[UDK] Forest
Well, this is a work I'm doing for the "Liceu of Barcelona", the most important Opera theatre in the city. They want promote the Opera among the young people, because they hace a problem: The target public they used to have is dying, and the young generations don't know a lot about Opera.
This will be a playable environment. It will have a forest (with a cave, a river and a lake) and also a Castle. It is based in the Opera Peleas and Melisande, by Debussy. The game is quite simple. You are Peleas inside his mind, and searching from some cues, you must find the key to the door in the cave. No killings, no zombies, and no Fus Ro Dah hahahahahahah. Just you and the environment. It will be very complentative, as the forest itself is a representation of the feelings of peleas to Melisande. It is an Opera from the symbolism, so this give me freedom to create interesting locations, like the fountain (coming soon) and the dock. Sound is also going to be important, and also the particles system. Once the player is about to discover the truth, for example, some flying petals will show him the path through the forest, and so.
It will be released february for free, and I'm also planning to release all the textures and assets.
In know now it looks like very generic. This will be solved soon. We're doing some unique models like a fountain, a dock, and stuff like that.
Hope you like it.
This will be a playable environment. It will have a forest (with a cave, a river and a lake) and also a Castle. It is based in the Opera Peleas and Melisande, by Debussy. The game is quite simple. You are Peleas inside his mind, and searching from some cues, you must find the key to the door in the cave. No killings, no zombies, and no Fus Ro Dah hahahahahahah. Just you and the environment. It will be very complentative, as the forest itself is a representation of the feelings of peleas to Melisande. It is an Opera from the symbolism, so this give me freedom to create interesting locations, like the fountain (coming soon) and the dock. Sound is also going to be important, and also the particles system. Once the player is about to discover the truth, for example, some flying petals will show him the path through the forest, and so.
It will be released february for free, and I'm also planning to release all the textures and assets.
In know now it looks like very generic. This will be solved soon. We're doing some unique models like a fountain, a dock, and stuff like that.
Hope you like it.
Replies
I've finally decided to do the correct exposition for the forest and burn the sky, like a real camera would do. The big trunk texture is now darker witch helps to compensate the lack of blacks (fog can me very messy in this task).
Morning fog is also a "great" way to burn the image and loose contrast...
The lighting needs some work, its all very uniform and bland at the moment- this isn't the art, the art is lovely, it's just the light.
I think the water needs some attention, it's probably the weakest part.
I'd get some contrasting colours in there, the green is overwhelming at the moment.
Keep it up!
Other than that great work so far! Keep it up!
So yes, it was obvious: the lighting was implemented wrong. And that's because I didn't know what cascade shadows were. The level is really big and because of that, the lightmap resolution was really indecent. Then, to avoid toons of black vegetation, I used the emissive slot of the materials to correct those blacks. And then with the color correction I added black to the scene again.
But, after looking into the UDN, I found cascade shadows. End of the problems. I also implemented a better vertex normals in the vegetation so light spreads softly.
The water shader was tweaked, cards with mountains were added to the background and the first assets for the Castle zone are done. Textures for the castle are placeholders.
Again, really usefulls answers. Sometimes the obvious things are the ones we're not able to see!
The water still looks rather bland, perhaps its just lacking the effects one would expect. Refraction and some sort of reflection might make it look a lot better.
I don't like at all the SSAO for this kind of environments, grass planes mess it up.
Water was the most difficult part of this projects. I agree it looks bland but it was my first water material, so really happy with the result.
and project done!
The costumer is really happy with the result. I'm thinking in making a zip with some of the natural textures and some models free to download and use.
Here are the final screenshots of the best zones and the download link. If you want to play it, you will find the instructions inside de .rar
Download
I know it might sound odd, but it really does seem like a sunny, fresh morning - something that isn't the easiest thing to achieve well. Congrats
Other than that, looks and feels great!
nordahl154, unfortunally, the project is finished and delivered to the costumer, so I won't do anything more to it. There are still some minor fixes to do but as I said, we ran out of time and other projects had to be done.
I couldn't show this video until a public conference we had to made, but for those of you who want's to see a fly through of the environment without spoilers, here's the video