reason your getting a nasty result is because there would be no way sand would do anything like that in real life. think about using the vertex blending on the top of the rocks, rather than on the sides. or take a look at this awesome tutorial by Virtuosic, might work pretty well in your case:

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1193841

if you want it to appear as though the sand is piling up on the sides, i would either add another mesh around the base of the rock with the same sand texture as the ground, or use the terrain tools in udk to physically raise the level of the terrain near the base of the rock. hope this helps :thumpup:

Kawe

Woops, haven't been checking in here in a while.

Been trying to figure out how buildings and stuff should look... and instead I ended up making props instead since I'm not very confident in my other skills. Having a hard time finding references for some military base in the desert that is semi-futuristic.

Probably going to need a "dirty up" pass on the textures... but I like clean stuff



Also I'm having issues with these hard shadows on UDK terrain. Would really love to make them soft but I haven't figured out how.

Mike Yevin wrote: »

i think part of the reason your getting a nasty result is because there would be no way sand would do anything like that in real life. think about using the vertex blending on the top of the rocks, rather than on the sides. or take a look at this awesome tutorial by Virtuosic, might work pretty well in your case:

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1193841

if you want it to appear as though the sand is piling up on the sides, i would either add another mesh around the base of the rock with the same sand texture as the ground, or use the terrain tools in udk to physically raise the level of the terrain near the base of the rock. hope this helps :thumpup:

Hey, I'm seriously going to try that out. Auto-sand that looks good sounds way better than manual sand that looks bad

I'll be sure to make some sand piles as well.

Kawe

Finally found the settings for fuzzier shadows. Also made some more props and stuff.





Uh.. the level is just a test map for my graphics stuffs so ya

Cheese_Shinobi

This is exactly what I would do if I had the time for it! Really like the idea and your work so far, gonna keep an eye on this for sure!

Kawe

Haven't posted here in a while. Decided to ditch the whole "clean" business cause well... I'm not very good at it apparently. Here's some progress images... did some quick attempt at lighting the scene as well cause it just looks so ugly without lighting. Took a while to figure out how lights work but I was kind of impressed with how it turned out since it's my first try at this. Haha. Not sure how it will look in the end.. going to have to figure out some natural light sources to light the playing area with.

Still needs a lot of decorations and stuff.

Obviously some of the old "clean" stuff is there and some of it shouldnt even be there.. like that weird gate thing is upscaled a bajillion times...

jimmypopali

Wow what a great update, the scale works really well.

DDuckworth

Ooooooh this is looking very nice, thanks for the massive sudden update, kinda nice to get that every now and then rather than following slow progress on works .

The doors' scale seem a little off to me, I think the thing that is causing it the most is the size of the yellow placards on the sides, they seem so massive that it seems like you had a human sized door and scaled it up to fit the space, perhaps shrink them and add more as a test run?

Kawe

DDuckworth wrote: »

Ooooooh this is looking very nice, thanks for the massive sudden update, kinda nice to get that every now and then rather than following slow progress on works .

The doors' scale seem a little off to me, I think the thing that is causing it the most is the size of the yellow placards on the sides, they seem so massive that it seems like you had a human sized door and scaled it up to fit the space, perhaps shrink them and add more as a test run?

Ya, the door is supposed to be maybe 1/5 the size. Going to have to make something new to fill up that space. Not really sure what to put there though.