[UDK] the 'Road Home'
polycounter lvl 20
While driving to visit friends in the town I grew up in I thought the road side would make for a rather melancholy environment. I went up again a while ago and filmed this:
[ame]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L84tv5_QJsI[/ame]
From there I toyed in my head over the course of a month or so how to build this and make it interesting. The goal here, though, is that while it might be melancholy that can be no excuse for it to be boring. I decided to first do the entire environment then go back to it and add interesting elements: A dilapidated barn. A burning car. A fallen UFO.
I'm hoping to do a video of this environment that's 1-2 minutes long and in the same essence of the one I captured above only with a few more interesting focal points.
One drunken night I blocked out this:
And this past weekend I managed to get this far:
I'm really not thinking economically with this environment. It's pretty hefty already in the triangle count and things are scaled slightly askew that'll need to be corrected.
I think next I'll do the foreground fence then go back and fix the errors.
[ame]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L84tv5_QJsI[/ame]From there I toyed in my head over the course of a month or so how to build this and make it interesting. The goal here, though, is that while it might be melancholy that can be no excuse for it to be boring. I decided to first do the entire environment then go back to it and add interesting elements: A dilapidated barn. A burning car. A fallen UFO.
I'm hoping to do a video of this environment that's 1-2 minutes long and in the same essence of the one I captured above only with a few more interesting focal points.
One drunken night I blocked out this:
And this past weekend I managed to get this far:
I'm really not thinking economically with this environment. It's pretty hefty already in the triangle count and things are scaled slightly askew that'll need to be corrected.
I think next I'll do the foreground fence then go back and fix the errors.
Replies
The tall dead wheat grass in the foreground is nearly black on the one side facing away from the sun. I'm using Lightmass...
in that case why not just use SSS? (or SSSSS as they call it)
the vid looks awesome with its super desaturated tones, I think mostly beacause its almost all ambient light with very little direct sun. it would be doooope to get that dappled/clouds moving over the ground look. cant wait to see more man.
Now this sounds interesting.
maybe that helps with the foliage
nice looking scene so far
Hey man - please tell me more! I think in previous UDK env's, I edited the normals of my foliage to get better lighting results. It's been a while, though, so I'm hoping to hear what others have to say.
AAAWWWWWW YYYYEEEEEEEEAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH
Now put some fake subsurface scattering on those tall grass clumps so they'll look better :P
Mesh - Transfere atributes - check normals. Then you just gotta have a good target.
awesome stuff sltr
Here's a quick tip on how you could make the grass look a little better.
Set the material's lighting model to MLM_NonDirectional; it works pretty well on the grass and will be a lot cheaper than making an SSS material.
Also, multiply your grass texture by a scalar parameter (brightness) and a vector parameter (color) and create an instance of that material. Now you will be able to tweak the color and brightness of your grass and see the results in the editor without having to compile the material over and over again. Tweak the values until your grass is almost indistinguishable from the terrain and you will notice a huge improvement
This is basically what I was referring to. I'm at home on break without UDK or 3ds Max for the next week, but I'll try to explain it the best I can.
First, you'll want to build your entire foliage mesh in 3ds Max, and have all your alpha plane placement finalized. Once you have that done, download this script called SlideNormalThief. What this script does is copies the vertex normals from a reference mesh over to your target object, in this case your foliage mesh. The process is similar to baking maps using RTT. You'll place the reference object over top of the target object, and the target object's vertex normals will bend to match the nearest vertex normal on your reference object. You can use any shape you'd like for the reference object, as you can get different results depending on what effect you're going for. I found I got the best results by starting with a sphere and sculpting it till I had a blobby shape that conformed to the basic shape of my foliage mesh. If I remember correctly, both objects need to have an Edit Normals modifier applied before using the script.
Here's an image from Eric Chadwick that shows the results of bent vertex normals.
Once you have results you are happy with, you'll have to export it to UDK in FBX format, as that will ensure you are preserving your explicit normals. On export there will be an option to export normals, I can't remember what it is off the top of my head, but it shouldn't be hard to find in the options. Once in UDK import your foliage mesh, and under the import options, tick "Explicit Normals". You should be all set.
Here's an image I had laying around from when I was testing this method a few months ago. It was just a test mesh, but you can see the lighting is even across the mesh, hiding the fact that it's just alpha planes.
Hopefully once I get back to my home computer, I can put together an actual tutorial. Hope this helps!
EDIT: I suck at reading. Cool, a sphere to start that conforms somewhat to the tree. DONE.
Dont have UDK here, but I believe you can
- export out your grass model from max as FBX.
- Import into UDK,
- click your grass model in editor,
- select matching static meshes (right click and select)
- replace with your fbx (by right clicking and making sure you clicked the fbx model in the content browser.)
This all depends if your pivots are the same.
You can also consolidate assets using the consolidation tool. Just remember to pick the mesh you want to keep in the dialog window of the tool :P
Must be something new. Havent played around much in the newer UDK's
That's fantastically smart! I've always found that the biggest haslte is to make the grass foliage fit with the ground textures.
Something that would be really cool is if you have a megatexture or what ever for you big colors and so on. Then some tiling ground textures for corresponding area in you mega texture. AND THEN have the grass melt together with the underlying megatexture. Kinda you get the idea so that you get some nice settle variation corresponding to you ground material.
Remember to get like three slightly different grass models. It will look so damn repetitive otherwise. I you already said that you'll not really focus on performance here.
Yeah sure. But wouldn't it be cool if that would happend with a shader? Either vertex color or a "what ever that node is called in UDK material editor"..
Looking great Adam. I already mentioned on FB that the grass looks a bit odd with the bright/dark extremes, but otherwise it's looking sharp.
[Edit]
Having a transmission setup will also help:
Explain?
Wouldn't it be easy to try to just move the ground plane a few units down and bake just to see if the blacks are still there?
Ah, always so smart
Could vertex color the bottom of the grass and lerp between your grass texture and the ground texture with vertex color. Pretty cheap way of doing it as I dont know how you would try to figure out the pixels underneath of the mesh etc maybe playing around with object world position (think thats a node).
@Adam: I've used the emissive slot like paul to get rid of the black in grass.