Druid Pillars - need help with presentation
polycounter lvl 6
Been working at this a while now, could use help on lighting and how to do a foggy background with light shining through, placing the grass by hand is taking forever. Crits on textures, etc. welcome too.
Loosely reinterpereted from this
Land was painted on static mesh using vertex blending.
Loosely reinterpereted from this
Land was painted on static mesh using vertex blending.
Replies
ps: there's an obvious uv seam visible on the upright symbolised rock which you might be able to hide in some stylised lighting but it's worth attention imo.
paintover idea
Do that!
Thanks SO MUCH for this, it is an awesome thing to wake up to! Could you send me the original sky you used for this if you are ok with me using it?
Sky68 sunset photo used in paintover.
Sky69 2nd photo, same sunset.
Both are unedited (2816 x 2112) fullsize photo's, hope it's not too late!
ps: you might have to copy the link and open in a new tab as others were having problems before from polycount.
Thanks so much, yeah the redirect gave me problems too, thanks for mentioning it, all i had to do was reload the page once it didn't redirect.
How are you liking what I've done so far?
And again, thanks so much for that paintover, it's the reason I was able to do it so quickly, I would have lingered around for a while figuring out what to do without it!
I like the works so far. Some crits;
The glow of the symbols appear too uniform. If not every symbol is lit and not all symbols have the same intensity it will compliment the natural surroundings more.
ps: I really like the glow you did on the little rock on the lhs, looks very cool.
I don't know if you are changing the sky so the current one appears too saturated but does have a good feature directly above the pillar where it's clear like the eye of the storm. Some coloured lights would help as a final touch to match the sky.
Looking forward to updates!
I decided to stick with my current sky as I don't want to make this project into a timesink.
It was suggested to me in WAYWO to add some flowers and smaller rocks to populate the area as well as thin out the grass in the back, i did thin out the grass and at first I was all for flowers, but now i'm reconsidering, I feel it may make the scene too happy when I want it to appear slightly ominous.
@GCMP, thanks for all your crits so far you have been a huge help. I am not sure of the glow on this if it's too bright or not, I have a less glowy version and i've been staring at this too long to make a decision on what's too bright lol.
@Tony, I can see your point so I tried to do it up a little more, don't really want to go too celtic with it and Druid is only the best i can describe it, i'm itching for a name for this piece and I am coming up dry. Hope you like the changes!
Also for anyone who cares to have a look, while I was messing with the sky saturation in the material editor this happened, I thought it was kinda cool so wanted to upload it
On the skydome the texture looks pretty low res and flat. I would find a larger sky and something with more depth in it.
The grass also in the back looks taller. You might want to adjust that some. Also seems like it should be in more patches or more dense.
Fog would be awesome too.
For the lighting the grass doesn't seem to react much to it, but I can give strengthening it up a shot, the sky is a 2k texture, should I jump to 4? It didn't require any shrinking to fit the tex - i'm guessing it looks low res due to the DOF blur?
I'll give patches a shot and see about the grass looking taller, I can't take placing more individual pieces by hand - already placed over 4000 individually thanks to UDK removing foliage volumes.
The grass sizes were randomly varied between .8 and 1.2 scale so i'm guessing that's just due to the height difference in terrain or something, but it's all about what looks right so i'll try it out
Edit: oh also I just took a look through your posts and saw your girl you are working on, she is looking great! No crits really I love the texturing and the outfits, the purple shirt with white sleeves is my fav.
And I just read about my scene looking empty
Changes - shrank grass in back by .2, added fog, added rocks in BG, changed sky light color and saturation.
Getting close to calling it done, will still make a few changes if anything stands out, should I stick to the blue or was the red better?
Where is a poll when you need one :poly131:
Sephez's suggestion fixes this with the repeted pillars but you could always add other things too, maybe a broken fence along the roadside, flowers etc.
But I love this already, it's gonna end up well, I'm sure.
The grass still looks pretty bleh. It might be the color is off from the ground some. Maybe match the grass a little closer.
Fog is nicer but the start distance is a bit too sharp. Soften that up.
Also you might want to read http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=3275 when setting up shots. It really makes a lot of sense.
Changes: adjusted grass to match ground better, disabled DOF to see if sky looks better, added other stones, changed grass to a more patchy look (i'm happier with it now), softened fog edge.
Overall a few things - I never planned to do a real environment, I only wanted to do the stones and then make a super simple background to pimp my work on the stones haha, but it's become more than that now I see. But I think its worth it, i'm getting happier with this as it comes along.
@Jeffro, thanks for your continued crits, I am starting to think i'll need to get a diff sky, I went back and looked and realized I wasn't using the sky I thought I was since I had to change it at one point and it's only a 1k texture so even though i'm really reluctant it might be a necessary evil. About the article - this was actually my attempt at the rule of thirds and I had read the article before, but I decided to read it again to make sure I didn't miss anything, thanks for that.
@Uncle, glad you are loving this, hopefully i'll do you proud!
@fightpunch - thanks so much, I feel cheap reusing the main prop like this but I think it looks pretty nice, I just don't want to look lazy, I am still considering a fence but mostly i'm leaning towards flowers and possibly a gate/stone entranceway in the background where the two stones are next to the road.
Thanks everyone for looking and reading that wall of text!
tl;dr - further suggestions?
As for suggestions, I think smaller props such as the flowers you mentioned would be a nice addition. And if you are worried about reusing the same pillar, maybe you could have one of the pillars in the background fallen over and destroyed. Keep it up
Where is your light source coming form? To me it seem to be where the sun set is? Perhaps make your main directional come from there and have long shadows from the Pillar on the ground and highlight the shadow parts with a rim or secondary light.
Thanks! Glad to hear i'm doing something right, I think a broken pillar might just do the trick, as i'll only need to add one new textured area within the stone's textures, it had some extra UV space that was killing me anyways!
I'm just happy to be getting some crits to go by
Congrats on RIFT, your work is awesome btw!
There is AO on all of the pillars/stones, but i suppose it isn't strong enough, i'll darken it up some or see if I can get a better bake on it.
My dominant directional light is pointing from behind coming from where the path ends towards the screen, then I have some point lights to match the skydome colors, is your suggestion to make the long shadows come towards the screen or away from towards the background?
Thanks so much for the crits everyone!!!
I see the a light AO now that I am on my work monitors which are calibrated correctly T___T I would suggest making it darker just a tad anyway.
If the directional is coming from the top left-ish area, then the shadow on the ground should be pointing towards the bottom right-ish area. Right now it looks like it is pointing towards the top right-ish.
Long shadows is part of what sells these times of day and can make a scene look so gorgeous.
If I could guess, it could be that your point lights are casting shadows which is overriding your directional.
Warming up your main light could help a bit also.
After looking at my AO maps I see that from the method I was using (Varga final gather method) it wasn't creating the shadows from the ground, I was so happy with this new method I had found because it includes the normal map in it, but I didn't realize what it was missing! So now i'm going back to my old method (Here) and will combine the two
I'm glad you caught this on my first port piece that will require ground shadows on the AO, thanks so much again.
Update coming soon!
Made you another paintover. There's a small fake background of some buildings in the distance and the object distribution should feel more natural. Other than that some slight desaturation of the sky near the buildings and around the pillar was done, not much else.
New Composition with DOF
New Composition No DOF
Last Composition
Finally what I'd like to get critique on now is this dagger which is what is jammed in the rock on the left, I realize it's hard to see in the shot but I will be putting close ups like this in my port
Based on this
@toxic_h20 - thanks for that paintover, I like it a lot, you got here sorta late though after I did a ton more work haha. The only problem I have with that paintover is that it took out the stone on the left and the dagger which is part of my main showpieces from these assets.
@GCMP - thanks again for the paintover, the buildings don't work for me so I tried putting in a small mountain looking piece, I was hesitant to even make a fence as I was thinking of this piece being pre-medieval so modern buildings seems quite out of place
The dagger looks good but from distance it's difficult to tell what it is. I actually thought it was rebar until you posted a closeup as the curved handle was throwing me. Maybe you could embed it in the nearest stone to the camera?
@EVERYONE - thanks so much for helping me and critting me on this, the paintovers are what REALLY pushed things along quickly, thanks so much and hope you like it, please go check out my site for wires and flats!
I decided to name it Myrddin's Obelisk as the name is a precursor for Merlin and that is sort of the theme here with the dagger in the stone.
Hope to see some more variety in your folio