Hey Choco. thanks for such great tutorials. but i got a question about 3dcoat merging mesh. How do I control the amount of detail retained on the voxel mesh. Like how do I preserve the edge hardness of the original mesh. becuase by default Im losing a lot of the detail.
Choco I just wanted to stop by this glorious thread and say thanks for all of the tutorials and media you've shared with the polycount community. Your environment and terrain work is such a pleasure to look at and it's great hearing about your processes. There are definitely weaker areas of my latest environment piece that I could address with some of your methods, especially for terrain and background detail. Also, I really admire your bold use of colors and the moods you've conveyed through your art. Cheers man!
great work choco very inspiring, i learned a lot from your tutorials!
@onionhead: in the tool options press 'Auto scale', then all your detail should be there, but your estimated polycount will go up, so you should probably estimate between quality and voxel-/polycount. Hope that answers your question.
Sorry for the late reply onionhead, like priareos said, the size of your mesh reflects the amount of voxels. The bigger, the more detailed your model can be. Treat it as a real volumetric object . There is a resolution+ button at the bottom left of the menu bar.
Thanks Bee-Bee, your work is ace man, wish I could make vehicles like you someday.
Priareos, SimonT, thanks guys, very appreciated.
Its been a while since I've last updated this thread, so today I wanted to share with you guys this video showing the work in progress.
I had to remake a large portion of the level multiple times due to computer crashes getting the level files corrupted and unusable.
Luckily, I had some old backups saved on another HDD to start from.
I decided to go for a more serious/realistic mood then the all happy one from before.
Getting proper lighting done for an overcast scene was a bit challenging at start in order to have a consistently lit level from any position where the camera is (even in high altitudes).
Since rain scenes usually have very little direct lighting coming from the sun, I had to rely on lightprobs in order to achieve Image based lighting.
This really helped define the materials (reflectivity) and gives very natural lighting, which usually isn't the case when an object is inside the shadow frustum of another object.
I really like the terrain and the overall overcast feel to the scene! However the rain seems to lack a bit of volume, it's lacking the feel of "weight". Because the speed of your rain suggests quite a cloud burst. If that makes any sense at all! xD
Anyway I really like what you are doing so keep it up!
It looks like you have a overlay of rain on the camera and that their is no real rain in the level. No depth to it at all. Rain is also driven by the wind, so it has direction. Your seems to be going in one direction where ever the camera moves.
Also if you keep the rain you will need to add in heavier fog and water running down the rocks and small streams in the valleys, and down the dirt paths.
Also the waves will need to amped up as with the wind on the grass.
Hi choco, thanks for sharing ur landscape material. I noticed that you didn't
apply the colormap in you material.
I'm wondering when using a colormap if you need to use you're last detail material node and hook it back to your BlendOverlay Node. So in my case the detail Rock gets linked back to BlendOverlay.
I heard that all the textures overlay on top of each other.
Or do you need link all you're detail textures back to the BlendOverlay?
I've been doing some background work and blocking out the castle and village area while keeping everything modular.
I also figured out a very good alternative for making modular assets in 3dcoat.
The technique includes the usage of instanced voxels to tile a sculpt which can be used to preview any changes you do on the original sculpt.
Hi decorix,
The way you setup your material is all good, I noticed that your detail textures have some color information which might lead to undesired results when you overlay another color texture on top of them.
You might want to either highpass your detail textures or desaturate them.
Here is a video tutorial which I made a while ago that deals with the importing process to UDK :
Just my opinion but I think you're really hurting the presentation of your work with your intense camera vignetting. It's especially bad in your videos, practically at glaucoma levels.
Beautiful work though regardless and greatly appreciate all the time and effort you put into explaining your workflow.
This was in the polycount wiki. I've tried it and it works well. I think Mudbox 2013 is coming out with features that makes sculpting tiling meshes much easier.
Just my opinion but I think you're really hurting the presentation of your work with your intense camera vignetting. It's especially bad in your videos, practically at glaucoma levels.
Beautiful work though regardless and greatly appreciate all the time and effort you put into explaining your workflow.
Thanks for the feedback, you got a good point there, I usually forget to turn the hdr vignetting off. I think that the effect is overused indeed.
you mentioned in the above video you might do a mudbox tutorial for tiling textures. I would love to see that if you have the time!
There will be one whenever I get some time
I've been working on some tilable textures lately and mostly doing research on different approaches regarding the creation of such textures.
Every single part on these texture were handsculpted in mudbox then put together in maya.
Some early tests on some meshes I quickly put together in the sdk :
I still need to add a bit more of contrast and hue variation on these textures.
Also planning to make some decals to breakup the linearity of the tiles.
Thanks so much for pointing it out. I was setting up a standard Landscape material, but I didn't realize/forgot that I'm using Colormap and I needed to desaturate my detail textures. I totally fotgot that I needed to do that!!
Hi decorix,
The way you setup your material is all good, I noticed that your detail textures have some color information which might lead to undesired results when you overlay another color texture on top of them.
You might want to either highpass your detail textures or desaturate them.
Here is a video tutorial which I made a while ago that deals with the importing process to UDK :
Testing out some modular models at the moment.
I'll have to make some ivy models and some flower plants to add some contrast a bit later on.
I still have to model some different shapes (more curvy) to get some more interesting silhouettes.
Although I agree with @Joopson on some of the sharp edges. The base of the pillars in particular has a simple silhouette that betrays its low-poly construction.
Thanks for the crits, I'll work on that part for sure. Nothing final yet since I'm still trying to figure out which texturing style and workflow I'm going to use.
I'm experimenting with some semi-stylized texturing right now which is based on the PRTpn maps (similar to objectspace normal map).
After looking at a bunch of handpainted textures, the main characteristics that I noticed are the exaggerated shapes, color and mostly shading which is directly painted on to the color map.
The PRTp texture (extracted from xnormal) combined with a curvature map allows me to get some shading information that gives a paintry feel to the texture.
The base color map is just a concrete texture from cgtextures on which I applied a surface blur to remove the noise and high frequency detail.
After combining all these texture maps in Photoshop, I get this kind of result without a single brush stroke.
Sculpting some exaggerated cracks in the highpoly modeling process will help further stylizing the textures.
PRTp map : green channel is used as a top-down light source (also contains soft shadowing information).
Next thing I'm going to try is baking out a litsphere based texture and experiment with different blending modes.
The stairs look great, and the assets that have already been imported into the engine looks extremely well done. Im sucking up so much information from following this thread. how much farther do you think you have on this level? Great work as always Choco!
The stairs look great, and the assets that have already been imported into the engine looks extremely well done. Im sucking up so much information from following this thread. how much farther do you think you have on this level? Great work as always Choco!
Thanks , there is a lot of stuff to do regarding the level, I'm planning to build some sort of shrine kinda similar to the one you see in shadow of the colossus :
reference :
The structure is kinda really big and challenging tbh. I put a lot of work on paper for designing the modular parts and maximizing the re-usability of each model.
Almost done texturing the first section of the stairs :
Those steps are looking really nice. I'd be interested in how you approach your planning for modularity - on paper or otherwise.
thanks ! well I rely a lot on the grid and try to have my models fit in a bounding box which has power of two extents. (8,64,128,256,512 etc...or 384, 160 in some cases).
There is an interesting paper written by Kevin Johnstone which deals about how he approached the creation of modular models and environments in gears of wars or UT3 : http://www.kevinjohnstone.com/Help/Modular%20Environment%20Design.rar
What I do on paper, is mostly sketching out the models while keeping in mind how these models would link together, see if there is a way to make them usable in a different way etc...
Usually when I work on an environement based on a concept art reference (lets say a building for example) I would first decompose the building into multiple logical parts (pillars, windows, doors,walls, archs etc...)and see if there are any repeating patterns which can be used as modular models.
On the other hand, the placement of the pivot of your models is of extreme importance ! (without exaggerating )
Finished the stairs set, I reprojected all the texture maps for each model into a single texture map to avoid using a material for each model.
In the end all 3 models use the same material.
Time to move on to ground and model some adapted (curved) floor meshes.
these look really nice but why did you create separate textures for the curved pieces? couldn't you have used a larger straight texture and then warped it in the mesh? You could get a much higher resolution with the same texture size than you have achieved.
these look really nice but why did you create separate textures for the curved pieces? couldn't you have used a larger straight texture and then warped it in the mesh? You could get a much higher resolution with the same texture size than you have achieved.
Thanks man, and yea you got a point, I could've went ahead and relied on a tiled texture and then bend the steps but these have unique textures and shapes so I used a high-poly to low-poly approach to get some nice shapes and unique detail.
I opened up a blog where I'll be compiling all the stuff I made and explaining some processes I used.
I'm still writing down some posts the moment I'm typing this message so it will have much more content by the end of the day.
these look really nice but why did you create separate textures for the curved pieces? couldn't you have used a larger straight texture and then warped it in the mesh? You could get a much higher resolution with the same texture size than you have achieved.
I've reviewed my workflow and it seems like using the bend technique works well.
I was worried about the mesh displaying some shading errors due to general topology transformations but it doesn't seem like its the case.
Thanks for mentioning the trick
No problem dude glad I could help, this is all looking epic looking forward to seeing more. With the number of polys in your stuff you weren't going to have any problems with texture stretching =P
I've reviewed my workflow and it seems like using the bend technique works well.
I was worried about the mesh displaying some shading errors due to general topology transformations but it doesn't seem like its the case.
Thanks for mentioning the trick
What about the normal map? If you bend the model, shouldn't the normal map be messed up, at least in the heavily bent/rounded areas?
No problem dude glad I could help, this is all looking epic looking forward to seeing more. With the number of polys in your stuff you weren't going to have any problems with texture stretching =P
I would really like to know more about this technique, so would you mind explaining what the polycount/-density has to do with texture stretching here?
How quickly can you know out something like this?
Also, where is Greentooth? :P
Thanks ! Doing the highpoly sculpting plus the blocking-out process takes approx 3 to 4 hours.
Doing the low poly mesh and texturing it should take another 2 to 3 hours.
It really all depends on how dense and how big your highpoly mesh is.
As for the greentooth I got some plans for it for sure
Pillar looks badass though I think maybe you have too many different styles of engraving patterns going on.
You got a really good point there, I went ahead and reused the AO of one of my previously made textures and used it as a stencil for the sake of consistency.
Thanks for the heads-up
pRTp maps are as far as i understand proprietary maps used for computing ambient light for Wing Commander. They essentially store the XYZ directions as color information, sort of like world space normal maps. They're quite handy to use as base for diffuse maps.
Replies
@onionhead: in the tool options press 'Auto scale', then all your detail should be there, but your estimated polycount will go up, so you should probably estimate between quality and voxel-/polycount. Hope that answers your question.
Thanks Bee-Bee, your work is ace man, wish I could make vehicles like you someday.
Priareos, SimonT, thanks guys, very appreciated.
Its been a while since I've last updated this thread, so today I wanted to share with you guys this video showing the work in progress.
Luckily, I had some old backups saved on another HDD to start from.
I decided to go for a more serious/realistic mood then the all happy one from before.
Getting proper lighting done for an overcast scene was a bit challenging at start in order to have a consistently lit level from any position where the camera is (even in high altitudes).
Since rain scenes usually have very little direct lighting coming from the sun, I had to rely on lightprobs in order to achieve Image based lighting.
This really helped define the materials (reflectivity) and gives very natural lighting, which usually isn't the case when an object is inside the shadow frustum of another object.
Anyway I really like what you are doing so keep it up!
All good nonetheless.
Also if you keep the rain you will need to add in heavier fog and water running down the rocks and small streams in the valleys, and down the dirt paths.
Also the waves will need to amped up as with the wind on the grass.
apply the colormap in you material.
I'm wondering when using a colormap if you need to use you're last detail material node and hook it back to your BlendOverlay Node. So in my case the detail Rock gets linked back to BlendOverlay.
I heard that all the textures overlay on top of each other.
Or do you need link all you're detail textures back to the BlendOverlay?
Can you perhaps post example?
This is how I set it up.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ovzm3jtdfw9i05b/ScreenShot00002.jpg
Thanks, Or does someone else know this?
******************************************************************
The way you setup your material is all good, I noticed that your detail textures have some color information which might lead to undesired results when you overlay another color texture on top of them.
You might want to either highpass your detail textures or desaturate them.
Here is a video tutorial which I made a while ago that deals with the importing process to UDK :
[ame="
Beautiful work though regardless and greatly appreciate all the time and effort you put into explaining your workflow.
http://saschahenrichs.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/here-another-tutorial-concerning.html
This was in the polycount wiki. I've tried it and it works well. I think Mudbox 2013 is coming out with features that makes sculpting tiling meshes much easier.
Thanks for the feedback, you got a good point there, I usually forget to turn the hdr vignetting off. I think that the effect is overused indeed.
Thanks, CE3 sdk comes with some really nice water/ocean shaders by default.
Takes a bit of practice to get the desired effects.
There will be one whenever I get some time
I've been working on some tilable textures lately and mostly doing research on different approaches regarding the creation of such textures.
Every single part on these texture were handsculpted in mudbox then put together in maya.
Some early tests on some meshes I quickly put together in the sdk :
I still need to add a bit more of contrast and hue variation on these textures.
Also planning to make some decals to breakup the linearity of the tiles.
Thanks so much for pointing it out. I was setting up a standard Landscape material, but I didn't realize/forgot that I'm using Colormap and I needed to desaturate my detail textures. I totally fotgot that I needed to do that!!
Thanks again!!
decorix
Yea absolutely, I'll have to tweak the rock color when I'm done making all the architectural textures.
@Decorix : Glad I could help out
Testing out some modular models at the moment.
I'll have to make some ivy models and some flower plants to add some contrast a bit later on.
I still have to model some different shapes (more curvy) to get some more interesting silhouettes.
Although I agree with @Joopson on some of the sharp edges. The base of the pillars in particular has a simple silhouette that betrays its low-poly construction.
I'm experimenting with some semi-stylized texturing right now which is based on the PRTpn maps (similar to objectspace normal map).
After looking at a bunch of handpainted textures, the main characteristics that I noticed are the exaggerated shapes, color and mostly shading which is directly painted on to the color map.
The PRTp texture (extracted from xnormal) combined with a curvature map allows me to get some shading information that gives a paintry feel to the texture.
The base color map is just a concrete texture from cgtextures on which I applied a surface blur to remove the noise and high frequency detail.
After combining all these texture maps in Photoshop, I get this kind of result without a single brush stroke.
Sculpting some exaggerated cracks in the highpoly modeling process will help further stylizing the textures.
PRTp map : green channel is used as a top-down light source (also contains soft shadowing information).
Next thing I'm going to try is baking out a litsphere based texture and experiment with different blending modes.
Thanks, its just for testing purpose, I'm trying to find a good balance between stylized and realistic texturing.
I've been working on some modular staires lately, there is still on more "straight" version that needs to be made before I start texturing these.
lowpoly models (around 1k tris for each).
thanks, and yea, I'll keep an eye on that, I'm aiming for 256 pixel/meter density with the final meshes.
I just finished the straight version of the stairs set.
Time to work on the diffuse texture
quick test :
Thanks
reference :
The structure is kinda really big and challenging tbh. I put a lot of work on paper for designing the modular parts and maximizing the re-usability of each model.
Almost done texturing the first section of the stairs :
(diffuse texture only/unlit) :
thanks ! well I rely a lot on the grid and try to have my models fit in a bounding box which has power of two extents. (8,64,128,256,512 etc...or 384, 160 in some cases).
There is an interesting paper written by Kevin Johnstone which deals about how he approached the creation of modular models and environments in gears of wars or UT3 : http://www.kevinjohnstone.com/Help/Modular%20Environment%20Design.rar
What I do on paper, is mostly sketching out the models while keeping in mind how these models would link together, see if there is a way to make them usable in a different way etc...
Usually when I work on an environement based on a concept art reference (lets say a building for example) I would first decompose the building into multiple logical parts (pillars, windows, doors,walls, archs etc...)and see if there are any repeating patterns which can be used as modular models.
On the other hand, the placement of the pivot of your models is of extreme importance ! (without exaggerating
There is also a very nice tutorial made by Chris Albeluhn regarding the designing of modular models : http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/Building_Layout_Guideline_Tutorial.html
Finished the stairs set, I reprojected all the texture maps for each model into a single texture map to avoid using a material for each model.
In the end all 3 models use the same material.
Time to move on to ground and model some adapted (curved) floor meshes.
Thanks man, and yea you got a point, I could've went ahead and relied on a tiled texture and then bend the steps but these have unique textures and shapes so I used a high-poly to low-poly approach to get some nice shapes and unique detail.
I opened up a blog where I'll be compiling all the stuff I made and explaining some processes I used.
I'm still writing down some posts the moment I'm typing this message so it will have much more content by the end of the day.
Link ! : http://klass87.blogspot.fr/
I updated my blog with some content, let me know what you guys think
klass87.blogspot.fr
I've reviewed my workflow and it seems like using the bend technique works well.
I was worried about the mesh displaying some shading errors due to general topology transformations but it doesn't seem like its the case.
Thanks for mentioning the trick
What about the normal map? If you bend the model, shouldn't the normal map be messed up, at least in the heavily bent/rounded areas?
I would really like to know more about this technique, so would you mind explaining what the polycount/-density has to do with texture stretching here?
Sorry for hijacking your thread Choco. I will stop now =P
Bounding box approx 1m x 1m x 5m (128x128x512)
How quickly can you knock out something like this?
Also, where is Greentooth? :P
thanks for the explanation!
Thanks ! Doing the highpoly sculpting plus the blocking-out process takes approx 3 to 4 hours.
Doing the low poly mesh and texturing it should take another 2 to 3 hours.
It really all depends on how dense and how big your highpoly mesh is.
As for the greentooth I got some plans for it for sure
You got a really good point there, I went ahead and reused the AO of one of my previously made textures and used it as a stencil for the sake of consistency.
Thanks for the heads-up
This should be the final highpoly mesh :
Just finished doing the low poly mesh and baking out the texture maps.
poly-count : 689 tris
Shaded :
Unlit view :
bakes :
http://wcpedia.com/dw/doku.php/wc_info/modding/ao_and_prt_bakes