Looks like a great idea! I think something a little more like the original might be a little better though, as it looks a little too different atm. If it was me, I'd bring the camera round more so the runway is a little more horizontal (perhaps not completely horizontal like the original).
I dunno, I kinda like the interesting perspective created by the runway. I think if anything, the reason it doesn't really connect with the original to me is the lack of color contrast. The red on the left of the runway is immediately where the viewer's eye is drawn, and I feel like the props (Especially that vehicle on the right) need a lot more contrast/visual interest at the moment. But like I said, love the composition and looking forward to seeing where you take it!
Actually, looking back and also reading Chandler's comment, I am sorta thinking a little differently. The whole idea of BRAWL is to 're-imagine' an environment... So I like the fact that you've imagined the whole environment outside of the original's very tight (and come on, let's face it!), unimaginative environment.
I think the main issue at the minute is that the building in the background is taking up too much focus within the scene, and the runway fighting area needs to be highlighted a little more. What might be quite cool is to have floodlights lighting up the runway in the specific area where the fight takes place. A little contrast to draw the player's eye to the gameplay area a little more.
Not happy yet with the bake in some areas but wanted to show it anyway.
Gonna go catch some zzz's now and do a better bake tomorrow and start texturing!
Wow! Some really impressive stuff here. Everything looks great!
Looking forward to seeing that building in the background fleshed out with the same amounts of details!
I know that texture's still very wip, but I hope you don't mind a little observation.
This could've already passed as a finished asset in a cleaner, slick sci-fi kind of game, but material definition is still way off. It's all plastic right now, break it up into rubber, plastic and painted(bare?) metal etc. and you're golden, buddy.
The design is sweet too and those moving parts will also help get some variation if you'll have many of those in the background.
Cheers. Cofracto, you'll be happy to know that I'm doing some more enviro work now then. Working on the controltower in the back now and trying to do something exciting. Still not feeling it overall.
We'll see how time treats me the next few weeks. Got a bunch of dark clouds on the horizon. Xoliul said he'll be getting alot of time of from work soon so I hope he's got some magic tricks up his sleeve!
(it's not gonna be this glowy, it's just window-test-placements)
Oh hell yah, this is looking incredible! Really nice bake, hard to believe its a low poly. Not enjoying those volumetric lights at the moment, but im sure they are just temporary..
Man, I'm finally back. Life got in the way so badly (well mostly my job), but I have two weeks off now.
Today I finished the UVs on the jet and did the AO bake in FAOgen.
Not too much time in fancy presentation, but starting textures tomorrow, should start looking a whole lot more interesting from then on.
By Friday I will also FINALLY (after almost 2 months of waiting) have internet on my desktop, so I can dropbox my stuff there, update my Nvidia drivers and get the newest UDK to get cracking on decorating the scene with effects.
I see you're highlighting the corners and scratches of your diffuse textures with white. (assuming White = Metal).
But Metal diffuse should be nearly black. like 20% grey, and then the specular/reflection should be blasted white, with virtually no gloss/spec power. Otherwise the metal reads rather plastic-y.
Valid opinion. Jacque. I'll try it out when I reach the polish phase. Gotta do some other stuff otherwise someone's gonna slap me!
JOrdan, Agreed. Lets scale it!
PS: I love crits. So everyone should feel welcome to do it! (and thank you for yours) Means you've actually looked at the picture and felt it was worth commenting on.
Did some more facku-ing around. Let me know if it's an improvement or not.
Some scale issues and overall all materials are basic shitty ones.
Gotta deal with that soon. Will hopefully have the control tower, most of the assets and the background done this weekend.
Should be much easier to make something out of it then and tweak it.
Mr Wahlgren I feel your epic loading truck is too shadowed for the time you spent on it. Give it more exposure! It needs to lift that jet up and break it yo' machinery dominance!
Jet's in. with materials set up. Worked on the ground material; IBR's are very, very tricky to get right. Especially since there's no Epic example to check out...
Did rain effects, basically remade Epic's stuff from the NightAndDay map.
Jet's in. with materials set up. Worked on the ground material; IBR's are very, very tricky to get right. Especially since there's no Epic example to check out...
Did rain effects, basically remade Epic's stuff from the NightAndDay map.
Are there any specific problems you're running in to? You know about this page?
Yes, but it sort of lacks the really in-depth, tricky things I want to know.
A few issues I have:
-ImageReflectionSceneCapture seems to do nothing. I added one for the control tower, i couldn't see it do anything at all. Does it depend on the strength of the Emissive or something ? I figured the windows on there would be bright enough already.
-Biggest issue, I can not for the life of me get that same range of sharpness/blur as you get on all those sexy screenshots, especially like here: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/rsrc/Three/ImageBasedReflections/Streaky.jpg
I want to have that same rough concrete and smooth puddle look. I just don't get it, I tried putting hugely varying values in my gloss, and it just ends up looking samey. Do my textures need more contrast? Are you doing any special material tricks? All stuff i could probably figure out if I had the assets to look at.
I'm not using any ImageReflectionActors yet, just lights set to do IR specular.
-To get static shadowing, you have to bake Lightmass. I have it set to force all dynamic lights, so it won't really bake Lightmass. Do i have to switch to lightmass to calculate the shadowing? Kinda annoying as I see not much use in using lightmass here, plus it's incredibly slow again for some reason.
-ImageReflectionSceneCapture seems to do nothing. I added one for the control tower, i couldn't see it do anything at all. Does it depend on the strength of the Emissive or something ? I figured the windows on there would be bright enough already.
This is likely due to a current bug, IRSC actors won't capture defferred lighting, which sucks, but my -hacky- work around is to set up the actors, switch the editor to DirectX9 mode, capture all of the reflections, save then go back to directx11. It sucks but that's the workaround for now. I'm also pretty sure shadows and light functions don't get captured but that's not a huge deal.
-Biggest issue, I can not for the life of me get that same range of sharpness/blur as you get on all those sexy screenshots, especially like here: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/rsrc/Three/ImageBasedReflections/Streaky.jpg
I want to have that same rough concrete and smooth puddle look. I just don't get it, I tried putting hugely varying values in my gloss, and it just ends up looking samey. Do my textures need more contrast? Are you doing any special material tricks? All stuff i could probably figure out if I had the assets to look at.
I'm not using any ImageReflectionActors yet, just lights set to do IR specular.
What kind of huge values in your gloss? The specular power in my current scene ranges from 10 to 10,0000 (i'm sure it saturates at some point I just dont know what the "highest" is).
-To get static shadowing, you have to bake Lightmass. I have it set to force all dynamic lights, so it won't really bake Lightmass. Do i have to switch to lightmass to calculate the shadowing? Kinda annoying as I see not much use in using lightmass here, plus it's incredibly slow again for some reason.
Yes you have to enable lightmass but you should be able to get away with setting all of your lights to point/spot light moveable and they wont hurt your lightmass time. The shadowing is stored in your lightmass importance volume so make sure you have one of those. If the quality isn't good enough you can reduce your lightmass scene scale to put more "pixels" in the shadowing volume texture. It will slow down build times though.
Thanks for the reply Jordan, that clarifies a lot. Hugely varying in my case would be values that are huge ranges for regular gloss, between 1 and 200, I had no clue you could go up to 100.000. Still, I think it doesn't respond like i'd expect it to. Changing the low value between 2000 and 50.000 makes very little visual difference. I also get the impression the blend between the values isn't completely linear. Up until now I set the normal dampening to 1, but with these huge gloss values it does look better at 5.
I will try out the Lightmass and DX9 things soon. Right now i have a small update with better gloss range and an LUT:
Also Jordan, what would you do to get a material-based random ripple effect in the puddles? I can't figure out how to use a texture in the material for it, as those ripples each scale on their own local axis and appear completely random.
Hey guys, nice progress! Would be nice to see dem plane a bit closer:)
What are you plans for the lighting so far, 'cause right now the scene looks more like an amazing plane demonstration shot, rather then a fighting arena. Also how exactly are you planning to separate the fighting space, from the background, and will those red lights just go through it?
Prolly gonna light up the area infront of the plane a bit aswell as make boundaries with some special effects xol is cooking up.
What do you mean about the red lights?
PS: Many textures and materials are WIP but we kinda just want to get everything in there and don't worry about the buggy DOF!
My only complaint: Not seeing more of the beautiful "missile loading" vehicle we witnessed being created over the past few pages, its hidden by distance / in shadows
Ok so I boosted this a bit more today with some effects and all. Got that sweet Bokeh Dof working. Andre did some new BG buildings (mostly to cut the insane tricount).
Click for huge resolution (did a tiledshot test).
The Dof's a bit smudgier than it should be here, because the size is actually hard to control when doing tiledshots.
Also here's my exhaust boost effect up close (old bg and dof in this one tho)
edit: oh and a question for Jordan: any idea why i'm getting these really sharp, orange borders on hard edges in the plane mesh (cockpit and inlet) with 4 MSAA? It's not there without MSAA.
And here's some stuff I asked JordanW and he answered very politely, so I'm putting it in here as advice for anyone:
(jordan's answers in bold)
I was doing some lensflares for the Brawl scene and started to get a bit frustrated. Then I saw the JW_lensflares package name and thought I should ask you. I spent an hour trying to even get my first flare to show up!
Turns out it was the "relative bounding box" setting, I think my flares got completely occluded or something. What's up with this? it's kinda hard to work with this as you can't even visualize the bounding box. <<<<<I think If you go to view flags you can turn on bounds, but yea a lens flare needs good bounds to show the flare
My Lensflares "lag" a bit when I move my camera, like they just can't stay in the exact spot and need some time to update and jump back. <<<<<Do you have realtime update on? I'm not sure about this one why it would lag, but if realtime update is on it should be good.
Lastly, the Flares don't seem to work in the preview window, so I can't get thumbnails out of them. <<<<Yeah, thumbnails for lens flares aren't very accurate
Could you offer me a consecutive answers on what the best quality-performance settings are for meshes when using Deferred rendering? I'd prefer not to bake things also. <<<<<<<OK, defferred rendering, turn off light environment on everything you want to be deferred...so everything, and make sure all your lights are moveable lights with NORMAL shadows not modulated and you should be good to go. (this was very good advice, finally i get it now)
The ImageReflection Actors do act a bit weird: I'm using them for the windows on the control tower (since doing the 1024 textures for them myself is super wasteful for this compo as you can't clip them or anything). You can see the reflections on the ground here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12093849/JetWip/BigAssWip05.jpg <<<<<< with regards to the size and use of these reflections, they're auto generataed by the engine like a lightmap so I would consider them to follow the same rules as a lightmap which means it doesn't contribute to the overall scene texture budget, if you are really worried about it you could post in the brawl Q&A thread but I would make the connection that they are "lightmaps"
But the splits between the windows don't show up, it's like the entire actor is one solid surface. Is it blurring them together or something ? <<<<<< It does look like they're blurring together, I think this can be due to using such a big actor, try splitting it up into smaller ones, or make your own reflection texture and place one for each window. Doing one for each window may be slow so you may have to put 2-3 windows on a sheet.
Might be a bit tricky too hook up Keg but i dunno. Xol is da man to do it if it can be done!
Yeah in that recent update I also touched some lights a bit, deleted some old ones and tweaked a few mats here and there. It's much easier to work when there's stuff actually there to work with hehe.
We have a pretty care free attitude to working at it and take turns or do work that won't interefere with each other. Works pretty well.
Keg, that never appeared to me as wrong? The smoke is supposed to come from flares (guess I'll model and place those in) and if you look at videos of those, they actually spray smoke in a certain direction.
Replies
Good point about comp feedback. Why not. Just two different suggestions. Pretty much everything is placeholder.
That's just my opinion though!
I think the main issue at the minute is that the building in the background is taking up too much focus within the scene, and the runway fighting area needs to be highlighted a little more. What might be quite cool is to have floodlights lighting up the runway in the specific area where the fight takes place. A little contrast to draw the player's eye to the gameplay area a little more.
Not happy yet with the bake in some areas but wanted to show it anyway.
Gonna go catch some zzz's now and do a better bake tomorrow and start texturing!
Looking forward to seeing that building in the background fleshed out with the same amounts of details!
A bit unomptimized, might do a bit of a pass on it again but I'm not to bothered to be honest
I know that texture's still very wip, but I hope you don't mind a little observation.
This could've already passed as a finished asset in a cleaner, slick sci-fi kind of game, but material definition is still way off. It's all plastic right now, break it up into rubber, plastic and painted(bare?) metal etc. and you're golden, buddy.
The design is sweet too and those moving parts will also help get some variation if you'll have many of those in the background.
Anyway, MOAR PLEASE
keep rocking, guys
really slick btw
We'll see how time treats me the next few weeks. Got a bunch of dark clouds on the horizon. Xoliul said he'll be getting alot of time of from work soon so I hope he's got some magic tricks up his sleeve!
(it's not gonna be this glowy, it's just window-test-placements)
Today I finished the UVs on the jet and did the AO bake in FAOgen.
Not too much time in fancy presentation, but starting textures tomorrow, should start looking a whole lot more interesting from then on.
By Friday I will also FINALLY (after almost 2 months of waiting) have internet on my desktop, so I can dropbox my stuff there, update my Nvidia drivers and get the newest UDK to get cracking on decorating the scene with effects.
I see you're highlighting the corners and scratches of your diffuse textures with white. (assuming White = Metal).
But Metal diffuse should be nearly black. like 20% grey, and then the specular/reflection should be blasted white, with virtually no gloss/spec power. Otherwise the metal reads rather plastic-y.
Amazing work so far.
JOrdan, Agreed. Lets scale it!
PS: I love crits. So everyone should feel welcome to do it! (and thank you for yours) Means you've actually looked at the picture and felt it was worth commenting on.
Some scale issues and overall all materials are basic shitty ones.
Gotta deal with that soon. Will hopefully have the control tower, most of the assets and the background done this weekend.
Should be much easier to make something out of it then and tweak it.
Also for future consideration, some dim lights inside the cockpit to keep the eye moveing right from the tail of the plane?
Jet's in. with materials set up. Worked on the ground material; IBR's are very, very tricky to get right. Especially since there's no Epic example to check out...
Did rain effects, basically remade Epic's stuff from the NightAndDay map.
You just did this to the level.
I'd love to see some reflection on the ground, would help ground the plane and any other props you put on the runway.
Are there any specific problems you're running in to? You know about this page?
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/ImageBasedReflections.html
A few issues I have:
-ImageReflectionSceneCapture seems to do nothing. I added one for the control tower, i couldn't see it do anything at all. Does it depend on the strength of the Emissive or something ? I figured the windows on there would be bright enough already.
-Biggest issue, I can not for the life of me get that same range of sharpness/blur as you get on all those sexy screenshots, especially like here: http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/rsrc/Three/ImageBasedReflections/Streaky.jpg
I want to have that same rough concrete and smooth puddle look. I just don't get it, I tried putting hugely varying values in my gloss, and it just ends up looking samey. Do my textures need more contrast? Are you doing any special material tricks? All stuff i could probably figure out if I had the assets to look at.
I'm not using any ImageReflectionActors yet, just lights set to do IR specular.
-To get static shadowing, you have to bake Lightmass. I have it set to force all dynamic lights, so it won't really bake Lightmass. Do i have to switch to lightmass to calculate the shadowing? Kinda annoying as I see not much use in using lightmass here, plus it's incredibly slow again for some reason.
This is likely due to a current bug, IRSC actors won't capture defferred lighting, which sucks, but my -hacky- work around is to set up the actors, switch the editor to DirectX9 mode, capture all of the reflections, save then go back to directx11. It sucks but that's the workaround for now. I'm also pretty sure shadows and light functions don't get captured but that's not a huge deal.
What kind of huge values in your gloss? The specular power in my current scene ranges from 10 to 10,0000 (i'm sure it saturates at some point I just dont know what the "highest" is).
Yes you have to enable lightmass but you should be able to get away with setting all of your lights to point/spot light moveable and they wont hurt your lightmass time. The shadowing is stored in your lightmass importance volume so make sure you have one of those. If the quality isn't good enough you can reduce your lightmass scene scale to put more "pixels" in the shadowing volume texture. It will slow down build times though.
I will try out the Lightmass and DX9 things soon. Right now i have a small update with better gloss range and an LUT:
Also Jordan, what would you do to get a material-based random ripple effect in the puddles? I can't figure out how to use a texture in the material for it, as those ripples each scale on their own local axis and appear completely random.
What are you plans for the lighting so far, 'cause right now the scene looks more like an amazing plane demonstration shot, rather then a fighting arena. Also how exactly are you planning to separate the fighting space, from the background, and will those red lights just go through it?
What do you mean about the red lights?
PS: Many textures and materials are WIP but we kinda just want to get everything in there and don't worry about the buggy DOF!
the scene is coming along love the new angle.
My only complaint: Not seeing more of the beautiful "missile loading" vehicle we witnessed being created over the past few pages, its hidden by distance / in shadows
Amazing work, regardless.
Click for huge resolution (did a tiledshot test).
The Dof's a bit smudgier than it should be here, because the size is actually hard to control when doing tiledshots.
Also here's my exhaust boost effect up close (old bg and dof in this one tho)
edit: oh and a question for Jordan: any idea why i'm getting these really sharp, orange borders on hard edges in the plane mesh (cockpit and inlet) with 4 MSAA? It's not there without MSAA.
Here's a screenie:
And a vimeo link to see things in motion:
http://vimeo.com/22681165
What I added:
-lensflares
-ripples in the puddles
-better lighting al around
-tweaks all over
Andre also updated the tower so i tuned that one a bit with some effects and materials.
(jordan's answers in bold)
I was doing some lensflares for the Brawl scene and started to get a bit frustrated. Then I saw the JW_lensflares package name and thought I should ask you. I spent an hour trying to even get my first flare to show up!
Turns out it was the "relative bounding box" setting, I think my flares got completely occluded or something. What's up with this? it's kinda hard to work with this as you can't even visualize the bounding box.
<<<<<I think If you go to view flags you can turn on bounds, but yea a lens flare needs good bounds to show the flare
My Lensflares "lag" a bit when I move my camera, like they just can't stay in the exact spot and need some time to update and jump back.
<<<<<Do you have realtime update on? I'm not sure about this one why it would lag, but if realtime update is on it should be good.
Lastly, the Flares don't seem to work in the preview window, so I can't get thumbnails out of them.
<<<<Yeah, thumbnails for lens flares aren't very accurate
Could you offer me a consecutive answers on what the best quality-performance settings are for meshes when using Deferred rendering? I'd prefer not to bake things also.
<<<<<<<OK, defferred rendering, turn off light environment on everything you want to be deferred...so everything, and make sure all your lights are moveable lights with NORMAL shadows not modulated and you should be good to go.
(this was very good advice, finally i get it now)
The ImageReflection Actors do act a bit weird: I'm using them for the windows on the control tower (since doing the 1024 textures for them myself is super wasteful for this compo as you can't clip them or anything). You can see the reflections on the ground here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/12093849/JetWip/BigAssWip05.jpg
<<<<<< with regards to the size and use of these reflections, they're auto generataed by the engine like a lightmap so I would consider them to follow the same rules as a lightmap which means it doesn't contribute to the overall scene texture budget, if you are really worried about it you could post in the brawl Q&A thread but I would make the connection that they are "lightmaps"
But the splits between the windows don't show up, it's like the entire actor is one solid surface. Is it blurring them together or something ?
<<<<<< It does look like they're blurring together, I think this can be due to using such a big actor, try splitting it up into smaller ones, or make your own reflection texture and place one for each window. Doing one for each window may be slow so you may have to put 2-3 windows on a sheet.
Yeah in that recent update I also touched some lights a bit, deleted some old ones and tweaked a few mats here and there. It's much easier to work when there's stuff actually there to work with hehe.
We have a pretty care free attitude to working at it and take turns or do work that won't interefere with each other. Works pretty well.