Going to try and do an update every day this weekend. I'm trying to finish this by next Friday or Saturday. Here's where it's at now.
Tomorrow I'm going to start the smaller foliage and by Sunday I hope to have it placed around the map so I have 5 days to polish everything and do the finishing touches like tree roots and the flowing river.
This is a nice thread to follow because I'm pretty much in the same area. I'm learning ZBrush currently and hopefully get it to get some game res models out.
Yeah I agree, this is a very interesting thread. Cant wait to see how it turns out! Trees definitely need some more colour variation, though it could just be my stupid iPhone. Keep us posted!
This has come a ways but i think you can take it further.
Some Points (Take with a grain of salt its 5 am)
-needs more contrast
-sharper darker shadows
-less of a red tint maybe (?)
-your trees still do look unit you can see some of the brighter spots but theres doesnt seem to be a strong sence of lighting seems like all ambiant light and no strong directional light.
@Jimmy, I had trouble getting into ZBrush for a while but once you find out what brushes work best for you it's not that tough to get into.
@Guy123, I messed around with the color variation on the yellow maple's canopy earlier today. I'll post pictures later.
@Willy, I'll mess around with the lighting and color correction a bit today. It looks like either your monitor is much darker and less vibrant than mine or some strange compression happened when you posted that .gif because it's much more colorful and contrasted on my screen. I agree about the lighting on the yellow trees also but there's really not much I can do about it. I've already messed around with a lot of different light angles and this one does light them the most. I'll mess around with the angle a bit to see if I can get a bit more light onto them but I won't be able to get much more than I have now.
@Luke, thanks. Fable and Oblivion are mainly what I've been drawing from for the overall feel. I agree that some of the leaves on the ground blend are a bit weird but there's not much I can do about that since UDK doesn't have blend modulating on terrain currently. I've tried to make it not look too bad by using decals for most of the fresh leaves and trying to blend the leaves on the ground texture to look like they're sort of mashed in but it still looks a bit odd in some places.
Thanks for the comments and crits! I'll post an update later once I get started on the smaller foliage.
Got a start on the smaller foliage today along with a few other small details and tweaking the lighting/atmosphere a bit. I've arranged these plants into 6 different clusters to place around trees, in the open and along cliff faces/edges along with importing them as single plants to place inbetween the clusters in some spots.
Tomorrow I'm planning to start on a larger bush-like plant and finish placing the smaller grass/fern clusters around the entire map. I'm also going to try out a different bark on the yellow maples as I don't particularly like the one on there now.
Did some bush-like things yesterday and finished placing the foliage around the entire scene. It still needs some tweaking texture wise but I'm pretty happy with how the foliage turned out.
Going to spend the week tweaking and refining everything and adding some smaller finishing details like tree roots coming out of the rocks near the red maple and making the water look like it's flowing.
I know it's not perfect but I've already been working on this for nearly 2 months and I feel it'd be better to just move onto a new scene with the experience I've gained sometime soon.
The stuff you've made is cool. But you definitely dont want to call it done until you put a better lighting pass on it.
At the moment I feel like I'm watching an unlit map.
Yeah I know what you mean. I'm still struggling a bit on figuring out what all of the lightmass settings do. It's also kind of hard to iterate quickly with the lighting since each build takes about 40 or 50 minutes. I messed around with the lighting a bit over the weekend but I just can't get it to look right on the trees from lower angles. I think that it might be partly because they're fairly tall and clumped together so not much light penetrates through to the lower parts. That's just bad planning on my part. I'm considering going back and doing some large revisions on some of the assets like the trees but I was really hoping to just wrap this up and move on as I'm getting kind of burnt out on it.
The mian problem for me is the lack of lighting. You don't NEED to use lightmass for every test. Throw down some light shafts, some dappling on the floor. Fake it any way you need to in order to achieve good results.
The DoF also feels heavy handed and doesn't really compliment the scene because there's nothing to focus on that causes the DoF to be relevant. If it were me I would ditch the idea of taking screenshots from dozens of angles, it's making your job harder. Get a focal point for a single screenshot - the red tree on the rocks, surrounding by a river is perfect. Just saying it throws up lots of mental images.
Perhaps build a shrine to sit under the tree, some nice bloomed out edges and a few light shafts hitting it to provoke an almost religious feeling.
A few other things stand out to me as well:
- the leaf pile decals are obviously decals (even if they are not actually decals), make a model that is raised in the centre, as if the leaves have piled up. it'll give the ground more height variety on a micro-level. Right now everything is flat and the eye doesn't feel like getting involved.
- the rocks feel too clumpy, like someone littered the terrain with giant meatballs. make a more interesting shaped rock if you intend to use it so much.
- the colours. i understand you want somethign striking but right the image is split between super bright top half, and super dark bottom half. it is difficult to read and any interesting dressing you have done with bushes and roots and rocks seems to blend into one big purple mess.
- the water doesn't look like water. where are the edges, where's the ripples?
- the tree leaf planes are very flat, too many leaves on a single plane makes it look flat and doesn't give the lighting engine much to work with in terms of angles and shapes.
- for such a colourful scene, there's not enough contrast in colour.
@Rick, didn't see those crits until now since that was the day I moved. Thanks for going so in depth. I'll go through and address some of your criticisms for the next update. I'm not sure if I'll model out the leaves since the grass is much thicker now and modeling out the leaves would be more work than it's worth I think. It'd be hard to get them to fit to the terrain in most spots. I'll try out doing a small pile to place along the coast of the stream and in certain other spots though. I've considered doing a shrine or some ruins also. After I finish a few other things I'll probably try something like that.
Here are the latest pictures. The next thing I'm going to work on is some green medium foliage to get a bit more color variation in there.
Didn't get around to doing the green foliage yet but thought I'd post an update. Messed around with the lighting and color correction more and set up subsurface scattering on the tree leaves.
Looking good BUT, the leaves provide too much of a contrast in relation to the ground (either darken the leaves a little bit or give the ground some more lively colors, I strongly prefer the latter), and the trees really don't seem to have any inner shadow. You could probably ease up a bit on the background fog, it's really blurry. I'd also be afraid to swim in that water, maybe you could clear that up a little bit. :poly124:
I like the leaves on the ground and water though! Do they float along? The water crests also look nice. :thumbup:
Looking good BUT, the leaves provide too much of a contrast in relation to the ground (either darken the leaves a little bit or give the ground some more lively colors, I strongly prefer the latter), and the trees really don't seem to have any inner shadow. You could probably ease up a bit on the background fog, it's really blurry. I'd also be afraid to swim in that water, maybe you could clear that up a little bit. :poly124:
I like the leaves on the ground and water though! Do they float along? The water crests also look nice. :thumbup:
I think I'll mess around with the ground a bit because you're right about that contrast. As for the water, I've had a lot of comments on making it clearer but I'm not quite sure how. This is just an edited version of Epic's water from their foliage map. I changed the color of the fog, scaled the normals to be a lot smaller scale and toned down the reflections. I'll keep looking for what controls that. The leaves don't flow, but they do move around like they're in a pool of water. I tried making the entire river flowing before but it wasn't looking too great. Right now I only have water flowing near the tops of the waterfalls.
looking good. Might I suggest cutting down the DOF and try to get some light shinning through the trees. Right now to me if feels as if the sky is on fire or something. Maybe desaturated the trees a little too
Thanks for the reference Dustin. I really like the reflections in that first shot. I'm not sure I'll be able to replicate it though. I'm not that great with shaders in UDK which is why I've just been editing Epic's water right now.
I haven't done much on this scene lately. Been doing more TF2 items and working on mods but hopefully I'll be able to finish it up soon. I'm not sure if I'm ever going to get around to finishing it though. I feel it might be better if I just move onto a scene that's a bit simpler and less ambitious size wise where I can really polish things quicker and improve my artistic skills more instead of spending hours placing props in this giant forest.
Replies
looks great !!
Tomorrow I'm going to start the smaller foliage and by Sunday I hope to have it placed around the map so I have 5 days to polish everything and do the finishing touches like tree roots and the flowing river.
Some Points (Take with a grain of salt its 5 am)
-needs more contrast
-sharper darker shadows
-less of a red tint maybe (?)
-your trees still do look unit you can see some of the brighter spots but theres doesnt seem to be a strong sence of lighting seems like all ambiant light and no strong directional light.
Hope you dont mind a quick ajustment/paintover
@Guy123, I messed around with the color variation on the yellow maple's canopy earlier today. I'll post pictures later.
@Willy, I'll mess around with the lighting and color correction a bit today. It looks like either your monitor is much darker and less vibrant than mine or some strange compression happened when you posted that .gif because it's much more colorful and contrasted on my screen. I agree about the lighting on the yellow trees also but there's really not much I can do about it. I've already messed around with a lot of different light angles and this one does light them the most. I'll mess around with the angle a bit to see if I can get a bit more light onto them but I won't be able to get much more than I have now.
@Luke, thanks. Fable and Oblivion are mainly what I've been drawing from for the overall feel. I agree that some of the leaves on the ground blend are a bit weird but there's not much I can do about that since UDK doesn't have blend modulating on terrain currently. I've tried to make it not look too bad by using decals for most of the fresh leaves and trying to blend the leaves on the ground texture to look like they're sort of mashed in but it still looks a bit odd in some places.
Thanks for the comments and crits! I'll post an update later once I get started on the smaller foliage.
Tomorrow I'm planning to start on a larger bush-like plant and finish placing the smaller grass/fern clusters around the entire map. I'm also going to try out a different bark on the yellow maples as I don't particularly like the one on there now.
By the end of the day I'm planning to make the bush thing and have it along with the smaller foliage placed throughout the scene.
Going to spend the week tweaking and refining everything and adding some smaller finishing details like tree roots coming out of the rocks near the red maple and making the water look like it's flowing.
don't
Mind giving a bit more criticism than that?...
I know it's not perfect but I've already been working on this for nearly 2 months and I feel it'd be better to just move onto a new scene with the experience I've gained sometime soon.
At the moment I feel like I'm watching an unlit map.
Yeah I know what you mean. I'm still struggling a bit on figuring out what all of the lightmass settings do. It's also kind of hard to iterate quickly with the lighting since each build takes about 40 or 50 minutes. I messed around with the lighting a bit over the weekend but I just can't get it to look right on the trees from lower angles. I think that it might be partly because they're fairly tall and clumped together so not much light penetrates through to the lower parts. That's just bad planning on my part. I'm considering going back and doing some large revisions on some of the assets like the trees but I was really hoping to just wrap this up and move on as I'm getting kind of burnt out on it.
The mian problem for me is the lack of lighting. You don't NEED to use lightmass for every test. Throw down some light shafts, some dappling on the floor. Fake it any way you need to in order to achieve good results.
The DoF also feels heavy handed and doesn't really compliment the scene because there's nothing to focus on that causes the DoF to be relevant. If it were me I would ditch the idea of taking screenshots from dozens of angles, it's making your job harder. Get a focal point for a single screenshot - the red tree on the rocks, surrounding by a river is perfect. Just saying it throws up lots of mental images.
Perhaps build a shrine to sit under the tree, some nice bloomed out edges and a few light shafts hitting it to provoke an almost religious feeling.
A few other things stand out to me as well:
- the leaf pile decals are obviously decals (even if they are not actually decals), make a model that is raised in the centre, as if the leaves have piled up. it'll give the ground more height variety on a micro-level. Right now everything is flat and the eye doesn't feel like getting involved.
- the rocks feel too clumpy, like someone littered the terrain with giant meatballs. make a more interesting shaped rock if you intend to use it so much.
- the colours. i understand you want somethign striking but right the image is split between super bright top half, and super dark bottom half. it is difficult to read and any interesting dressing you have done with bushes and roots and rocks seems to blend into one big purple mess.
- the water doesn't look like water. where are the edges, where's the ripples?
- the tree leaf planes are very flat, too many leaves on a single plane makes it look flat and doesn't give the lighting engine much to work with in terms of angles and shapes.
- for such a colourful scene, there's not enough contrast in colour.
Here are the latest pictures. The next thing I'm going to work on is some green medium foliage to get a bit more color variation in there.
I like the leaves on the ground and water though! Do they float along? The water crests also look nice. :thumbup:
I think I'll mess around with the ground a bit because you're right about that contrast. As for the water, I've had a lot of comments on making it clearer but I'm not quite sure how. This is just an edited version of Epic's water from their foliage map. I changed the color of the fog, scaled the normals to be a lot smaller scale and toned down the reflections. I'll keep looking for what controls that. The leaves don't flow, but they do move around like they're in a pool of water. I tried making the entire river flowing before but it wasn't looking too great. Right now I only have water flowing near the tops of the waterfalls.
Thanks for the comments and crits Nordahl!
I haven't done much on this scene lately. Been doing more TF2 items and working on mods but hopefully I'll be able to finish it up soon. I'm not sure if I'm ever going to get around to finishing it though. I feel it might be better if I just move onto a scene that's a bit simpler and less ambitious size wise where I can really polish things quicker and improve my artistic skills more instead of spending hours placing props in this giant forest.