Dude, this is turning out amazing! Loving your rocks, like everyone else. Haha. I would definitely read / watch a tutorial if you make one!
Great job so far man!
Shinobix - Thanks! Hehe, yeah like i said before, I'm kind of a rock freak. My girlfriend gets a kick out of it sometimes because we'll be walking around and I'll randomly stop and just stare at a rock. Like some crazy person.
Rambooze - Thanks! I like nature too! Glad you like it
felipefrango - Great reference images, thanks!! Everything helps!
Geezus - thanks!
BadgerBaiter - Thanks!! I have a love hate relationship with those totems, but currently we're on good terms :P. But i'm glad you like them!
AjdinBarucija - I'm using 3ds max, zbrush, and photoshop for all my content creation. And I'm throwing it all into UDK.
Update time:
Been working mostly on the scene composition. My biggest concern this week was to open up the scene and put a tiny bit more emphasis on the background. Added a little bit of forced perspective by taking all background elements and slightly tilting them back. Made it seem just a little more grand. I added the totems... Not sure if I'll keep them stone, I might try out making them wood. Added more sense of overgrowth to the foreground. I still need to do that to the background. Waterfalls are really early on. Still need to work on that shader. Also need to make the ver back waterfall feel alot larger and more powerful than the others. I've got a few more things on my to do list:
- Add dense vegetation to the background
- Dress up the stone faces in the back with tree roots and plants
- Add something more ornate and representative to the original fighting platform to the foreground
- More hanging vines
- Waterfalls and mist
- Birds
- Exotic vegetation to add more color: pitcher plants, fungi, red...shit
- insects
- extra unique assts
- final lighting and tone mapping pass
That's as many things as i can think of at the moment.
my only complaint would be, that those totems could very much be a generic piece of rock. The detail gets lost since it's in no way accentuated. Maybe some colorful tribal paint on them or something? Those giant heads in the back could also be more prominent.
As an idea you could vertex paint the highlights on them just to make them pop a bit more.
this is fantastic, altho i agree that your totems seem to get lost and look like plain stones, your scene is also missing the
"see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.., sexualy violate no evil"
theme that the original level has.
maybe if one of your statues was pouring from the ears, one from the mouth, and one from the eyes.. and just asume you are standing on the one spewing from its crotch it would convey the same message
We're all in agreement then guys!! Yeah the faces need to pop a bit more as well as the totems. I already made some changes to the totems just testing out painted color and it does pretty well. So now I just have to actually paint it with some effort. I have a plan for the faces that I'm hoping will make them pop. But lighting will also contribute a lot to bringing out their form. All in good time
RhinoKey - About the hear, see, speak, sex stuff. Yeah early on when I was painting my thumbnails I was wondering about this. I actually had painted one that had exactly what you were recommending, with the exception of the sex no evil one. If I do go with this, I'm not really gonna play it up because I don't feel like it's really that important to the scene... also, I'd probably only go with hear, see, and speak... Otherwise the last one might come off as pee no evil. Water pouring out of the ears would be easy enough, and it's actually crossed my mind... maybe your critique is enough of a push to motivate me to get it to work I'll try it out.
Been gone for a bit. Had to take a break to build a new machine. I have been long overdue for one and i guess working on this comp let me know how badly i needed to upgrade. I'm now able to work faster and have multiple applications running at once....yay. Experimenting with lots of things right now... tonal breakup... color... lighting... overall there's an inconsistency with specular levels, i'm aware of that and will address it a little later. I keep flipping back and forth between orange and blue sky... not sure which one i like more. Blue is closer to the original though. Still lots to do. I need to set some time aside for a matte painting. The current sky is very much temp.
Fuck YES!!!! awesome man. Latest changes are bad ass.
Only crit right now is your getting some twinning with your butterflies. Infact kind of double-twining with them. Do not get rid of the. But I would work on that a bit. If you don't know what I mean i can describe it over voice or something later. But my eye catches the sort of repetition across and within them very quickly.
Dude this is great. I can't wait to see the end. You still have time to do all kinds of stuff and this is already looking amazing.
if he's using partcles with particle subUV texture and node- he could give them a randomized start frame(could also randomize the frames themselves which could look good for stills but suck for ingame captures)
This is really looking great, both rocks and foliage can be really tough but you're doing a great job.
I'd try and get a bit more colour variation in, and draw attention to some of the statues and totems, as they might otherwise get a bit lost.
man, Ive always prided myself in how I can do rocks and shit, and then you gotta go and totally make me look like a nub' here lol.
this came out great...my ONLY critique with this is 1 thing
and its nothing in the art sense but in the "if this was a fighting stage" sense...the camera is SUPER close if 2 fighters are suppose to be standing there (Grass is super big near camera etc) But thats a "if this was for a game" critique, other then that composition lighting etc is all sexy.
haha, this is so cool. I agree with Jordan concerning the readability of the faces. They are awesome, and anything to make them show up more would be great. Blurry backgrounds are fun in renders, but the game art in me like things exaggerated to show up nicely on console TV.
JordanW - I'm still doing tweaks to the faces. Adding highlights to define more of the facial features, and adding a bit of color to them. I wanted to avoid the color at first... but it seems to help with making them pop as well as representing them from the original scene.
rv_el - DOUBLE COMPLETE TWINNING?!? Hehe, yeah I see what you're saying. The butterflies are just mesh's right now, they aren't particles so I guess that will happen as i duplicate them around. I suck with fx, so... yeah... I'll just make some variants.
Dustinbrown/cholden - DOF is getting kicked. I agree with what you're saying. DOF is only in for the meantime cuz i don't want people focusing too much on the sky back there, as it's temp. Once I get things in back there then DoF is going... just take it out completely or make it crazy subtle to just soften edges a tiny bit.
!NOT AN UPDATE!
Just thought I'd put this up for viewing. Foliage isn't moving which makes everything look odd.. and waterfalls haven't gotten the particle treatment yet. Was just testing out fraps on my pc the other night and recorded this. It comes from the same iteration as my last image post. Maybe a few things different but at this point I hadn't really done much else. so yeah... not an update.. just for fun
Nice, great atmosphere! A little nitpicking though (which really only applies to the animated version), maybe the water is falling a bit too fast? IMHO it breaks up the sense of immense scale, makes it look like a thin stream of water rather than a large body of water falling from a great height. Also, more foam on the falling water and some mist where it falls maybe?
how the hell did this slip under my radar? Great job bbox. I know it's asking a lot but this peice would be so killer if you were able to match that high quality detailing of the foreground tribal assets with the sculptures spewing water. As of right now the surface of the rocks are a bit flat and noisy, and the faces a little too simple (simply adding some rock-like teeth i think would add a lot). They're a great asset in theory but I think they need a bit of work. Rock faces aside (get it?), loving everything about this scene.
That's some good feedback crazyfingers. It's crossed my mind and my first iteration actually had teeth, they just never made it out of zbrush. It just made them look evil and I wanted to stray from that... but things have changed and I now think that if they had teeth, it'd help make them pop from the cliffs. Would also stay a little more true to the original scene. Still a bit of time, and a change like that wouldn't take long. I'll try it out.
Alright, so I said I'd give it a try. Re-iteration on the faces... thoughts? This might change the entire scenes direction. It's so colorful that the evil faces just seem out of place... but at the same time it's such a contrast that it almost feels cool.. idunno... I'm tired. Now that i'm looking at it, I'm gonna tweak the size and position of that first head on the right.
...and so I did tweak it... Here's another version... repositioned head and dark eyes... kinda cool in a different way... blah... i really need to go to sleep now...
To be honest I'm not a great fan of the lensflare. There is something in the image which is still bugging me, but not sure what it is. So I did a paintover to try to get it.
I haven't really find out what it was, but as it is done and there is a free space here, I post it there .
No big changes, in worse case if it goes against the direction you aimed, you can pretend you didn't see it
really nice piece, great sense of scale, make sure to add the slow falling waterfalls with some particle fx as well!
i think you need more light sources from behind the camera, emulating lights bounces from the jungle. the contrast is quite heavy due to the camera looking into the sun. in the photogrpahy world it would result in the foreground objects being black. maybe you could lower or upper the light a bit?
anyways, great work, good inspiration. showing it a lot to my class for good reference
Oooo, a paintover! I dig it EZ! The face on the left is a good call, and it looks like you mad the vegetation a little more dense right in front of that area too. About the lens flare... I'm slowly getting tired of it, lol. Much like when i was first introduced to photoshop... lens flare, lens flare, lens flare. Hehe, it's cool at first... but then... it gets to be too much. I may or may not keep it. I might just keep it for certain shots. Anyway, i like your paintover, very good call.
_Shimmer - Agreed!! Last night I actually started adding a few things behind the camera to simulate some bounce lighting. I'll also be adding some fill lights here and there. Great advice
Geez, thanks everyone for the comments as of late. There's some really awesome advice being given and i really appreciate it. Thanks so much for helping me out.You're really helping me make this entry the best it can be. HIGH FIVE!! GREAT COMMUNITY!!
Much better with these changes! I still think the rock texture is a little noisy though, the tonal range is very large in the diffuse making reading the form a bit hard.
I agree with ez on lowering the lens flare a bit as well. For what it's worth your shot that's slightly tilted to the right is far better than the head-on shot, you may consider setting up the scene for that to be the dominant shot, as if fighters could fight on a 2d plane with that angle.
If I had to give crits I'd say that I'm not sure about how the scale works right now. I kinda feel that those plants might bee too big or the characters are going to take up a lot of screen space in that particular shot.
Also the part on the left looks a tad too dark, it's especially visible if you really zoom out from the picture. So I totally agree with EzMeow on this.
Would be really interesting to know a bit more about your lighting/fog setup and how you went around creating that kind of great atmosphere, man!
Good luck with it and I'm looking forward too see you finish.
Making me wish I was an enviro guy dude! Awesome stuff. I want to see all the awesome enviro entries in motion. And then I want to see them in an actual game !!!
rv_el: Thanks man! Yeah, seeing them in motion is definitely awesome.
d1ver: Tried to address the dark side on the left. as for my lighting and fog set up, it's pretty simple. Just a dominant directional casting god rays and exponential height fog as a base. To break up the fog I added the cloud fx. And I've got a bunch of little spot lights blasting out the back of all the faces to get some rim lighting. As for the space, yeah i intended for it to be a closed in type of feeling the depth of the fighting space i would feel would be comparable to Mk's pit.
Update:
Started working on the sky. Still need to refine it a tiny bit. Still a few polish things I need to add in. Gonna add a few items from tamtam, perhaps his scimitar and mask. A few more insects, some hanging vines, and whatever else sounds cool and I have time for.
Love it! Definitely one of my favourite entries. The things you updated (such as removing the lens flare, covering the sun with the rock, etc.) add so much. I think you could hide the sun just a bit more as I feel the bloom is slightly too much and I'd like to see a bit more of that tree and the rocks on that side.
Best of luck though with this entry. It's looking fantastic as it is.
Looking awesome! This would be a great scene to fight in, the ground cracking when people were thrown, dusty flying up and bugs flying around. Looks great.
Replies
Great job so far man!
http://travelphotos.everything-everywhere.com/Asia/Cambodia/Angkor/7492894_tKHAJ#483637383_vD6FG
http://travelphotos.everything-everywhere.com/Asia/Cambodia/Preah-Vihear/11217060_UKZzK#483624652_3Bywz
Shinobix - Thanks! Hehe, yeah like i said before, I'm kind of a rock freak. My girlfriend gets a kick out of it sometimes because we'll be walking around and I'll randomly stop and just stare at a rock. Like some crazy person.
Rambooze - Thanks! I like nature too! Glad you like it
felipefrango - Great reference images, thanks!! Everything helps!
Geezus - thanks!
BadgerBaiter - Thanks!! I have a love hate relationship with those totems, but currently we're on good terms :P. But i'm glad you like them!
AjdinBarucija - I'm using 3ds max, zbrush, and photoshop for all my content creation. And I'm throwing it all into UDK.
Update time:
Been working mostly on the scene composition. My biggest concern this week was to open up the scene and put a tiny bit more emphasis on the background. Added a little bit of forced perspective by taking all background elements and slightly tilting them back. Made it seem just a little more grand. I added the totems... Not sure if I'll keep them stone, I might try out making them wood. Added more sense of overgrowth to the foreground. I still need to do that to the background. Waterfalls are really early on. Still need to work on that shader. Also need to make the ver back waterfall feel alot larger and more powerful than the others. I've got a few more things on my to do list:
- Add dense vegetation to the background
- Dress up the stone faces in the back with tree roots and plants
- Add something more ornate and representative to the original fighting platform to the foreground
- More hanging vines
- Waterfalls and mist
- Birds
- Exotic vegetation to add more color: pitcher plants, fungi, red...shit
- insects
- extra unique assts
- final lighting and tone mapping pass
That's as many things as i can think of at the moment.
slightly different angle... almost the same:
my only complaint would be, that those totems could very much be a generic piece of rock. The detail gets lost since it's in no way accentuated. Maybe some colorful tribal paint on them or something? Those giant heads in the back could also be more prominent.
As an idea you could vertex paint the highlights on them just to make them pop a bit more.
This is looking so slick. Good luck with it.)
"see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.., sexualy violate no evil"
theme that the original level has.
maybe if one of your statues was pouring from the ears, one from the mouth, and one from the eyes.. and just asume you are standing on the one spewing from its crotch it would convey the same message
OMG I've played this level many time, this is the first time I notice this detail xD
RhinoKey - About the hear, see, speak, sex stuff. Yeah early on when I was painting my thumbnails I was wondering about this. I actually had painted one that had exactly what you were recommending, with the exception of the sex no evil one. If I do go with this, I'm not really gonna play it up because I don't feel like it's really that important to the scene... also, I'd probably only go with hear, see, and speak... Otherwise the last one might come off as pee no evil. Water pouring out of the ears would be easy enough, and it's actually crossed my mind... maybe your critique is enough of a push to motivate me to get it to work
Small update:
Got up early this morning and was craving some lens flare. It's only gonna get more colorful
Only crit right now is your getting some twinning with your butterflies. Infact kind of double-twining with them. Do not get rid of the. But I would work on that a bit. If you don't know what I mean i can describe it over voice or something later. But my eye catches the sort of repetition across and within them very quickly.
Dude this is great. I can't wait to see the end. You still have time to do all kinds of stuff and this is already looking amazing.
I'd try and get a bit more colour variation in, and draw attention to some of the statues and totems, as they might otherwise get a bit lost.
Seems you like rainbow effect
Great work
this came out great...my ONLY critique with this is 1 thing
and its nothing in the art sense but in the "if this was a fighting stage" sense...the camera is SUPER close if 2 fighters are suppose to be standing there (Grass is super big near camera etc) But thats a "if this was for a game" critique, other then that composition lighting etc is all sexy.
JordanW - I'm still doing tweaks to the faces. Adding highlights to define more of the facial features, and adding a bit of color to them. I wanted to avoid the color at first... but it seems to help with making them pop as well as representing them from the original scene.
rv_el - DOUBLE COMPLETE TWINNING?!? Hehe, yeah I see what you're saying. The butterflies are just mesh's right now, they aren't particles so I guess that will happen as i duplicate them around. I suck with fx, so... yeah... I'll just make some variants.
Dustinbrown/cholden - DOF is getting kicked. I agree with what you're saying. DOF is only in for the meantime cuz i don't want people focusing too much on the sky back there, as it's temp. Once I get things in back there then DoF is going... just take it out completely or make it crazy subtle to just soften edges a tiny bit.
!NOT AN UPDATE!
Just thought I'd put this up for viewing. Foliage isn't moving which makes everything look odd.. and waterfalls haven't gotten the particle treatment yet. Was just testing out fraps on my pc the other night and recorded this. It comes from the same iteration as my last image post. Maybe a few things different but at this point I hadn't really done much else. so yeah... not an update.. just for fun
[ame]
[ame]
[ame]
[ame]
I haven't really find out what it was, but as it is done and there is a free space here, I post it there
No big changes, in worse case if it goes against the direction you aimed, you can pretend you didn't see it
i think you need more light sources from behind the camera, emulating lights bounces from the jungle. the contrast is quite heavy due to the camera looking into the sun. in the photogrpahy world it would result in the foreground objects being black. maybe you could lower or upper the light a bit?
anyways, great work, good inspiration. showing it a lot to my class for good reference
_Shimmer - Agreed!! Last night I actually started adding a few things behind the camera to simulate some bounce lighting. I'll also be adding some fill lights here and there. Great advice
Geez, thanks everyone for the comments as of late. There's some really awesome advice being given and i really appreciate it. Thanks so much for helping me out.You're really helping me make this entry the best it can be. HIGH FIVE!! GREAT COMMUNITY!!
I agree with ez on lowering the lens flare a bit as well. For what it's worth your shot that's slightly tilted to the right is far better than the head-on shot, you may consider setting up the scene for that to be the dominant shot, as if fighters could fight on a 2d plane with that angle.
If I had to give crits I'd say that I'm not sure about how the scale works right now. I kinda feel that those plants might bee too big or the characters are going to take up a lot of screen space in that particular shot.
Also the part on the left looks a tad too dark, it's especially visible if you really zoom out from the picture. So I totally agree with EzMeow on this.
Would be really interesting to know a bit more about your lighting/fog setup and how you went around creating that kind of great atmosphere, man!
Good luck with it and I'm looking forward too see you finish.
d1ver: Tried to address the dark side on the left. as for my lighting and fog set up, it's pretty simple. Just a dominant directional casting god rays and exponential height fog as a base. To break up the fog I added the cloud fx. And I've got a bunch of little spot lights blasting out the back of all the faces to get some rim lighting. As for the space, yeah i intended for it to be a closed in type of feeling the depth of the fighting space i would feel would be comparable to Mk's pit.
Update:
Started working on the sky. Still need to refine it a tiny bit. Still a few polish things I need to add in. Gonna add a few items from tamtam, perhaps his scimitar and mask. A few more insects, some hanging vines, and whatever else sounds cool and I have time for.
Best of luck though with this entry. It's looking fantastic as it is.