The "hand painted render" is mostly a work done on the UDK post process shader.
At the moment the only texture I've work on is the wood which is hand painted.
For the rest for now there's only the normal map and some baked AO.
The difficulty is mainly to avoid too much high frequency details in the normal map (I had to trim a lot of detail on my sculpts) and on the diffuse map, as the post process enhanced every contrasted pixels.
Anyway update on the sky mainly and tweaks on some light (which I presume are gonna change when I'll have the proper tombstone model...)
the cloud and fog texture are supposed to be temporary, mostly for test purpose so I'll see if I'm gonna stick with those or not.
I sorta miss the hand painted look some of the simpler structures gave the scene and felt they could help lead the eye to the center point of interest if they were put near the edges of the graveyard. Scale and position could be adjusted this is a super fast paint over, you could make them smaller than the over graves to break up the repetition of shapes at the bottom. The lamps being distributed throughout the graveyard also made the bottom a little flat in my opinion so i put 'em just on the edges of the road, also helps lead the eye to the middle and i think makes a little more sense.
Just a few suggestions, whatever you do this scene is gonna be great!
Thanks for the inputs .
I've decided to keep the grave as they are "for now" as adding firefly or stuff would break the visual feeling anyway. I'll tweak around later when everything will be done.
So I've start to refine the trees and tested a firefly particle, not sure about the result nor the color.
I like the bend you added to the buildings in the back. And the trees are looking creepy, i like it. Do you still plan on having leaves scattered over the ground like in your original paintover?
Yup, I'm still planning to add some leaves, but I've spend my weekend collecting potatoes instead of actually working~ xD
ahahah.) that's gonna be my favorite excuse from now on.:)
nice job with dem fireflies. You've quickly transitioned from eerie to magical. Your scene has a great feel.
Maybe define the foreground fighting space a bit better?
Nice work!
As it is now it kind of looks like the moon is behind the mountain, which makes the very crisp cast-shadows of the structure and treebranches look quite strange.
By the way, don't believe his excuses, he enslaved his girlfriend to get potatoes for him while he was working, the bastard.
This is looking great. I love the hand painted look. Would be interesting to see what it looks like without the post process on to see how much is the post process and how much is texture and modelling work. Would love to the post processing material or chain for this badboy. It is great to see people trying to do this sort of stuff with UDK
Well I got all my potatoes now so life can trun back to its normal stream~
I'm aware of the crisp shadow issue, I was wondering if someone would notice it xD...
I'll post a screen without the post process later (expect something ugly ), as well as the post process chain but I need to clean it and reorganize it to be readable.... u.u;;;
Basically I try to reproduce a sobel filter but then I've been carried away by the node flow while playing with the material editor u.u;
Don't bother the connection going up, it's a test to blur the image but I ended up not using it.
I almost feel like those leaves are a little too "comforting", they add an element of life to the scene and it's not quite as scary.
Leaves that look like this might heighten the sense of death about the graveyard, but i understand that these leaves would be hard to texture. Maybe it's just that the current leaves look green?
be cool to see a hint of some firefly trails too, reference for ya:
This is a little overboard but a hint of movement to a few might add a bit of depth and whimsy.
As always lookin good
Edit: Just want to say you don't have to do a darned thing more to this scene and it's absolutely friggin' amazing, thanks for taking some of suggestions Ez, it's cool to see some them incorporated but it's hardly necessary, you could stick a fork in this right now and be one of the strongest contenders!
I've redone the leaves and added more red to their color to break the monochrome look a little bit.
Then I've tweak some post effect stuff, rework the sky and background, still a lot of little tweak to do but I guess I'm reaching the end ~
Your sky looks great! But what I did like about the other one was how it enforced the overall flow of the scene and helped guide your eye to the focal point. This one is spooky though, it's still awesome. Your graves look better, and the fire flies also feel better... which is odd... cuz i don't think you changed them... oh well, they feel better . Good job!!
Surprised there aren't more posts in this thread, this is so good, still my favorite environment. Both skies have their strengths, i like how this one helps bring the trees out and the rim lighting on some of the clouds brings the scene together.
Lookin forward to future tweaks whatever they are.
Wow, this is awesome mate!!
I'm ok with bbox about the sky thgouh.
Oh, and another thing, why is there some leaves on the ground but not even 1 in any trees ? Are they the very last leaves ??
This looks awesome, as for crits id say the trees in the background look like they've been reused a little to much, i think it could be improved by adding some more variation in height and maybe some leaves and stuff.
not sure whatr they are called i think tombstones? they feel kind of busy it may be to many of them or there just to close to gether. But still the piece is very strong
Thanks guys for the comments.
I changed the sky to try to give a little more depth to the scene, I'm going to leave it some more to if I prefer the open feeling to the claustrophobic one.
I'll add some leaves to the trees but really not much.
As for the tombstones, if you check some Japanese graveyard reference, you'll see that these are really busy.
Optional question : does anyone know to setup the lightmap streaming resolution? Sometime when I switch from the editor to the game I got different visual result which seems to be related to that.
This is looking really nice! my only crit would be the bright light in the middle. It seems a bit too harsh that kinda overpowers the whole scene and there doesnt seem to be any source for the light, which is odd.
Whatever you did, it looks really nice. I love the end of these competitions where at the end there's all these small tweaks that bring everything together. No crits from me. Scene looks great :-)
- Birds on the trees/structure
- made the leaves on the ground lighter
- closed the gap in the clouds
- changed the background trees to be more cluttered
- fog has been made thicker on the ground
- more bloom on the bell?
- aaaand i guess there are more fireflies
do I win? lol
But great work on this, its possibly my favourite stage so far in the competition.
Minor crit, the distribution of the birds at the top of the bell structure looks a little too uniform.
Also not sure how the bell rings (if it is swung or hit), but a bell striker to 1 side would still be a cool prop! (and fairly easy to make), and add just a touch of asymmetry to the scene.
At the beginning I was planning to put ghost spirit flame, but some people came out with the (nice) idea of fireflies which has turn to be a nice addition. I did some test to put both together but for now it was too much information for the eyes in my opinion, but I'm still running some test.
do I win? lol
Unfortunately you forgot some leaves in the trees and the props/flower on some grave
Minor crit, the distribution of the birds at the top of the bell structure looks a little too uniform.
Also not sure how the bell rings (if it is swung or hit), but a bell striker to 1 side would still be a cool prop! (and fairly easy to make), and add just a touch of asymmetry to the scene.
Thanks for the bird distribution comment.
I did place them carefully to try to avoid a regular placement but I seems that I failed (fixed in the next update).
For the bell striker ... on most of reference I've seen of these japanese bell, they got a kind on big wood cylinder...or nothing at all.
As the only free room I had was behind the bell (I didn't want to cover the front for aesthetic purpose), all you could see is some bits of rope.I could add it but it wouldn't bring much to the scene o.O.
The sky is a half-sphere cropped of all the polygons which were out of the field of view.
So basically a curved plane .
The texture on it is composed mostly from photo source clouds with a paint over work to get the lighting and feeling I wanted( it still needs some adjustment by the way u.u).
At the beginning I was planning to put ghost spirit flame, but some people came out with the (nice) idea of fireflies which has turn to be a nice addition. I did some test to put both together but for now it was too much information for the eyes in my opinion, but I'm still running some test.
No, I think fireflies were totally the way to go. And you're def right on the ghost/fireflies combo. I think that'd be too much and take away from the rest of the awesome sauce you've got going on.
I would like to echo the spacing change for the birds on the roof. Before that was said, I didn't even realize that they were birds. I thought it was just pieces jutting off the roof.
So F-ing painterly! I love it so much I probably don't even have any advices.:)
Alright I got a really-really minor one:) Right above the bell there's a plaque that is blank right now, but generally those always have some kind of kanji on them, since this is an entry to a cemetery this must be some kind torii gate, which have a religious meaning of their own so I doubt they would go with and empty plate.
Just a little example.
But that's just a nitpick and overall the scene is kick ass and I wish you luck, man.
I've add some kanji on the board above the bell in the last version I have but thanks to point out that it is missing.
I did a lot of test of details/props, but it was adding too much details (strangely while most of people try to add detail, I'm trying to keep my scene to the minimum xD).
So basically my last screen is going to be my final on apart from the bird spacing and kanji above the bell.
I just need to rebuild my lighting, find another angle and I'll be able to move on something else ~
Straight to the inspiration folder! Damn, drooling so hard on this one:)
As I was looking closer, it kinda hit me. Did I miss something? where does the lighting on the gates come from?:)
Damn you're so good that I've been looking at this for ages and never actually asked myself that.
Well basically I wanted to do a kind of ghost apparition depicting a spooky lil girl (ring like), but then I've seen in the rules that a character shouldn't be the main focus of the scene( and according to the general composition of the scene, it would have been the case here).
CONFIRMED: Crowds/background characters/creatures are entirely OPTIONAL, however they CANNOT be the primary focus of your scene. All characters/creatures created will count towards your overall budget.
So I got rid of this idea but I wanted to keep the lighting, considering the idea that it could be the moment right before the apparition of the ghost. u.u
Replies
The "hand painted render" is mostly a work done on the UDK post process shader.
At the moment the only texture I've work on is the wood which is hand painted.
For the rest for now there's only the normal map and some baked AO.
The difficulty is mainly to avoid too much high frequency details in the normal map (I had to trim a lot of detail on my sculpts) and on the diffuse map, as the post process enhanced every contrasted pixels.
Anyway update on the sky mainly and tweaks on some light (which I presume are gonna change when I'll have the proper tombstone model...)
the cloud and fog texture are supposed to be temporary, mostly for test purpose so I'll see if I'm gonna stick with those or not.
I sorta miss the hand painted look some of the simpler structures gave the scene and felt they could help lead the eye to the center point of interest if they were put near the edges of the graveyard. Scale and position could be adjusted this is a super fast paint over, you could make them smaller than the over graves to break up the repetition of shapes at the bottom. The lamps being distributed throughout the graveyard also made the bottom a little flat in my opinion so i put 'em just on the edges of the road, also helps lead the eye to the middle and i think makes a little more sense.
Just a few suggestions, whatever you do this scene is gonna be great!
I've decided to keep the grave as they are "for now" as adding firefly or stuff would break the visual feeling anyway. I'll tweak around later when everything will be done.
So I've start to refine the trees and tested a firefly particle, not sure about the result nor the color.
ahahah.) that's gonna be my favorite excuse from now on.:)
nice job with dem fireflies. You've quickly transitioned from eerie to magical. Your scene has a great feel.
Maybe define the foreground fighting space a bit better?
As it is now it kind of looks like the moon is behind the mountain, which makes the very crisp cast-shadows of the structure and treebranches look quite strange.
By the way, don't believe his excuses, he enslaved his girlfriend to get potatoes for him while he was working, the bastard.
I'm aware of the crisp shadow issue, I was wondering if someone would notice it xD...
I'll post a screen without the post process later (expect something ugly
First pass on the dead leaves :
As requested , same without post fx :
And a view of the post process shader :
Basically I try to reproduce a sobel filter but then I've been carried away by the node flow while playing with the material editor u.u;
Don't bother the connection going up, it's a test to blur the image but I ended up not using it.
Leaves that look like this might heighten the sense of death about the graveyard, but i understand that these leaves would be hard to texture. Maybe it's just that the current leaves look green?
be cool to see a hint of some firefly trails too, reference for ya:
This is a little overboard but a hint of movement to a few might add a bit of depth and whimsy.
As always lookin good
Edit: Just want to say you don't have to do a darned thing more to this scene and it's absolutely friggin' amazing, thanks for taking some of suggestions Ez, it's cool to see some them incorporated but it's hardly necessary, you could stick a fork in this right now and be one of the strongest contenders!
Then I've tweak some post effect stuff, rework the sky and background, still a lot of little tweak to do but I guess I'm reaching the end ~
Lookin forward to future tweaks whatever they are.
I'm ok with bbox about the sky thgouh.
Oh, and another thing, why is there some leaves on the ground but not even 1 in any trees ? Are they the very last leaves ??
I changed the sky to try to give a little more depth to the scene, I'm going to leave it some more to if I prefer the open feeling to the claustrophobic one.
I'll add some leaves to the trees but really not much.
As for the tombstones, if you check some Japanese graveyard reference, you'll see that these are really busy.
Optional question : does anyone know to setup the lightmap streaming resolution? Sometime when I switch from the editor to the game I got different visual result which seems to be related to that.
PS: I put it as my wallpaper
minor change a bit everywhere, time to play 7 differences game u.u;
- made the leaves on the ground lighter
- closed the gap in the clouds
- changed the background trees to be more cluttered
- fog has been made thicker on the ground
- more bloom on the bell?
- aaaand i guess there are more fireflies
do I win?
But great work on this, its possibly my favourite stage so far in the competition.
Also not sure how the bell rings (if it is swung or hit), but a bell striker to 1 side would still be a cool prop! (and fairly easy to make), and add just a touch of asymmetry to the scene.
At the beginning I was planning to put ghost spirit flame, but some people came out with the (nice) idea of fireflies which has turn to be a nice addition. I did some test to put both together but for now it was too much information for the eyes in my opinion, but I'm still running some test.
Unfortunately you forgot some leaves in the trees and the props/flower on some grave
Thanks for the bird distribution comment.
I did place them carefully to try to avoid a regular placement but I seems that I failed
For the bell striker ... on most of reference I've seen of these japanese bell, they got a kind on big wood cylinder...or nothing at all.
As the only free room I had was behind the bell (I didn't want to cover the front for aesthetic purpose), all you could see is some bits of rope.I could add it but it wouldn't bring much to the scene o.O.
So basically a curved plane
The texture on it is composed mostly from photo source clouds with a paint over work to get the lighting and feeling I wanted( it still needs some adjustment by the way u.u).
No, I think fireflies were totally the way to go. And you're def right on the ghost/fireflies combo. I think that'd be too much and take away from the rest of the awesome sauce you've got going on.
I would like to echo the spacing change for the birds on the roof. Before that was said, I didn't even realize that they were birds. I thought it was just pieces jutting off the roof.
Alright I got a really-really minor one:) Right above the bell there's a plaque that is blank right now, but generally those always have some kind of kanji on them, since this is an entry to a cemetery this must be some kind torii gate, which have a religious meaning of their own so I doubt they would go with and empty plate.
Just a little example.
But that's just a nitpick and overall the scene is kick ass and I wish you luck, man.
Cheers
I've add some kanji on the board above the bell in the last version I have but thanks to point out that it is missing.
I did a lot of test of details/props, but it was adding too much details (strangely while most of people try to add detail, I'm trying to keep my scene to the minimum xD).
So basically my last screen is going to be my final on apart from the bird spacing and kanji above the bell.
I just need to rebuild my lighting, find another angle and I'll be able to move on something else ~
Just need to get this into production lighting (It won't change much I think...).
Not sure I have really understood the texture images (512px seems really small o.O).
As I was looking closer, it kinda hit me. Did I miss something? where does the lighting on the gates come from?:)
Damn you're so good that I've been looking at this for ages and never actually asked myself that.
So I got rid of this idea but I wanted to keep the lighting, considering the idea that it could be the moment right before the apparition of the ghost. u.u