AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH These are great! That process of painting the diffuse in mudbox utterly blew my mind -like I had to clean grey matter off my screen.
I'm excited to see the UDK portion. I'd love to see how you set up those assets.
I honestly can't thank you enough. It takes away the overwhelming complexity of environment art and simplifies tremendously.
I'm from SinisterRainbow Studios (http://www.sinisterrainbow.com) - looking for more talented people like yourself. I joined here just to contact you, but doesn't seem like I can do so directly, so excuse the post. I'd like to give you a portion of the game's profits for use of some of your work. You can still use your designs for your portfolio, an can even use them commercially again a year after the game's release. Let me know if you're interested. Thanks.
Awesome awesome awwwesome work,.... liked every bit of it... and thanks for the tuts.. Have downloaded the video and waiting to reach home to learn them... thanks alot for sharing...
Thanks for all these tutorials, Man. Seriously, they're wonderful, and I'm learning loads.
And just for future reference, you can properly display those normals in Maya by changing from "Right Handed" tangent space to "Left handed, in the Attribute editor:
Thanks for the tip, this will definatly help when previewing normals with -Y channel
Here is a quick demonstration of a technique that I'm trying out for making tiled sculpting. Its based on voxel and uses tiled instanced voxels to preview the changes I do on the original mesh.
This could be a good alternative to the traditional methods (zbrush 2.5d canvas) for making tilable textures or tilable meshes.
The technique is still in its early stages, in a sens where I still need to figure out how to get a proper render target to render out the tilable texture.
I'll propose to the 3dcoat devs to add this feature by default and automate the tiling process with a render target for baking out the texture maps.
Edit : OK, I just figured out how to get a proper render target and make tilable a texture with this method. The technique is finalized I guess since now I can get all the texture maps needed (normals, AO etc...) for creating our final texture. The textures extracted from the highpoly are seamless which is just what we need.
This is probably the most appealing way of creating next-gen textures since we are working in 3d space instead of being limited to a plane (mudbox) or a canvas (zbrush 2.5d) where we only have a top-down view of the texture.
I'll make a full video walk-through on how you can use this texturing alternative once I get a better mic.
Choco, my man, I'd totally write a song for your demo reel. I subscribed to your youtube channel and flip every time I see an update.
Of the many people shooting to make it big in the industry, you are going to be well-off, and I'll tell you why: you are a problem solver. Your solutions are intuitive and accessible; I get excited looking over your workflow and I get a mad itch to get home and try it out myself every day.
Sorry for being effusive, but that's just how I feel. Thanks again!
Choco, my man, I'd totally write a song for your demo reel. I subscribed to your youtube channel and flip every time I see an update.
Of the many people shooting to make it big in the industry, you are going to be well-off, and I'll tell you why: you are a problem solver. Your solutions are intuitive and accessible; I get excited looking over your workflow and I get a mad itch to get home and try it out myself every day.
Sorry for being effusive, but that's just how I feel. Thanks again!
Thanks! I really appreciate the support, its very motivating to read your words. I'll let you know when I get something close to being done then we can work together on the music track. I was planning on composing my own track, your help will definitely be welcome
@Martikrol : yea I'm planning to buy one of those again. Thats what I actually have been using for the last 3 years. The quality of the sound has been degraded because of the oldness of my headset. But platronics really do some high quality headsets at an affordable price. I'll also check out the blue yeti you mentioned aswell.
I agree, your a problem solver. In the industry, people love it when you can solve problems. Both technical and creative. You better be hired soon...can't wait for your reel.
Thanks again for all your tutorials. I'm learning so many new workflows.
Thanks for it. I was really curious how you texture, not that much about sculpting it self (because I saw many, well 98% of them, Crytek stones use two tileable textures, and been curious if you have gone the same approach).
I've been experimenting a bit with the mesh decal technique in cryengine.
I have to say that cryengine was built to make use of premodeled decals. It handles transparency really well and there isn't a single sign of Z fighting when overlapping two polygons together.
Since we don't have access to an advanced material/shader editor in cryengine for making use of custom vertex blending or a secondary UV channel to remove seams. I guess that the only way to hide seams while adding unique detail to a modular mesh would be the usage of modeled decals.
I did a test on a simple archway to see how it would look.
1024x1024 brick wall
1024x128 corner decal.
I'm happy with the results so far since it also allows me to add some definition to 90° wall corners which usually look terrible and old-school.
As for making the castel, I'm not sure if I should put it all together in maya then export it as a single node or export the modular parts and build it in the cryengine.
I heard that the cryexport plugin automatically detects if a mesh is an instance or not within the node for 3dsmax, I don't know about maya yet.
Building the castle in maya would allow me to bake AO into the vertex colors or paint down adapted vertex colors for masking out the Moss/brickwall for example (I wish we could paint vertex colors in the CE3 editor sigh...).
Now that's cool. Low on the polycount, and hides corners seamlessly. It might be cool with some parallax mapping or tessellation to make it stick out a bit from the wall.
Good to know, I'm thinking a workflow using 3DSMax's Object Paint tool to place decal squares on a mesh and then exporting them would work pretty well. Does Object Paint create instances? Because that would be extremely powerful if cryexport for Max really does detect instances.
I heard that the cryexport plugin automatically detects if a mesh is an instance or not within the node for 3dsmax, I don't know about maya yet.
It does. Bear in mind there is finite amount of instances you can export withing single file. Anything above that limit, will result in messed up mesh. I don't remember the limit though (;.
Also each instance in single file add to draw call count It's not much, but it will stack the more instances you have.
Generally you should avoid having separate meshes in single file or instances. Merge everything.
This may not apply to vegetation.
To answer your question, go with modules you can assemly withing editor. Just remember these should be pretty big chunks, self conaitning that make sense.
And to answer yet un asked question. Amount of submaterial is not that important in CE3. Yes. Keep them low. But for more unique object (castle in you example), go crazy and add them as you need.
For objects that will be havely instances over level, you should keep them to one or two.
I've been working on a new texturing workflow lately to speed up the texturing process.
Its based on texture map re-projection. It consists of reusing textured low poly models to make tilable textures in maya or add detail to bigger meshes.
The good thing about this technique is that you get to use your 3d package without having slow-downs when working with highpoly meshes and a simple render-to-texture gives you all the render passes organized in layers (example at the bottom : soil, stones, grass) which can be reorganized in photoshop with their respective masks in a none destructive way.
Quick example made in a matter of minutes in maya.
As to the castle I think it so depends on the design, but note that
you'd have to have unique geometry and the vertices to paint to if you're to use the
blend shader .
I have a little dilemma with it myself, on the other hand you could go
with highly modular geometry and use decals to hide the seams(or tiling rather), which I think will prove more flexible.
Also with corner decals such as those you have there, you can make a very good
use of POM for the bricks.
Cool stuff Choco, I used pretty much the same technique when I did an tileble pebble texture some year ago. The purpose was to be able to use dynamics without it taking forever. Something that i think you can use to, to get some smaller stones in there as well..
Model some pebbles, lowpoly/UV/bake, drop some of them in maya and bake.
Hey, Choco I Love you work It is an amazing source of inspiration. I have benefitted greatly from your tutorials on youtube.
THANK YOU SO MUCH!!
Do you have any plans to make a tutorial on how you go about making your textures?
As to the castle I think it so depends on the design, but note that
you'd have to have unique geometry and the vertices to paint to if you're to use the
blend shader .
I have a little dilemma with it myself, on the other hand you could go
with highly modular geometry and use decals to hide the seams(or tiling rather), which I think will prove more flexible.
Also with corner decals such as those you have there, you can make a very good
use of POM for the bricks.
Good luck, love your work!
There is no lightmapping in CE3. Soz. There is no seams.
Thus repetition still can be problem.
I would opt for making bigger chunks (right corner with wall, left corner with wall), or even entire exterior and seprate interior. Just to make use of blend shader.
In any case, CE3 is well suited for use big chunks with many submaterials. And this ability should be exploited to maximum (IMO).
Anyway. Nice texture choco. I assume you just baked high poly stones and grass, to low poly and assembled texture from low poly chunks ? Intresting. Most intresting is the fact that it doesn't look like made from low poly.
Anyway. Most seams with modular assets are present because of lightmapping (and bad uv unwrap). Where one module have bit diffrent lighting than other. Check this in CE3.
Make some modular textures with normal mapping, tesselation, specular, PoM and I assure you, you won't see any seams where modules stick.
Cool stuff Choco, I used pretty much the same technique when I did an tileble pebble texture some year ago. The purpose was to be able to use dynamics without it taking forever. Something that i think you can use to, to get some smaller stones in there as well..
Model some pebbles, lowpoly/UV/bake, drop some of them in maya and bake.
Thanks man, I didn't know that you made a tutorial regarding that technique, I wish I saw it earlier ! that would've saved me hours and hours of time.
I even went through the process of creating a lighting setup in maya to simulate the normal mapping but had trouble render normal maps for whole objects in 3d space. Until I saw that xnormal had the bake texture feature which is really handy.
The texture maps I got with this technique so far a high quality stuff. I'm really happy with the results and the speed at which you can create content with it.
Tilable textures can be made through geometry instancing in maya.
This will really speed up the process of building the level in maya in a none destructive way.
I'm also considering using the "Turtle" bake engine for games which comes with maya 2013. It allows you to bake GI and IBL on lightmaps or vertex colors.
This could help get some extra definition combined with realtime lighting.
I'm planning to make a texturing tutorial, the process is very simple and easy to use.
I'm also considering using the "Turtle" bake engine for games which comes with maya 2013. It allows you to bake GI and IBL on lightmaps or vertex colors.
Woah, woah. It comes with Maya 2013? Where? I can't find mention of it anywhere. If this is true, I'm super stoked. Turtle was even awesome 4 or 5 years ago. I'd love to see it now.
Hhehe, I'm sorry should have told you You can render normals in maya. You need to put an empty bump mapping node in the shader. It's dependent on the world normals, so you need you render from the right angle. Never really got it to work, tried to render out alpha planes with a grass texture on it. Never got it to render AO in MR neither, so it's kinda pointless.
When I'm finished with my current project I'll reboot an old UDK scene and put it in CE3. I'll definitely use your texturing techniques for the grass there..
That new Seith plugin seems cool, I can imagine it being awesome not needing to go back and forth all the time.
What is Turtle ? I never heard of it. Is it something used to bake textures like scanline in 3ds max ?
You can bake shitloads of cool things. It's made so that it's easy to integrate in your pipeline and I think you can bake synced normal maps with it, if you code it that is. I know that DICE used it for mirrors edge in UDK for example. It's a little company in Gothenburg, Sweden that got bought up by Autodesk some years ago.
Like strolsson said, its a plugin which can easily be implemented in a game production pipline.
Its actually being used a lot in the industry. Very easy to setup.
Here is a good overview of how you can use the soft :
Very nice- how are you creating the vector displacement maps? Is it the same process as creating standard displacement maps as in your earlier tutorial- but only with vector displacement instead?
Thanks, and yea its exactly the same process, just render out a VDM in mudbox instead of a displacement map then use it a stamp.
Just a small update :
- reworked the background : fully 3d (modeled mountains and volumetric clouds)
- Currently in the process of cleaning up the whole thing and optimizing before I start placing the finished assets.
The landscape work took way more time then I expected because of the size of the whole thing.
The bloom is too strong, I will tune it down a bit in the next update.
Man yet another great update. I love how the background is all 3d now, but I cant help but feel that the mountains needs some tweaking. For me if feels like the mountains dont blend as well into the environment as they could. Still looking great though cant wait to see more.:)
Thanks and yea I'd say that the completion of the level is at 30% at the moment. The amount of work needed to be done is huge, its pretty much just landscape work at the moment but there will be a few focus areas that should make things more interesting.
In the end the scale of the level turns this project into a challenge more then just a showcase of my skills (portfolio), since I'm also planning to release a playable version to public once its done.
Its a good learning experience since I'm also trying to learn every aspect of environment design and level design while having to deal with technical limitations and optimization.
Hopefully at the end of this project I'll be able to show something to a recruiter in order to land a job somewhere.
Anyways, I just realized that I've been working all this time on cryengine without having geometry instancing on.
Turning on the option allowed me to save 800 to 1000 draw-calls which is tremendous.
This allows me to push the level of detail even further while still having a large margin to meet the optimal draw-call requirement to make it work on a xbox360 or a ps3 for example.
On the other hand, texture requirements is another story since I heard that consoles don't support textures over 1024x1024 but its not that of a problem.
As for the mountains in the background, preator187, I agree that there is still space for some tweaking in order to make the whole thing abit more consistent. Thanks for the heads-up
Anyways, I just realized that I've been working all this time on cryengine without having geometry instancing on.
Turning on the option allowed me to save 800 to 1000 draw-calls which is tremendous.
Also bear in mind that in CE3.4 Geometry Instancing do not work with DX11. Another thing to keep in mind, is that Current-gen consoles do not support geometry instancing anyway.
Also turning geometry instancing off will reduce DrawCalls (at least in 3.4 version).
Another small thing. Merge objects into bigger chunks whatever you can. Modularity might be fancy and cool, but only for smaller levels. In bigger landscape like yours try to keep objects as big as possible and repeat as few as possible. Triangle and sub-material count is not much of an issue. (of course we are talking about CryEngine).
Also bear in mind that in CE3.4 Geometry Instancing do not work with DX11. Another thing to keep in mind, is that Current-gen consoles do not support geometry instancing anyway.
Also turning geometry instancing off will reduce DrawCalls (at least in 3.4 version).
Another small thing. Merge objects into bigger chunks whatever you can. Modularity might be fancy and cool, but only for smaller levels. In bigger landscape like yours try to keep objects as big as possible and repeat as few as possible. Triangle and sub-material count is not much of an issue. (of course we are talking about CryEngine).
QFT I was gonna post that info about geometry instancing but you did it before!
Great tutorials, im not through them all yet but im definitely enjoying them.
I have a little issue i hope you can help me with.
Before seeing this technique for creating terrains, i started a terrain for a small level in UDK for school using their terrain system(not landscape). Ive greyboxed all my rocks and items in using the general meshes in the content browser and got my scale looking good and i dont want to start the terrain all over again because i'll never get it exactly the same >_>
The terrain is a rocky desert, so it has hills/cliffs etc and i want to export this and take it to world machine to detail and get colour maps from, but i have no idea how to do this.
I exported both the height map from UDK and the terrain itself as an OBJ. Im not sure whether to import the obj into mudbox, and export a height map using a plane and continue from there, or somehow use the exported height map directly from UDk (its 128,128 ) Ive used HMSC to convert it to a TIFF 16 (129,129).
Im also not sure if the size of the current terrain matters when using the mudbox route or if i need to change everything.
Great tutorials, im not through them all yet but im definitely enjoying them.
I have a little issue i hope you can help me with.
Before seeing this technique for creating terrains, i started a terrain for a small level in UDK for school using their terrain system(not landscape). Ive greyboxed all my rocks and items in using the general meshes in the content browser and got my scale looking good and i dont want to start the terrain all over again because i'll never get it exactly the same >_>
The terrain is a rocky desert, so it has hills/cliffs etc and i want to export this and take it to world machine to detail and get colour maps from, but i have no idea how to do this.
I exported both the height map from UDK and the terrain itself as an OBJ. Im not sure whether to import the obj into mudbox, and export a height map using a plane and continue from there, or somehow use the exported height map directly from UDk (its 128,128 ) Ive used HMSC to convert it to a TIFF 16 (129,129).
Im also not sure if the size of the current terrain matters when using the mudbox route or if i need to change everything.
Ive had such an information overload in the last 2 days about all these different ways to do things and im not sure how to continue.
If you are going for gameplay area it's still better to start in game editor. Otherwise you quickly run into scale issues.
WM and Mudbox in that case is best used just for last step for adding details.
Or you can skip Mudbox entirely
If you are going for gameplay area it's still better to start in game editor. Otherwise you quickly run into scale issues.
WM and Mudbox in that case is best used just for last step for adding details.
Or you can skip Mudbox entirely
SO your saying its a good idea to do my base terrain in UDK then making an external one and bringing it in?
Im just not sure about how to take that terrain and put it in world machine. when i got the 128 x 128 height map i thought it might be to small to put on a landscape. I was expecting a map of like 1024 or 2048 but there is no way to export the terrain height map as that size. i can use HMSC to map it a bigger size but its quality is very bad.
I have a feeling all the different numberings on the landscape sizes and stuff in UD and world machine are confusing my thought process here. Id love to hear from choco to see if he can figure out how to do this cleanly starting from a terrain in UDK.
Hopefully at the end of this project I'll be able to show something to a recruiter in order to land a job somewhere.
You won't have to show it to a recruiter, just show it to the company directly Or find someone who works at the company you want to apply to and show it to them, there's plenty of people in the industry here and the quality of your work will almost certainly land you a job.
On the other hand, texture requirements is another story since I heard that consoles don't support textures over 1024x1024 but its not that of a problem.
Not true. Consoles can use and display 2k textures but they are used sparingly due to perfomance and memory costs
SO your saying its a good idea to do my base terrain in UDK then making an external one and bringing it in?
Im just not sure about how to take that terrain and put it in world machine. when i got the 128 x 128 height map i thought it might be to small to put on a landscape. I was expecting a map of like 1024 or 2048 but there is no way to export the terrain height map as that size. i can use HMSC to map it a bigger size but its quality is very bad.
I have a feeling all the different numberings on the landscape sizes and stuff in UD and world machine are confusing my thought process here. Id love to hear from choco to see if he can figure out how to do this cleanly starting from a terrain in UDK.
I'll keep cracking away at it till then
Yes. The troubles you have are exactly what I have pointed out. If you are going to sculpt in Mudbox/Zbrush or worse generate from scratch in WM, you will run into "this heightmap is to small!/To big". While in fact is not. Scale in game must be treated differently from scale for terrain visualization.
Sculpt in your editor (UDK), often jump to player and run for a while to check if your terrain make sense, and iterate. If you are happy with terrain you can start detailing in any external app.
Just export Landscape heightmap (regardless of it's size), I'm not sure but you can setup WM to accept non power of 2 sizes.
Ok so i got it into world machine last night by doing this
Export OBJ of terrain from UDK
Import into mudbox
Imported a plane of the same size into mudbox
Extracted the displacement onto the plane at 2048x2048
Imported that height map into WM.
Working well I haven't tried using the height map from UDK directly, i might try and see what it does
The only issue i encountered was that when exporting the OBJ, its triangulated. I put it in maya and tried to remove the triangulation but no commands would work. I would need to manually delete every triangle to quad the entire thing. The fact that it was triangulated made mudbox chug decently, and it was only 37,000ish when i can normally do millions of polys on there.
I also had an issue of when i was exporting the maps in 512x512 to see if they would come out right (i had to bump the distance up a decent amount) It would finish the export of the map, then crash mudbox. When i exported the 2048 version it did not crash. Kinda werid but i eventually got it into WM.
I am running into some issues with the layout generator when i try to make my Terrance node effect only certain parts of the terrain. Its appearing as a solid colour in the 2d top down view instead of showing me the terrain.
Replies
I'm excited to see the UDK portion. I'd love to see how you set up those assets.
I honestly can't thank you enough. It takes away the overwhelming complexity of environment art and simplifies tremendously.
-Bryan
Thanks for the tip, this will definatly help when previewing normals with -Y channel
@Makkon, cupsster, cmtanko, mats effect :
I'm glad you find the video useful thanks guys
Here is a quick demonstration of a technique that I'm trying out for making tiled sculpting. Its based on voxel and uses tiled instanced voxels to preview the changes I do on the original mesh.
This could be a good alternative to the traditional methods (zbrush 2.5d canvas) for making tilable textures or tilable meshes.
The technique is still in its early stages, in a sens where I still need to figure out how to get a proper render target to render out the tilable texture.
I'll propose to the 3dcoat devs to add this feature by default and automate the tiling process with a render target for baking out the texture maps.
Edit : OK, I just figured out how to get a proper render target and make tilable a texture with this method. The technique is finalized I guess since now I can get all the texture maps needed (normals, AO etc...) for creating our final texture. The textures extracted from the highpoly are seamless which is just what we need.
This is probably the most appealing way of creating next-gen textures since we are working in 3d space instead of being limited to a plane (mudbox) or a canvas (zbrush 2.5d) where we only have a top-down view of the texture.
I'll make a full video walk-through on how you can use this texturing alternative once I get a better mic.
[ame="
i sent u a Private Message the other day, i hope u can read it..
Have a nice day!
Of the many people shooting to make it big in the industry, you are going to be well-off, and I'll tell you why: you are a problem solver. Your solutions are intuitive and accessible; I get excited looking over your workflow and I get a mad itch to get home and try it out myself every day.
Sorry for being effusive, but that's just how I feel. Thanks again!
No truer words have ever been spoken.
try any of the plantronics microphones.
Use those, or the blue yeti.
The blue yeti has outstandingly clear quality. It's well built too.
@Martikrol : yea I'm planning to buy one of those again. Thats what I actually have been using for the last 3 years. The quality of the sound has been degraded because of the oldness of my headset. But platronics really do some high quality headsets at an affordable price. I'll also check out the blue yeti you mentioned aswell.
Thanks again for all your tutorials. I'm learning so many new workflows.
I have to say that cryengine was built to make use of premodeled decals. It handles transparency really well and there isn't a single sign of Z fighting when overlapping two polygons together.
Since we don't have access to an advanced material/shader editor in cryengine for making use of custom vertex blending or a secondary UV channel to remove seams. I guess that the only way to hide seams while adding unique detail to a modular mesh would be the usage of modeled decals.
I did a test on a simple archway to see how it would look.
1024x1024 brick wall
1024x128 corner decal.
I'm happy with the results so far since it also allows me to add some definition to 90° wall corners which usually look terrible and old-school.
As for making the castel, I'm not sure if I should put it all together in maya then export it as a single node or export the modular parts and build it in the cryengine.
I heard that the cryexport plugin automatically detects if a mesh is an instance or not within the node for 3dsmax, I don't know about maya yet.
Building the castle in maya would allow me to bake AO into the vertex colors or paint down adapted vertex colors for masking out the Moss/brickwall for example (I wish we could paint vertex colors in the CE3 editor sigh...).
http://freesdk.crydev.net/display/SDKDOC2/Blend+Layer
Maybe not most advanced thing in the world, but should be enough.
It does. Bear in mind there is finite amount of instances you can export withing single file. Anything above that limit, will result in messed up mesh. I don't remember the limit though (;.
Also each instance in single file add to draw call count It's not much, but it will stack the more instances you have.
Generally you should avoid having separate meshes in single file or instances. Merge everything.
This may not apply to vegetation.
To answer your question, go with modules you can assemly withing editor. Just remember these should be pretty big chunks, self conaitning that make sense.
And to answer yet un asked question. Amount of submaterial is not that important in CE3. Yes. Keep them low. But for more unique object (castle in you example), go crazy and add them as you need.
For objects that will be havely instances over level, you should keep them to one or two.
I've been working on a new texturing workflow lately to speed up the texturing process.
Its based on texture map re-projection. It consists of reusing textured low poly models to make tilable textures in maya or add detail to bigger meshes.
The good thing about this technique is that you get to use your 3d package without having slow-downs when working with highpoly meshes and a simple render-to-texture gives you all the render passes organized in layers (example at the bottom : soil, stones, grass) which can be reorganized in photoshop with their respective masks in a none destructive way.
Quick example made in a matter of minutes in maya.
I need to go through this whole thread again taking notes
I recommend also thinking about some kind of cave to connect some areas, good luck at work!
Great technique indeed.
As to the castle I think it so depends on the design, but note that
you'd have to have unique geometry and the vertices to paint to if you're to use the
blend shader .
I have a little dilemma with it myself, on the other hand you could go
with highly modular geometry and use decals to hide the seams(or tiling rather), which I think will prove more flexible.
Also with corner decals such as those you have there, you can make a very good
use of POM for the bricks.
Good luck, love your work!
Model some pebbles, lowpoly/UV/bake, drop some of them in maya and bake.
I even did a small tut on it
THANK YOU SO MUCH!!
Do you have any plans to make a tutorial on how you go about making your textures?
Thus repetition still can be problem.
I would opt for making bigger chunks (right corner with wall, left corner with wall), or even entire exterior and seprate interior. Just to make use of blend shader.
In any case, CE3 is well suited for use big chunks with many submaterials. And this ability should be exploited to maximum (IMO).
Anyway. Nice texture choco. I assume you just baked high poly stones and grass, to low poly and assembled texture from low poly chunks ? Intresting. Most intresting is the fact that it doesn't look like made from low poly.
What does texture tiling (or texture seams) have to do with lightmapping?
Don't want to be condescending, but check what "thus" means in the dictionary,
and answer yourself, if what you wrote makes sense.
Anyway. Most seams with modular assets are present because of lightmapping (and bad uv unwrap). Where one module have bit diffrent lighting than other. Check this in CE3.
Make some modular textures with normal mapping, tesselation, specular, PoM and I assure you, you won't see any seams where modules stick.
Thanks man, I didn't know that you made a tutorial regarding that technique, I wish I saw it earlier ! that would've saved me hours and hours of time.
I even went through the process of creating a lighting setup in maya to simulate the normal mapping but had trouble render normal maps for whole objects in 3d space. Until I saw that xnormal had the bake texture feature which is really handy.
The texture maps I got with this technique so far a high quality stuff. I'm really happy with the results and the speed at which you can create content with it.
Tilable textures can be made through geometry instancing in maya.
Seith is currently developing a plugin which allows you to export a whole level from Maya to CE3. I'm beta testing the plugin : http://www.crydev.net/newspage.php?news=91071
This will really speed up the process of building the level in maya in a none destructive way.
I'm also considering using the "Turtle" bake engine for games which comes with maya 2013. It allows you to bake GI and IBL on lightmaps or vertex colors.
This could help get some extra definition combined with realtime lighting.
I'm planning to make a texturing tutorial, the process is very simple and easy to use.
Woah, woah. It comes with Maya 2013? Where? I can't find mention of it anywhere. If this is true, I'm super stoked. Turtle was even awesome 4 or 5 years ago. I'd love to see it now.
When I'm finished with my current project I'll reboot an old UDK scene and put it in CE3. I'll definitely use your texturing techniques for the grass there..
That new Seith plugin seems cool, I can imagine it being awesome not needing to go back and forth all the time.
You can bake shitloads of cool things. It's made so that it's easy to integrate in your pipeline and I think you can bake synced normal maps with it, if you code it that is. I know that DICE used it for mirrors edge in UDK for example. It's a little company in Gothenburg, Sweden that got bought up by Autodesk some years ago.
Its actually being used a lot in the industry. Very easy to setup.
Here is a good overview of how you can use the soft :
part 1 :
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part 2 :
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Just a small update :
- reworked the background : fully 3d (modeled mountains and volumetric clouds)
- Currently in the process of cleaning up the whole thing and optimizing before I start placing the finished assets.
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The landscape work took way more time then I expected because of the size of the whole thing.
The bloom is too strong, I will tune it down a bit in the next update.
Looking forward to see more!
Good stuff!
In the end the scale of the level turns this project into a challenge more then just a showcase of my skills (portfolio), since I'm also planning to release a playable version to public once its done.
Its a good learning experience since I'm also trying to learn every aspect of environment design and level design while having to deal with technical limitations and optimization.
Hopefully at the end of this project I'll be able to show something to a recruiter in order to land a job somewhere.
Anyways, I just realized that I've been working all this time on cryengine without having geometry instancing on.
Turning on the option allowed me to save 800 to 1000 draw-calls which is tremendous.
This allows me to push the level of detail even further while still having a large margin to meet the optimal draw-call requirement to make it work on a xbox360 or a ps3 for example.
On the other hand, texture requirements is another story since I heard that consoles don't support textures over 1024x1024 but its not that of a problem.
As for the mountains in the background, preator187, I agree that there is still space for some tweaking in order to make the whole thing abit more consistent. Thanks for the heads-up
Also turning geometry instancing off will reduce DrawCalls (at least in 3.4 version).
Another small thing. Merge objects into bigger chunks whatever you can. Modularity might be fancy and cool, but only for smaller levels. In bigger landscape like yours try to keep objects as big as possible and repeat as few as possible. Triangle and sub-material count is not much of an issue. (of course we are talking about CryEngine).
I have a little issue i hope you can help me with.
Before seeing this technique for creating terrains, i started a terrain for a small level in UDK for school using their terrain system(not landscape). Ive greyboxed all my rocks and items in using the general meshes in the content browser and got my scale looking good and i dont want to start the terrain all over again because i'll never get it exactly the same >_>
The terrain is a rocky desert, so it has hills/cliffs etc and i want to export this and take it to world machine to detail and get colour maps from, but i have no idea how to do this.
I exported both the height map from UDK and the terrain itself as an OBJ. Im not sure whether to import the obj into mudbox, and export a height map using a plane and continue from there, or somehow use the exported height map directly from UDk (its 128,128 ) Ive used HMSC to convert it to a TIFF 16 (129,129).
Im also not sure if the size of the current terrain matters when using the mudbox route or if i need to change everything.
There is also a way to convert my terrain into a landscape in UDK but im not sure how to fix the errors (see bottom of this page http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/LandscapeCreating.html)
Ive had such an information overload in the last 2 days about all these different ways to do things and im not sure how to continue.
If you are going for gameplay area it's still better to start in game editor. Otherwise you quickly run into scale issues.
WM and Mudbox in that case is best used just for last step for adding details.
Or you can skip Mudbox entirely
SO your saying its a good idea to do my base terrain in UDK then making an external one and bringing it in?
Im just not sure about how to take that terrain and put it in world machine. when i got the 128 x 128 height map i thought it might be to small to put on a landscape. I was expecting a map of like 1024 or 2048 but there is no way to export the terrain height map as that size. i can use HMSC to map it a bigger size but its quality is very bad.
I have a feeling all the different numberings on the landscape sizes and stuff in UD and world machine are confusing my thought process here. Id love to hear from choco to see if he can figure out how to do this cleanly starting from a terrain in UDK.
I'll keep cracking away at it till then
You won't have to show it to a recruiter, just show it to the company directly
Not true. Consoles can use and display 2k textures but they are used sparingly due to perfomance and memory costs
Sculpt in your editor (UDK), often jump to player and run for a while to check if your terrain make sense, and iterate. If you are happy with terrain you can start detailing in any external app.
Just export Landscape heightmap (regardless of it's size), I'm not sure but you can setup WM to accept non power of 2 sizes.
Export OBJ of terrain from UDK
Import into mudbox
Imported a plane of the same size into mudbox
Extracted the displacement onto the plane at 2048x2048
Imported that height map into WM.
Working well
The only issue i encountered was that when exporting the OBJ, its triangulated. I put it in maya and tried to remove the triangulation but no commands would work. I would need to manually delete every triangle to quad the entire thing. The fact that it was triangulated made mudbox chug decently, and it was only 37,000ish when i can normally do millions of polys on there.
I also had an issue of when i was exporting the maps in 512x512 to see if they would come out right (i had to bump the distance up a decent amount) It would finish the export of the map, then crash mudbox. When i exported the 2048 version it did not crash. Kinda werid but i eventually got it into WM.
I am running into some issues with the layout generator when i try to make my Terrance node effect only certain parts of the terrain. Its appearing as a solid colour in the 2d top down view instead of showing me the terrain.