Bens Art Box :D
polycounter lvl 7
I decided to make one thread that I would use to share my work from now on. Saves time and space.
After the great hard drive failure of 2011 where I lost my Jurassic Park project I decided to cut my losses and start something totally new. Below is what I have of my new project, a UDK based environment based loosely on the planet Helion Prime from Chronicles of Riddik.
The final scene will have a crashed fighter in the middle of the street. For now I am building the base layout of the scene and defining materials and modular assets. I am hoping to do this project in passes. The idea is to
I am trying to optimize my use of textures in this, so far what you see uses 3 512 diffuse maps and a few 512 normal maps. I am trying to re use as much as possible. the wall texture is made up of one tiling stone texture and a tiled brick normal map with an AO layer attached to the Alpha of the diffuse map.
The steps and the lines in the brick use the same 512 brick texture.
I am storing AO information in the vertex colours of as many of the assets as i can.
I am not totally sure how far I can push recycling the textures as this scene is quite a big larger than I originally thought and when it comes time to destruct the scene I will need to make a lot of unique details but so far it has been pretty efficient.
All the assets so far are modular and are based on the one reference image I could get from Riddik however I say they are 'loosely' based because to be honest the one reference image didnt give me much to work from and I had plans for this scene form the outset. I used the film as a starting point but went in my own direction from there.
Feel free to crit though I know there isnt much to show as yet. None of this is final yet or even close as I am really only defining materials at the moment as a reference guide and will actually make the proper assets and final tweaks in a later stage.
Enjoy or hate at your leisure
After the great hard drive failure of 2011 where I lost my Jurassic Park project I decided to cut my losses and start something totally new. Below is what I have of my new project, a UDK based environment based loosely on the planet Helion Prime from Chronicles of Riddik.
The final scene will have a crashed fighter in the middle of the street. For now I am building the base layout of the scene and defining materials and modular assets. I am hoping to do this project in passes. The idea is to
- model the base
- define the modular pieces
- define materials and finalise UV layouts
- Make the scene 'airtight'
- finalise lighting and atmospheric affects
- put the ship into the scene
- reverse engineer the destruction into the scene replacing the modular pieces with unique damaged versions
I am trying to optimize my use of textures in this, so far what you see uses 3 512 diffuse maps and a few 512 normal maps. I am trying to re use as much as possible. the wall texture is made up of one tiling stone texture and a tiled brick normal map with an AO layer attached to the Alpha of the diffuse map.
The steps and the lines in the brick use the same 512 brick texture.
I am storing AO information in the vertex colours of as many of the assets as i can.
I am not totally sure how far I can push recycling the textures as this scene is quite a big larger than I originally thought and when it comes time to destruct the scene I will need to make a lot of unique details but so far it has been pretty efficient.
All the assets so far are modular and are based on the one reference image I could get from Riddik however I say they are 'loosely' based because to be honest the one reference image didnt give me much to work from and I had plans for this scene form the outset. I used the film as a starting point but went in my own direction from there.
Feel free to crit though I know there isnt much to show as yet. None of this is final yet or even close as I am really only defining materials at the moment as a reference guide and will actually make the proper assets and final tweaks in a later stage.
Enjoy or hate at your leisure
Replies
One small thing, I realise this is probably going to be a porfolio piece and not an explorable level, but I found that doors had to be +-20% bigger to look right in first person view.
Use info as needed
Looking forward to updates!
P.S. are you going to change the colour of the sky? That bronze/orange would look great!
By the way, where can I find out more about AO layers attached to the Alpha of the diffuse map and storing AO information in the vertex colours? I been using UDk a bit now, but still a bit lost on some methods. Do you have a link?
BeserK - You are right about the doors, I based my scales off the character meshes and didnt test it until relatively late in the process. They are about forehead height at the moment which annoyed me at first. It IS gonna be portfolio so I will not punish myself but it was quite a shock at first lol.
Change the colour of the sky? Do you mean actually alter the colour of the sky or play with the colour of the lighting?
When I get closer to the final concept I will do a pass and tweak the lights and stuff. I am thinking of going for more of a sunset time period so probably will go for more red / orange but will have to wait and see. Sandstone is a massive element in this scene and yellow stone with orange light may be somewhat overpowering so will have to wait and see.
salacious_Crumb - To attach an AO as an alpha layer in a texture. Simply open your diffuse texture in photoshop and go to the channels window. Click at the bottom what is usually the create new layer button. This will create a new channel instead of layer and the channel will be called 'alpha 1'.
Open your AO texture map and desaturate it fully by pressing ctrl+shift+U. Then select the it all (ctrl+A) and copy it (ctrl_C).
Go back tot he diffuse texture and select the newly created Alpha channel, with it selected paste the desaturated AO (ctrl+v). Save the texture out as a 32bit .TGA file and import it into UDK like normal.
In the material editor in UDK simply multiply your diffuse layer as you would normally and multiply the AO over that by attaching the Alpha slot of the diffuse texture into second slot on the multiply. The image explains it better than I can tho.
Also this is the video I found that explains how to store vertex shading info in 3DS Max. After this go into UDK and in the editor plug in a Vertex Color function into the diffuse slot and it makes the vertex colours show on the model.
Also this is the reference I am really only using two images from the right hand side but the others are there if I need them.
The torus knot is a copper material I made along the same lines as the Chrome one on JavaHawk tut on youtube.
crit is most welcome though I know there still isnt much TO crit yet.
@ Eric Chadwick - Thanks for the comments, I took what you said on board. I dont think I can add other light sources as it is daylight and they wouldnt really make sense. But thinking on what you said I realised the light or rather shadows is all I really have to play with on this kind of scene to create some interest . So to that effect I started thinking about how I could make some interesting shadows and how I could break up the monotony. And the result is a few small changes in the geometry and I'm pretty happy with it so far.
I know there still isnt much to crit but it is all apreciate none the less. Cheers
Kinda feels like you're spending your time on the wrong things right now, even though a flag is awesome in all ways, it's probably better to work Big -> Small. In which your building pieces are more vital than your flag which is micro-detail work in comparison.
It's looking nice though
Also I know this is hardly an original concept now but in my defence I did have my cockatiel sat on my moniter when I did it. Here is my Bird man sculpt, I finally decided to get my hands dirty with some sculpting practice. It took just shy of half an hour.
So on to the new work. I have been holding off on showing this as I wanted to do something I was happy with. Its my first piece in Zbrush and its hopefully gonna be part of a large project. This is the first piece in what will be a full chess set by the end. The point of the project is to get to grips with Zbrush while working on something that will make a nice portfolio piece when this finished but also be decent stand alone pieces in their own right.
Eventually I would like these pieces to be used in a massive chess board environment in udk but more on that later once I have the individual pieces made. The theme is a classic Knights vs Dragons.
Cheers!
You can see the full res one here but fair warning its huge.