I see what you mean Minotaur0, but this is based off pictures I gathered from existing castles machicoulis. I will see in the long run if it's still that much distracting.
Okay, good news, I succeeded doing a timelapse! This one is 16 minutes long and will go through the process of modelling a layered rock mesh from start to engine.
There's no voice over and it might be a bit fast but the you can clearly see the important stuff in it as I described in the previous message. @The Nasal Abyss: Hope that'll help
The paint deformation thing really opened up a new world for me, haha. Thanks for the vids!
Question though (for anyone)
Can UDK import vertex colours in the same way? I tried .ASE with "import vertex colours" but it didn't import at all. Any inobvious steps to this process that I might've missed?
Computron, it's called radiosity. There's indeed sonething you miss in this timelapse, you have to place a skylight in your level and enable shadows. Then start the process, bake to vertex and like I did adjust the levels.
The mindfuck behind the vertex alpha is a way I found to invert vcolors, using a substract layer mode. Just because in game white is the sand and the AO is black where sand should be.
Highelf: as long as I recall UDK never supported vertex alpha with the ASE format, you'd have to use fbx for that I think.
Just a hypothetical, is it possible to animate vertex color? If yes, couldn't that make for some nice dynamic ambient occlusion in characters if you calculate radiosity at every keyframe?
Sugestion for your brick bridges, or something like this, or even like this. for soemthing a bit more modern, we have this, but constructionally its no different from the designs the romans mastered millenia before. OF course there are more vertically challenging stone viaducts, but the length:height ratio is much alrger than the ones you've built. Hope those help
Also, judging from this image of yours, its going to be a difficult task (!!!) to get merchanidse, supplies, etc, up and down from the river to the castle. some kind of crane or construction mill on the side for important goods that don't need to take the long and winding road to the top is another suggestions. inspiration 1 same thing, but real instead of graphics drawing
And finally, the humble treadwheel crane, having been in service since the romans up till the pre-industrial era.
Otherwise its absolutely spectacular. Please continue
I love your work so much. This is looking awesome. Jost and I were wondering if you did any of the work or assets for the forest scene in CE3FSDK. Those cliffs are awesome and blend to the floor very nice. The scattered fallen bits are really a nice touch. Will this environment be explorable by watchers when it's done or just screen candy?
Hey there! Looks effing amazing. I have a question though- how do you load your normal maps into cryEngine, because I have a model, and they either don't display, or they do so terribly.... What sort of normal map does Cry Engine use, Y- or Y+? It's given me so much trouble, and I can't find an answer or figure it out on my own. They just don't show up. They do get loaded into the bump channel, right?
Hey there! Looks effing amazing. I have a question though- how do you load your normal maps into cryEngine, because I have a model, and they either don't display, or they do so terribly.... What sort of normal map does Cry Engine use, Y- or Y+? It's given me so much trouble, and I can't find an answer or figure it out on my own. They just don't show up. They do get loaded into the bump channel, right?
I see what you mean Minotaur0, but this is based off pictures I gathered from existing castles machicoulis. I will see in the long run if it's still that much distracting.
Okay, good news, I succeeded doing a timelapse! This one is 16 minutes long and will go through the process of modelling a layered rock mesh from start to engine.
There's no voice over and it might be a bit fast but the you can clearly see the important stuff in it as I described in the previous message. @The Nasal Abyss: Hope that'll help
Seems like a nice way of making unique rocks, but isn't it more beneficial to make a modular set of rocks and be able to place them wherever you like, rather than hand-crafting each individual cliff? i know this is a portfolio piece though, so i guess you can do things differently
Crazy props for the video, the rocks look great too,
but where did the colour go bro!? If your going for the middle east style castle then maybe some shots from the film Kingdom of Heaven might help out -
Okay so your not lacking that much colour, but some slight greens and brightening/ desaturating the stone walls might help a little. Still man, this is a massive project and your doing great. Keep it up.
Sugestion for your brick bridges, or something like this, or even like this. for soemthing a bit more modern, we have this, but constructionally its no different from the designs the romans mastered millenia before. OF course there are more vertically challenging stone viaducts, but the length:height ratio is much alrger than the ones you've built. Hope those help
Also, judging from this image of yours, its going to be a difficult task (!!!) to get merchanidse, supplies, etc, up and down from the river to the castle. some kind of crane or construction mill on the side for important goods that don't need to take the long and winding road to the top is another suggestions. inspiration 1 same thing, but real instead of graphics drawing
And finally, the humble treadwheel crane, having been in service since the romans up till the pre-industrial era.
Otherwise its absolutely spectacular. Please continue
Thank you very much re.wind! This is really helpful. I agree with most of what you said, and will certainly change my bridges to make them way more interesting. Great feedback.
Answering some of the other's questions,
synergy11: yes for those big objects I work in max in world space to have an accurate version of the terrain there. The terrain can be exported from the engine easily, just by drawing a selection of what part of the terrain you want to export. You can also reconstruct it in max using a displace modifier, and displacing by the terrain max height value set in CE3..
PogoP: I'll tell you why, if you make those cliffs from smaller props you get three very big cons:
- Massive overdraw for what's being under terrain but still get drawn at each frame.
- Thus polycount for the whole cliff being multiplied by a good factor compared to a unique mesh
- The amount of drawcalls all your small meshes do compared to one.
That's not working differently, we work like this in production. Keep Modularity for things that really need it.
xXm0RpH3usXx: cheers man, I will give it a try next time I have problems
recording.:)
myles: yeah I see what you mean. It's already getting more color variation now, I added a blendshader on the bricks. Obviously no picture yet but I might have something to show before the weekend.
Silver: I would like to do that kind of tutorial, but unfortunately (my freetime and) my workflow concerning texturing is so changing from one to another that it might be completely useless. There's guys around here that are far more able to give you this I think.:\
I personally really would like to see how you made those bricks.
Especially sculpt and bake.
Bricks with mortar or more loosely coupled - no problem. Brick thinly coupled - huge problem, and I see you have handled it very nicely
This looks really great so far. Really nice idea having the water to the side, adds a lot to the scene.
At the moment, however, I think the scene is struggling with scale. I can't pinpoint it exactly but it feels like the two elements, the castle and the cliffs, are competing with each other. Looking at the cliffs, the castle should be a lot larger than what it currently is. Castle's should feel imposing and right now it looks small.
It could be as simple a solution as tiling the rock texture on the cliffs more as they look very low res compared to the castle walls, or perhaps placing some higher frequency noise around the castle(such as small rocks, bushes, etc. Your initial shots with the standard CE3 environment worked well because of the higher frequency areas on the ground, but also because the cliffs had a lot more areas of light and dark where currently, your cliffs look too large and 'clean'.
Another thing, and this came up a lot in Helm's Deep, the two textures feel a bit too similar and there's no real contrast between the cliffs and the castle. I understand that the castle was made using the stone around the area, but at the same time, usually there is something which breaks up the two such as grass
But great stuff so far. You've already got something really solid right now. Look forward to seeing more.
what is it that makes your rocks have that orange "glow" is that part of the material or something else? looking back at the other screens it seems to happen on the fort structure as well, as if its sort of an orange AO.. its a pretty neat effect but it doesnt fit well in areas that are in shadow such as in this screenshot.
water looks great but a tad bit too opaque on the falling water. really nice transition though on the lake to fall. pretty much flawless on that account.
Thanks for the awesme crits guys. I was wondering if the tiling would make things this worse with scale. Seems it was indeed.
I started fixing things toward making the human structures more important on the screen.
-lowered castle south wall to make its buildings stand out more
-increased water volume tiling
-increased waterfall tiling
-decreased water opacity and added sunbeam in them.
-increased rock cliffs tiling and decreased vertex AO on them
-added more small scale rocks around,
Definitely better but still not satisfied tho, I hope the next few objects in like vegetation and other terrain texture will do it. At the moment I still play with very limited number of textures and assets.
This scene is coming out even better than your LOTR Helms Deep environment. Awesome to be able to see the progression.
Though I'm curious as to what you plan to do for the sky/negative space? Along with any effects/particles to bring some more atmosphere. I'm getting carried away picturing this thing set up as a night scene with torches and all propped up.
How did you go about texturing the large arched bridges? You used a tiling brick texture on the bridge. Is the trim around the arches a separate textured model? Or does the bridge use two separate texture sheets? One for the trim and one for the tiling brick?
ahaha oh maaan i havent checked in on your progress with this one for a long while and i am so glad i did. really great stuff, leaps and bounds forward. all these new shots are really enticing, what a great looking, inviting game environment
Hmmm something seems really off with the scale of this piece... It doesn't look quite as 'epic' as it should. I think it might be something to do with the scale of the castle in relation to the brick sizes, or perhaps the scale of the cliff walls. I can't put my finger on it!
Nice videos, thanks for that!
Though I'm curious as to what you plan to do for the sky/negative space? Along with any effects/particles to bring some more atmosphere. I'm getting carried away picturing this thing set up as a night scene with torches and all propped up.
Thanks, to be honest with you I have some ideas about negative space, but none of them seem strong enough. One would be to show some opposite mountain chain in the background. I think I can achieve that with a custom skydome maybe.
synergy11: three tiling textures (4 with the older brick texture but it shares the same pattern), which are also used on the walls. Bridges look very generic at the moment, and I will certainly go back at them using the feedback posted few pages before. And yeah, each bridge is a single piece, of about 10k tris.
Mcejn: thanks, this scene is for sure accumulating more pressure compared to HelmsDeep. I must make sure that it stands out on my portfolio because HD's been the top piece for a while there, none of the beat em up or brawl maps were good enough to take its place It wasn't the same style or constraints anyway.
PogoP: I guess it's because the few last screenshots have their focus on the landscape and less on the castle. Should be sorted as soon as I get back to the village and dungeon as you will see less rocks and more human scale stuff on screen.
@the others: cheers guys, glad you dig the progress.
Small update, more polishing done on atmospherics, and a bush test. Reworked waterfall shader. It's more noticeable and looks closer to what I first made, which a lot of people preferred.
something about the waterfalls in shadow still trouble me. the bottom left one looks perfect, with the light hitting it in just the right spot, making it reflective, and the rest transparent. shouldn't the top 2 be transparent as well since they are not being hit by direct light?
Since most of the shader works with the cubemap, until I try something else, the waterfall sexyness depends a lot from the position you take the pic from.
I know, sucks. Final solution would be to put particles in it and less opacity I guess.
Yep, that needs particles for sure.. In this envirnonmrnt setting it should evaporate water. Also you have rocks at point of inpact so there should be a lot of "white" water with micro bubbles in the air.
Enough now Let artist decide.
Yeah just throw some particles in man, im sure that'll help a lot.
Really like all this GREEN
I'm sure you already have this in mind, I was thinking you could make the areas directly around the water a little more oasis like,
Looks great, I was thinking you could add some bright material covers over some of the wall sections, almost like some bits in Troy.. I'll try and take some screen grabs of the film later.
Have you considered giving the rocks a bit more sharpness / definition in some areas? It feels slightly blobby to me in parts (Last screenshot on the right underneath the castle walls)
I feel that some more defined shapes would really help there.
nice update ParoXum! I really like that green color you added to the water, it really helps for the readability of the map. I agree with the large particules of evaporated water, and I would say maybe you could add wet rock surfaces around your waterfall also (but i know its still wip )
Orb: thanks for the feedback man, I hope you have a great time at your new gig if you already started! I already have evaporated water at the bottom waterfall but the particles are not see-able from where I take pictures, it's loding quite agressively. Will see if I can increase the distance without killing my framerate.
myles: cool man, I planned to add exactly what you're sayin.
Ixenonl: Thanks man, I will add this place to my polish list.
At the moment the lighting direction can still change, maybe a pointlight there to make the spec bounce a bit will be enough tho, since there's geometry there, it's just in the shadows.
Tree update, soon some palm trees in. Those ones should already give you a better sense of scale:
great update. the trees and foliage really help balance the atmosphere of the scene.
i know i asked briefly about it earlier in the thread, but i was wondering if you could explain a little bit more about creating your tiling textures. specifically for those rock cliffs. just wondering if you start from a plane for something like that, or use basic shapes you create in max/maya first. how you go about making in tile. things like that.
I usually make a pattern study in PS, from mixed photo sourced rocks tex. When I find an interesting one I change it into an displacement map that I can sculpt later on in ZB. Since the sculpt then already tile, I just have to keep at it with the warpmode on each brush I use, then bake it and job done, tiling sculpt.
Very often I have a totally different sculpt from what the reference photo used to be, and it's good since that means you really created something new in the end.
ah ok. thanks, that helps a lot. when it comes to sculpting for tiling textures i never really know which method to use. not that there is 1 definite method better than another but i like to get some insight into what others do and maybe give that a shot. i havent really tried out that method you've explained (which i refer to as the Bobby Rice method lol), but i may just give it a shot soon.
Replies
Awesome, thanks for taking the time to recordt those!
Question though (for anyone)
Can UDK import vertex colours in the same way? I tried .ASE with "import vertex colours" but it didn't import at all. Any inobvious steps to this process that I might've missed?
http://wiki.polycount.com/AmbientOcclusionVertexColor#A3ds_Max_-_Radiosity
The mindfuck behind the vertex alpha is a way I found to invert vcolors, using a substract layer mode. Just because in game white is the sand and the AO is black where sand should be.
Highelf: as long as I recall UDK never supported vertex alpha with the ASE format, you'd have to use fbx for that I think.
Just a hypothetical, is it possible to animate vertex color? If yes, couldn't that make for some nice dynamic ambient occlusion in characters if you calculate radiosity at every keyframe?
Also, judging from this image of yours, its going to be a difficult task (!!!) to get merchanidse, supplies, etc, up and down from the river to the castle. some kind of crane or construction mill on the side for important goods that don't need to take the long and winding road to the top is another suggestions.
inspiration 1
same thing, but real instead of graphics drawing
And finally, the humble treadwheel crane, having been in service since the romans up till the pre-industrial era.
Otherwise its absolutely spectacular. Please continue
I love your work so much. This is looking awesome. Jost and I were wondering if you did any of the work or assets for the forest scene in CE3FSDK. Those cliffs are awesome and blend to the floor very nice. The scattered fallen bits are really a nice touch. Will this environment be explorable by watchers when it's done or just screen candy?
So you have your whole level built and laid out in Max first? Than you just export and re-arrange everything back in the Engine?
How do you reference the engine's own terrain back to max?
Thanks again.
y-
Made of win, thank you so very much for helping the peeps here man!
i use this:
http://www.nchsoftware.com/capture/index.html
works for me pretty well... (and no watermarking as in fraps)
but where did the colour go bro!? If your going for the middle east style castle then maybe some shots from the film Kingdom of Heaven might help out -
http://gallery.awn.com/data/681/Kingdom-of-Heaven.jpg
http://image.toutlecine.com/photos/k/i/n/kingdom-of-heaven-2005-19-g.jpg
Okay so your not lacking that much colour, but some slight greens and brightening/ desaturating the stone walls might help a little. Still man, this is a massive project and your doing great. Keep it up.
I would like to ask you make a tutorial on, how to creating a this beautiful textures.
Thank you very much re.wind! This is really helpful. I agree with most of what you said, and will certainly change my bridges to make them way more interesting. Great feedback.
Answering some of the other's questions,
synergy11: yes for those big objects I work in max in world space to have an accurate version of the terrain there. The terrain can be exported from the engine easily, just by drawing a selection of what part of the terrain you want to export. You can also reconstruct it in max using a displace modifier, and displacing by the terrain max height value set in CE3..
PogoP: I'll tell you why, if you make those cliffs from smaller props you get three very big cons:
- Massive overdraw for what's being under terrain but still get drawn at each frame.
- Thus polycount for the whole cliff being multiplied by a good factor compared to a unique mesh
- The amount of drawcalls all your small meshes do compared to one.
That's not working differently, we work like this in production. Keep Modularity for things that really need it.
xXm0RpH3usXx: cheers man, I will give it a try next time I have problems
recording.:)
myles: yeah I see what you mean. It's already getting more color variation now, I added a blendshader on the bricks. Obviously no picture yet but I might have something to show before the weekend.
Silver: I would like to do that kind of tutorial, but unfortunately (my freetime and) my workflow concerning texturing is so changing from one to another that it might be completely useless. There's guys around here that are far more able to give you this I think.:\
Especially sculpt and bake.
Bricks with mortar or more loosely coupled - no problem. Brick thinly coupled - huge problem, and I see you have handled it very nicely
And have to retopo it, what would have been the use of the sculpt if no normal bake is needed in the end? Dunno.
Water update! That's still early play with what the system is capable of, but I'm getting there:
Need to find a way to sort the priority of waterfalls since it's a brush and lakes are volumes.... Particles are stock engine ones.
At the moment, however, I think the scene is struggling with scale. I can't pinpoint it exactly but it feels like the two elements, the castle and the cliffs, are competing with each other. Looking at the cliffs, the castle should be a lot larger than what it currently is. Castle's should feel imposing and right now it looks small.
It could be as simple a solution as tiling the rock texture on the cliffs more as they look very low res compared to the castle walls, or perhaps placing some higher frequency noise around the castle(such as small rocks, bushes, etc. Your initial shots with the standard CE3 environment worked well because of the higher frequency areas on the ground, but also because the cliffs had a lot more areas of light and dark where currently, your cliffs look too large and 'clean'.
Another thing, and this came up a lot in Helm's Deep, the two textures feel a bit too similar and there's no real contrast between the cliffs and the castle. I understand that the castle was made using the stone around the area, but at the same time, usually there is something which breaks up the two such as grass
But great stuff so far. You've already got something really solid right now. Look forward to seeing more.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1488651/fort_highness/valley_028.jpg
water looks great but a tad bit too opaque on the falling water. really nice transition though on the lake to fall. pretty much flawless on that account.
I started fixing things toward making the human structures more important on the screen.
-lowered castle south wall to make its buildings stand out more
-increased water volume tiling
-increased waterfall tiling
-decreased water opacity and added sunbeam in them.
-increased rock cliffs tiling and decreased vertex AO on them
-added more small scale rocks around,
Definitely better but still not satisfied tho, I hope the next few objects in like vegetation and other terrain texture will do it. At the moment I still play with very limited number of textures and assets.
@Oniram: it's the global illumination
Ninja edit:
This scene is coming out even better than your LOTR Helms Deep environment. Awesome to be able to see the progression.
Though I'm curious as to what you plan to do for the sky/negative space? Along with any effects/particles to bring some more atmosphere. I'm getting carried away picturing this thing set up as a night scene with torches and all propped up.
Great stuff so far, really badass!
How did you go about texturing the large arched bridges? You used a tiling brick texture on the bridge. Is the trim around the arches a separate textured model? Or does the bridge use two separate texture sheets? One for the trim and one for the tiling brick?
Or is the bridge made up of modular pieces?
Sorry for the beginner questions. aha
Cheers.
Chris
Thanks, to be honest with you I have some ideas about negative space, but none of them seem strong enough. One would be to show some opposite mountain chain in the background. I think I can achieve that with a custom skydome maybe.
synergy11: three tiling textures (4 with the older brick texture but it shares the same pattern), which are also used on the walls. Bridges look very generic at the moment, and I will certainly go back at them using the feedback posted few pages before. And yeah, each bridge is a single piece, of about 10k tris.
Mcejn: thanks, this scene is for sure accumulating more pressure compared to HelmsDeep. I must make sure that it stands out on my portfolio because HD's been the top piece for a while there, none of the beat em up or brawl maps were good enough to take its place
PogoP: I guess it's because the few last screenshots have their focus on the landscape and less on the castle. Should be sorted as soon as I get back to the village and dungeon as you will see less rocks and more human scale stuff on screen.
@the others: cheers guys, glad you dig the progress.
I know, sucks. Final solution would be to put particles in it and less opacity I guess.
Enough now
Really like all this GREEN
I'm sure you already have this in mind, I was thinking you could make the areas directly around the water a little more oasis like,
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_5cZNTbS6Ods/SWxZODy9qfI/AAAAAAAAAFI/Kpt18DHdG38/s400/desert-oasis-photos3.jpg
http://amazingdata.com/mediadata6/Image/amazing_fun_featured_2359470300102347975S600x600Q85_2009072322294411490.jpg
http://cache2.artprintimages.com/p/LRG/21/2154/2I8CD00Z/art-print/ethel-davies-desert-oasis-chebika-tunisia-north-africa-africa.jpg
http://photopostsblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/desert-oasis-photos1.jpg
Looks great, I was thinking you could add some bright material covers over some of the wall sections, almost like some bits in Troy.. I'll try and take some screen grabs of the film later.
Have you considered giving the rocks a bit more sharpness / definition in some areas? It feels slightly blobby to me in parts (Last screenshot on the right underneath the castle walls)
I feel that some more defined shapes would really help there.
good job!
myles: cool man, I planned to add exactly what you're sayin.
Ixenonl: Thanks man, I will add this place to my polish list.
At the moment the lighting direction can still change, maybe a pointlight there to make the spec bounce a bit will be enough tho, since there's geometry there, it's just in the shadows.
Tree update, soon some palm trees in. Those ones should already give you a better sense of scale:
i know i asked briefly about it earlier in the thread, but i was wondering if you could explain a little bit more about creating your tiling textures. specifically for those rock cliffs. just wondering if you start from a plane for something like that, or use basic shapes you create in max/maya first. how you go about making in tile. things like that.
Very often I have a totally different sculpt from what the reference photo used to be, and it's good since that means you really created something new in the end.
How did you avoid seams on the trees where the branches meet the trunk?