Just out of interest, what parts are custom and what parts are CryEngine place-holders?
I'm guessing that the rocks and materials are custom, but the fog effects and clouds are CE3 stock.
This is a strong execution with fantastic presentation (watch the youtube full screen 1080p [click the gear]).
I feel the scene is repetitive with the same rocks and scale everywhere, with limited color variation up close. However, I feel this may be unjustified with the WIPiness of this scene.
Also, as much as I love this thread, it'd be great to see something in a dramatically different style (than rocks).
I absolutely agree with you regarding the color variation. Its still in its early stages but I'm planning to add more color variations to balance it out.
As for dear esther, I never though about it but I've checked it out and must say that I'm amazed with the art work, its some great reference material, thanks for the heads up !
Just out of interest, what parts are custom and what parts are CryEngine place-holders?
I'm guessing that the rocks and materials are custom, but the fog effects and clouds are CE3 stock.
Thanks, in those last screenshots, they sky box and particle effects are place holders (CE3 stock) I already started replacing those by my own custom made ones.
- Painted a new skybox texture : took me a while to figure out how to convert a longitudinal/latitudinal skydome texture to a vertical cross (cubemap) seamlessly. I wont even mention the headaches setting it up to work with crytek's proprietary cubemap setup.
Painted in mudbox :
Preview in engine :
- Added thunder bolts and in game sounds as place holders, making my own particle effects shouldn't be a problem but I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to make my own sound fx for this.
- Added sand material (painted in mudbox): I might remake this one since I'm not too fond of it
preview :
Map overview of what is planned :
Castle reference : (from Sammy)
I'm still sculpting the modular parts for the castle/ruins and making vegetation.
I did some vegetation implementation tests for foliage and it worked like a charm right from the first try, workflow is already setup, all thats left is content creation.
Regarding the cave :
I'm thinking about making some sort of underground ruined city, the lighting will be provided by a hole in the ceiling to let some sun light come through. Maybe some sort of tree and a bit of greenery under that hole would also make the cave more interesting color wise.
Better results and lots of time saved that is usually wasted in PS cleaning up AO/Normal map/Cavity.
If you want to gain time, you can try to use less softwares :
-you can try to use some retopo tools directly in maya (like Nex or Diamant) instead of topogun. Make a decimation and use it a low-poly for the retopo.
-You can also make you cavity map from your normal map direclty in xnormal.
Hey, so I keep seeing cavity maps being brought up on peoples workflow. So what exactly does it do? And when you generate edge/highlights. Is that just rim lights?
Hey, so I keep seeing cavity maps being brought up on peoples workflow. So what exactly does it do? And when you generate edge/highlights. Is that just rim lights?
It's just to emphasize edges and stuff.. Or well, any use you can find for it, it's good for.. Nothing that's "needed".
If you want to gain time, you can try to use less softwares :
-you can try to use some retopo tools directly in maya (like Nex or Diamant) instead of topogun. Make a decimation and use it a low-poly for the retopo.
-You can also make you cavity map from your normal map direclty in xnormal.
Nice work aniway !
In xnormal does it bake a cavity map or does it generate one from the normal map like crazy bump?
That's depend on how you setup the cavity map setting generator. I think honestly that you need to generate a base cavity map and then correct some levels/details inside photoshop.
Quick comparison for a rendered cavity map (raytraced) from Xnormal and a generated one from Crazybump.
Xnormal Raytraced cavity map :
The output texture is best used as a "multiply" layer in photoshop on top of your color map.
You can get very sharp cavity map with around 512 rays in your rendering options with supersampling x2 or x4. While you can get good results there are still problems when it comes to render time/quality settings. Depending on the resolution you are rendering at (lets say 2048x2048 ) a cavity map can take up to an hour of render time or more if you have missed rays due to the topology of your cage (can add an extra 1/3 of render time), they usually appear as black spots on your texture map.
A cavity map from Xnormal (2048x2048, 256 rays, AA x2)
On the other hand, crazybump can generate a pseudo diffuse texture from a normal map when you load a normal map in crazybump.
That diffuse texture is very similar to the sketch matcap you'll find in Zbrush for example.
It is best used as an overlay layer on top of your color map in PS. (Because the gray brightness value is at 128 )
The diffuse texture generated from your normal map contains cavity and edge information which really helps for texturing your assets.
AO + normals + crazybump pass = 75% of texturing done.
Crazybump diffuse output (Normal map sharpness bumped to "99", highlights slider value in diffuse tab bumped to "10".
You can also get similar and sometimes better results by playing around in Crazybump's ambientocclusion tab (sharper texture output).
I personally think that using crazybump is the best way of doing it if you are an xnormal/crazybump user.
If you have an Nvidia graphics card (cuda enabled), you can render your Normals and AO in a matter of minutes if not seconds at the highest quality possible. But Xnormal Optix renderer (cuda/GPU renderer) doesn't support cavity map rendering. The only work around for you would be crazybump to speed up your process if you have to meet a deadline etc...
But again, if you are planning to use your GPU to render your texture maps, you'll have to keep an eye on the polycount of your highpoly mesh since it is loaded into the memory of your graphics card.
- You will need lots of Vram (gpu ram) : over 1gb of vram is good for meshes up to 3.5 million polygons. If your don't have enough video memory then you'll just have to stick with your cpu based renderer
(Tip : turn off secondary display, background wallpaper, areo theme etc... to free up some video memory).
Quick update regarding the project :
So I decided to take a break from modeling and start sculpting the cave in the sdk.
I used the voxels tools to make a cave which is seamlessly built into the terrain.
Here is an early wip shot. Lots of space to fill with some good stuff : (materials are mostly place holder atm)
To lit the cave I had to make use of fill lights and negative lights to simulate bouncing lights and penumbra. CE3's realtime global illumination solution doesn't work that great in large environments so I had to completely turn it off.
Holy Guacamole, very cool! Can we see the cave wall material? It looks great how it seems eroded away.
Thanks, its the same rock texture which I used on the cliffs
I wonder you you UV that cave? Box-thing trick, or is it unfolded like every other object with seams and shit?
I'm using a box mapping projection, Crytek seem to have a better setup for it since its based on the vertex shader (less projection artefacts) while UDK's is based on the pixel shader.
choco, you are a talented artist. Keep up the good work and please, please keep showing us. Learning a hell of a load.
Here's a question: that indoor cave area, how did you model it? Geometry looks too neat to be a sculpt and too uniform to be a retopo..
The cave was made with the SDK tools (realtime voxels) similar to when you are making a terrain in your level. Its not a model but an optimized tessellated voxel object .
How did you do the bricks? Did you have a rough base mesh like Just a cube itself and you bring it in zbrush and start adding details? Then retopo? Cause you got the cracks looking so good its deep inside
nice work, good use of voxel objects. It's the first time I see someone outside Crytek make a good use of it.
If you want better GI, you can still delve into the console, type GI to get a list of all GI commands and push back the GI max distance values. This will ask more power tho.
ParoXum : thanks for the tip, I'll check it out asap
How did you do the bricks? Did you have a rough base mesh like Just a cube itself and you bring it in zbrush and start adding details? Then retopo? Cause you got the cracks looking so good its deep inside
I built that pillar brick by brick, each and every brick was placed and merged into a single mesh in 3dcoat (voxel sculpting). Then I exported an HP and MP (medium poly) version. The HP version was used for extracting normals/AO and the MP version was used for making the LP model.
Currently testing out with different moods and time settings :
-added moving clouds with their respective shadows being cast onto the ground.
Hey Choco,
I appreciate very much your thread and it's very interesting that you share your researches.
About the texturing workflow : have you tried Ndo for cavity from normals? I think the result is similar to what you get with crazybump but it is a filter in photoshop so it's a little faster... (but you can't tweak as much as in crazybump)
And on another topic, I was wondering : why would you paint your skybox in mudbox? do you paint it on a sphere so you're sure the projection is working?
- I've implemented custom lighting model for meshes and terrain in order to get consistent shading when using static meshes on terrain : you can hardly make the difference between terrain and rock models.
- Added Rim lighting to meshes and terrain : this seems to add a lot to the scene and gives a good sense of volume.
- Used gradient map based post processing effect to get a filmic effect.
- Usage of 3d worldspace project textures on terrain (cliffs) to avoid texture stretching : this technique could be a good alternative for painting terrain textures procedurally (automatically blend snow/rock based on slop angles).
- Planning to test out height based blending for textures to get fine detailed blending between textures on terrain.
Some quick tests on a scene which was put together in 30min
2 tiled textures used on terrain (rock/grass) + 6 different rock models duplicated all over the terrain.
coots7 thanks for the links, it seems like my material is very similar to Ryan's.
c22dunbar : its the NormalfromHeightmap material function under "procedurals" you'll have to use a textureobject node to make it work.
I did some playing around and you can get a similar effect using the in-built functionality of Photoshop.
You get much closer by using Surface Blur. I have been trying to reproduce it for a while now, and while Surface Blur gets pretty damn close I just can't get the edges to pop like Choco did.
If possible, could you please explain exactly how you created that? I'm especially curious as to how you reached that level of density/geometry using their terrain and a voxel object. A step by step tutorial would mean I owe you TWO cookies.
Thanks Paroxum, I've gone through that doc already. I've also checked out the eat3d vid by Helder, as well as a few youtube videos. It might just be the camera distance in those screenshots, which is confusing me with the scale. As far as I know, it's not possible to increase the density of the terrain, so I thought choco might be doing something different, but again, it's probably just the screenshot.
Right now I'm just having a bit of trouble achieving a cool looking cave and avoiding the "blobbiness" that is so easy to run into, or a really blocky look.
I'm not sure but I think the cave in this picture is just monstruously big.
There's a way to increase the voxel density though IIRC, but it leads to sliptting the voxel objects in even smaller ones which tends to become a problem. Don't take my word for it tho since I don't really use voxels on a day to day basis and even less on public versions of the engine.
I'm not sure but I think the cave in this picture is just monstruously big.
There's a way to increase the voxel density though IIRC, but it leads to sliptting the voxel objects in even smaller ones which tends to become a problem. Don't take my word for it tho since I don't really use voxels on a day to day basis and even less on public versions of the engine.
If possible, could you please explain exactly how you created that? I'm especially curious as to how you reached that level of density/geometry using their terrain and a voxel object. A step by step tutorial would mean I owe you TWO cookies.
Looking great, can't wait to see more updates!
I used the "split voxel into 8 parts" feature to increase their density. You need to plan how your cave is going to be setup first before splitting them.
First you need to put all your voxel object together following the terrain bbox (terrain components) then select them and split them into 8 parts. Once that is done, all thats left is to copy terrain and start carving your cave.
The only problem I've run through so far is how the voxels occlude objects sometimes when your camera is too close to a cave wall, I haven't really looked for a solution yet since its not that of a problem.
You get much closer by using Surface Blur. I have been trying to reproduce it for a while now, and while Surface Blur gets pretty damn close I just can't get the edges to pop like Choco did.
Try using some sharpen filters to make to edges pop out a bit more
I'm using Kodak gem brush plugin in PS cs3. It uses a smart noise reduction algorithm which keeps certain details following a threshold.
Another way of achieving it is by using Adobe Lightroom 3.4 which has advanced noise reduction tools.
Hey Choco,
I appreciate very much your thread and it's very interesting that you share your researches.
About the texturing workflow : have you tried Ndo for cavity from normals? I think the result is similar to what you get with crazybump but it is a filter in photoshop so it's a little faster... (but you can't tweak as much as in crazybump)
And on another topic, I was wondering : why would you paint your skybox in mudbox? do you paint it on a sphere so you're sure the projection is working?
Thanks a lot for sharing!
Using mudbox for painting your skybox texture is probably the fastest way in my opinion. You get direct feedback and lots of control over your texture while painting on an inside out sphere. I'm planning to make a video demonstration to illustrate the technique and possibilities of using mudbox as a general texturing tool.
It reminds me of the default Windows XP wallpaper, Bliss - in a good way
Nice touch with the clouds.
Quick question, and a basic one, how do you unwrap your sky-dome UVs?
Thanks, if you are planning to paint your skydome in mudbox, just make a dense sphere (over 50k ploys) and use the default UVs that come with it.
You'll end up with a 2:1 texture (4096x2048 for example) which can be cropped to 4096x1024 if you want to use it as a dome instead of a spherical sky.
I opened up a portfolio website on carbonemade.com (http://abdaouiamir.carbonmade.com/about), its still empty at the moment since I don't really have any (finished )work worth showing other the this environment which I did 2 years ago when I was working with an indie team.
The video was rendered in realtime on my personal computer.
I was responsible for putting together the level in about 24 hours straight of work in order to meet the deadline. It was hard to accomplish especially with an engine that was still in its alpha version but it was a good learning experience.
I have also have been doing a bit of drawing for my project. I think that any environemental artist needs to illustrate the world he's building through some concept arts to grasp the direction he's going for.
I know that as a 3d artist you don't really need to know how to draw concept art but It could be a good add to your skills especially when you want to illustrate an idea or a mood when working within a team.
Blocking out some stuff (1 hour of work) in PaintToolSai. Very early wip.
And these are some old attemps which I never finished.
I always find hand-drawn digital art fascinating.
Your most recent piece seems to be a completely different style to the previous two - a conscious decision? Or just personal development?
I always find hand-drawn digital art fascinating.
Your most recent piece seems to be a completely different style to the previous two - a conscious decision? Or just personal development?
Both pieces are two completely different settings, the most recent one is to set the architecture that I might be going for
I've been working on a workflow for making vegetation lately which uses mudbox's ScreenGrab feature and its postprocessing effects to render out multiple passes of the same mesh
I first modelled some high poly grass blades in Maya then I exported them to mudbox where I can easily manipulate high poly objects and arrange them together.
After putting together the grass blades, all I had to do left was take a few screenshots from any angle at 4 times the resolution with different filters on.
The opacity is automatically taken when rendering the screenshot.
The reason why I used x4 the screen resolution was to later on downsize the image and end up with anti-aliasing.
This method seems to be extremely fast and a good alternative to ray-traced rendering.
You get direct feedback of what your texture is going to look like and lots of control.
Color Only (unlit)
Specularity :
Realtime Ambient occlusion :
Normal map :
Different lighting and material settings can give you completely different results in just a few clicks :
I did some in engine tests for the grass to see how it looks (first attempt)
There is some slight blurring due to the grass swaying with the wind in the in-engine screenshots.
the grass texture :
Now that the workflow is setup, I'm confident about modeling complex vegetation.
I'm also testing the possibility of reusing the highpoly vegetation model for making tilable textures.
I can make stenciles and brushes with top-down Screengrabs and then paint on a plane to make my own custom textures with their respective normal maps.
Quick test of a custom brush :
It could be a promising technique with a large brush/stencil library and different types of vegetation/variations.
Replies
Just out of interest, what parts are custom and what parts are CryEngine place-holders?
I'm guessing that the rocks and materials are custom, but the fog effects and clouds are CE3 stock.
As for dear esther, I never though about it but I've checked it out and must say that I'm amazed with the art work, its some great reference material, thanks for the heads up !
Thanks, in those last screenshots, they sky box and particle effects are place holders (CE3 stock) I already started replacing those by my own custom made ones.
@Helba : thanks I appreciate it
Small Update :
- Painted a new skybox texture : took me a while to figure out how to convert a longitudinal/latitudinal skydome texture to a vertical cross (cubemap) seamlessly. I wont even mention the headaches setting it up to work with crytek's proprietary cubemap setup.
Painted in mudbox :
Preview in engine :
- Added thunder bolts and in game sounds as place holders, making my own particle effects shouldn't be a problem but I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to make my own sound fx for this.
- Added sand material (painted in mudbox): I might remake this one since I'm not too fond of it
preview :
Map overview of what is planned :
Castle reference : (from Sammy)
I'm still sculpting the modular parts for the castle/ruins and making vegetation.
I did some vegetation implementation tests for foliage and it worked like a charm right from the first try, workflow is already setup, all thats left is content creation.
Regarding the cave :
I'm thinking about making some sort of underground ruined city, the lighting will be provided by a hole in the ceiling to let some sun light come through. Maybe some sort of tree and a bit of greenery under that hole would also make the cave more interesting color wise.
- Added Crazybump pass : generate edge highlight/cavity from normal map
- Added Topgun step : Build low poly mesh from scratch and avoid using decimation tools.
- Added cage optimization for flawless bakes.
- Removed : Cavity map baking (minus 20min of bake time )
- Removed : Edge-highlight map baking : (minus 15min of bake time)
Better results and lots of time saved that is usually wasted in PS cleaning up AO/Normal map/Cavity.
Maya : Normals, AO, Cavity, Edgehighlight maps. Color map will be made once the whole set is done.
If you want to gain time, you can try to use less softwares :
-you can try to use some retopo tools directly in maya (like Nex or Diamant) instead of topogun. Make a decimation and use it a low-poly for the retopo.
-You can also make you cavity map from your normal map direclty in xnormal.
Nice work aniway !
It's just to emphasize edges and stuff.. Or well, any use you can find for it, it's good for.. Nothing that's "needed".
Here is how i used it a while back..
In xnormal does it bake a cavity map or does it generate one from the normal map like crazy bump?
Example 1 - Example 2
edit: mm choco you use cavity map for edge highlight map o other way?
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=52183
hmm very tempting...
Totally badass stuff by the way!
I also love to hear about how you refine your workflow, as it's very helpful!
Quick comparison for a rendered cavity map (raytraced) from Xnormal and a generated one from Crazybump.
Xnormal Raytraced cavity map :
The output texture is best used as a "multiply" layer in photoshop on top of your color map.
You can get very sharp cavity map with around 512 rays in your rendering options with supersampling x2 or x4. While you can get good results there are still problems when it comes to render time/quality settings. Depending on the resolution you are rendering at (lets say 2048x2048 ) a cavity map can take up to an hour of render time or more if you have missed rays due to the topology of your cage (can add an extra 1/3 of render time), they usually appear as black spots on your texture map.
A cavity map from Xnormal (2048x2048, 256 rays, AA x2)
On the other hand, crazybump can generate a pseudo diffuse texture from a normal map when you load a normal map in crazybump.
That diffuse texture is very similar to the sketch matcap you'll find in Zbrush for example.
It is best used as an overlay layer on top of your color map in PS. (Because the gray brightness value is at 128 )
The diffuse texture generated from your normal map contains cavity and edge information which really helps for texturing your assets.
AO + normals + crazybump pass = 75% of texturing done.
Crazybump diffuse output (Normal map sharpness bumped to "99", highlights slider value in diffuse tab bumped to "10".
You can also get similar and sometimes better results by playing around in Crazybump's ambientocclusion tab (sharper texture output).
I personally think that using crazybump is the best way of doing it if you are an xnormal/crazybump user.
If you have an Nvidia graphics card (cuda enabled), you can render your Normals and AO in a matter of minutes if not seconds at the highest quality possible. But Xnormal Optix renderer (cuda/GPU renderer) doesn't support cavity map rendering. The only work around for you would be crazybump to speed up your process if you have to meet a deadline etc...
But again, if you are planning to use your GPU to render your texture maps, you'll have to keep an eye on the polycount of your highpoly mesh since it is loaded into the memory of your graphics card.
- You will need lots of Vram (gpu ram) : over 1gb of vram is good for meshes up to 3.5 million polygons. If your don't have enough video memory then you'll just have to stick with your cpu based renderer
(Tip : turn off secondary display, background wallpaper, areo theme etc... to free up some video memory).
Quick update regarding the project :
So I decided to take a break from modeling and start sculpting the cave in the sdk.
I used the voxels tools to make a cave which is seamlessly built into the terrain.
Here is an early wip shot. Lots of space to fill with some good stuff : (materials are mostly place holder atm)
To lit the cave I had to make use of fill lights and negative lights to simulate bouncing lights and penumbra. CE3's realtime global illumination solution doesn't work that great in large environments so I had to completely turn it off.
Wires view :
Here's a question: that indoor cave area, how did you model it? Geometry looks too neat to be a sculpt and too uniform to be a retopo..
I'm using a box mapping projection, Crytek seem to have a better setup for it since its based on the vertex shader (less projection artefacts) while UDK's is based on the pixel shader.
The cave was made with the SDK tools (realtime voxels) similar to when you are making a terrain in your level. Its not a model but an optimized tessellated voxel object .
Combination test :
If you want better GI, you can still delve into the console, type GI to get a list of all GI commands and push back the GI max distance values. This will ask more power tho.
I built that pillar brick by brick, each and every brick was placed and merged into a single mesh in 3dcoat (voxel sculpting). Then I exported an HP and MP (medium poly) version. The HP version was used for extracting normals/AO and the MP version was used for making the LP model.
Currently testing out with different moods and time settings :
-added moving clouds with their respective shadows being cast onto the ground.
Nice touch with the clouds.
Quick question, and a basic one, how do you unwrap your sky-dome UVs?
I appreciate very much your thread and it's very interesting that you share your researches.
About the texturing workflow : have you tried Ndo for cavity from normals? I think the result is similar to what you get with crazybump but it is a filter in photoshop so it's a little faster... (but you can't tweak as much as in crazybump)
And on another topic, I was wondering : why would you paint your skybox in mudbox? do you paint it on a sphere so you're sure the projection is working?
Thanks a lot for sharing!
Can you maybe share those scripts?
or descirbe what each does in photoshop
a vid might help
Man you make it look so easy! This summer I'll be building a portfolio, I'll likely be coming to you for advice often. Hope you don't mind!
Hit Ctrl+F a couple more times to accentuate the effect and possibly add an Unsharp Mask too.
I hope that helps
Edit: You can also make the edges sharper with a DryBrush filter set to Brush Size 10, Brush Detail 10, and Texture 1.
I'm recuiting a team for a project using CE3 SDK, r u interested?
I'll send u a PM for more info.
Uriccardo
You get much closer by using Surface Blur. I have been trying to reproduce it for a while now, and while Surface Blur gets pretty damn close I just can't get the edges to pop like Choco did.
Mother of god.
That's CryEngine 3, right?
If possible, could you please explain exactly how you created that? I'm especially curious as to how you reached that level of density/geometry using their terrain and a voxel object. A step by step tutorial would mean I owe you TWO cookies.
Looking great, can't wait to see more updates!
Right now I'm just having a bit of trouble achieving a cool looking cave and avoiding the "blobbiness" that is so easy to run into, or a really blocky look.
There's a way to increase the voxel density though IIRC, but it leads to sliptting the voxel objects in even smaller ones which tends to become a problem. Don't take my word for it tho since I don't really use voxels on a day to day basis and even less on public versions of the engine.
I used the "split voxel into 8 parts" feature to increase their density. You need to plan how your cave is going to be setup first before splitting them.
First you need to put all your voxel object together following the terrain bbox (terrain components) then select them and split them into 8 parts. Once that is done, all thats left is to copy terrain and start carving your cave.
The only problem I've run through so far is how the voxels occlude objects sometimes when your camera is too close to a cave wall, I haven't really looked for a solution yet since its not that of a problem.
Try using some sharpen filters to make to edges pop out a bit more
I'm using Kodak gem brush plugin in PS cs3. It uses a smart noise reduction algorithm which keeps certain details following a threshold.
Another way of achieving it is by using Adobe Lightroom 3.4 which has advanced noise reduction tools.
Using mudbox for painting your skybox texture is probably the fastest way in my opinion. You get direct feedback and lots of control over your texture while painting on an inside out sphere. I'm planning to make a video demonstration to illustrate the technique and possibilities of using mudbox as a general texturing tool.
Thanks, if you are planning to paint your skydome in mudbox, just make a dense sphere (over 50k ploys) and use the default UVs that come with it.
You'll end up with a 2:1 texture (4096x2048 for example) which can be cropped to 4096x1024 if you want to use it as a dome instead of a spherical sky.
I opened up a portfolio website on carbonemade.com (http://abdaouiamir.carbonmade.com/about), its still empty at the moment since I don't really have any (finished )work worth showing other the this environment which I did 2 years ago when I was working with an indie team.
The video was rendered in realtime on my personal computer.
[ame="
I was responsible for putting together the level in about 24 hours straight of work in order to meet the deadline. It was hard to accomplish especially with an engine that was still in its alpha version but it was a good learning experience.
I have also have been doing a bit of drawing for my project. I think that any environemental artist needs to illustrate the world he's building through some concept arts to grasp the direction he's going for.
I know that as a 3d artist you don't really need to know how to draw concept art but It could be a good add to your skills especially when you want to illustrate an idea or a mood when working within a team.
Blocking out some stuff (1 hour of work) in PaintToolSai. Very early wip.
And these are some old attemps which I never finished.
Your most recent piece seems to be a completely different style to the previous two - a conscious decision? Or just personal development?
I think I desaturated the shadows a bit too much...
And a simple how-to: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/448525/keep/minitutorials/PainterlyTextures.jpg
Both pieces are two completely different settings, the most recent one is to set the architecture that I might be going for
I've been working on a workflow for making vegetation lately which uses mudbox's ScreenGrab feature and its postprocessing effects to render out multiple passes of the same mesh
I first modelled some high poly grass blades in Maya then I exported them to mudbox where I can easily manipulate high poly objects and arrange them together.
After putting together the grass blades, all I had to do left was take a few screenshots from any angle at 4 times the resolution with different filters on.
The opacity is automatically taken when rendering the screenshot.
The reason why I used x4 the screen resolution was to later on downsize the image and end up with anti-aliasing.
This method seems to be extremely fast and a good alternative to ray-traced rendering.
You get direct feedback of what your texture is going to look like and lots of control.
Color Only (unlit)
Specularity :
Realtime Ambient occlusion :
Normal map :
Different lighting and material settings can give you completely different results in just a few clicks :
Kinda mindblown over how easy it was to get great looking clouds with just alot of filters and adjustments.
and choco, love your environments dude!
I did some in engine tests for the grass to see how it looks (first attempt)
There is some slight blurring due to the grass swaying with the wind in the in-engine screenshots.
the grass texture :
Now that the workflow is setup, I'm confident about modeling complex vegetation.
I'm also testing the possibility of reusing the highpoly vegetation model for making tilable textures.
I can make stenciles and brushes with top-down Screengrabs and then paint on a plane to make my own custom textures with their respective normal maps.
Quick test of a custom brush :
It could be a promising technique with a large brush/stencil library and different types of vegetation/variations.
:poly136:
Can't be unseen.
Nice grass anyway !