Arthur Ramazanov WoW style Environment WIP

Arthur Ramazanov

Here is my WIP on a Hand painted WoW-like Environment

http://artofartyramazanov.blogspot.com/

This is my first time trying this style out - I would like to get better at this.

All critiques are welcome

Thanks for viewing


The Story: A man lost his family and is taking up necromancy in order to bring them back to life..So I tried to merge some aspects of the Undead city Brill and some Human buildings to kinda try and get the feel of a human transitioning into the dark arts.

Snader

Try using the URLs of the images on your blog, and putting them inside [ img ] [ / img ]. Without the spaces, of course.

Arthur Ramazanov

Thanks - I just tried that

Also if anyone knows how to get a flat viewport render - at a high resolution I would greatly appreciate the information

Arthur Ramazanov

Also some of the texture maps

chrisradsby

This is all sorts of awesome. Regarding the viewport issue, if you're using max there is a plugin here on the forum somewhere that has the capability to render out higher resolution grabs of your viewports.

Great work so far, the mood and general shape is really nice. I really like the darker textures on this one, they're detailed but not noisy. Great work! Keep going!

Arthur Ramazanov

Thank you for the kind words - means a lot

Arthur Ramazanov

Maya viewport render Update

Jessica Dinh

I think this looks really nice! Great textures :] The back story adds to it too, and I like the general dark mood. However, I might try something other than just the same brown for everything. Maybe make the door a different color, and the planks going around the house a slightly lighter (or darker?) brown. Since everything is that same brown right now it is a bit hard to tell certain shapes apart.

I really like the color you chose for the windows, those look great I also love the roof, and all the ivy on it.

Arthur Ramazanov

Thank you for the advice - I see your point I will look into it and make a few changes.

Also I was thinking of adding some greens in with the browns

Yeah hand painting textures is a bit tough for me since this is the first time I'm doing this - i'm more used to image manipulation or polypainting

Arthur Ramazanov

Still need some work on the color and the vibrancy of the colors...I want to have it be dark and desaturated but as many people have told me - this is now WoW style...I looked around at Gilneas and they had some desaturated and dark colors So I'm not too sure what to do with the colors -

If anyone has any advice

Arthur Ramazanov

Trying to figure out how saturated I want the colors...Any advice?

Jessica Dinh

I think maybe what your scene is lacking is some contrasts with warms. Everything is cool right now, and I know you are trying to go for a dark and dreary feel, but having a little warm color will actually accentuate that atmosphere because there will be something for the cools to compare with.

I would play with the white walls and see what it looks like if you push it closer towards peach-ish beige. Also, your lampposts are getting confused with the window lights - maybe try out orange light for those.

Arthur Ramazanov

Hey, thanks for the advice. I can see what you're saying - I changed the lights around a little...and threw in some other lights - the orange colors looked a little too odd for me - But I wonder if i throw some orange and warmer colors into the sky background if that might help

Anyway thanks for the help

Arthur Ramazanov

Another WIP

Oliver_Farrell

Love this man! Keep up the good work. Im trying to do this sort of thing too. I will keep an eye on this thread!

Arthur Ramazanov

Thanks Man - been workin on it daily for the past few weeks - lots to do still but Hopefully I'll be done soon

Arthur Ramazanov

Oliver_Farrell wrote: »

Love this man! Keep up the good work. Im trying to do this sort of thing too. I will keep an eye on this thread!

Oh yeah I've seen your thread - you're doing WoW art as well goin through the 3D total tutorial - you did a nice job on the axe and shield

Arthur Ramazanov

Figured I'd try it with some Shadows

marq4porsche

Looking good! I think some dark red-purple skies can add a bit more color contrast and will help the overall mood. Right now everything is still in the greenish territory.

Arthur Ramazanov

yeah I was thinking I need to push the sky a little more - thanks I shall fix that

chrisradsby

You should focus your attention on the terrain now, making sure the grass look awesome. Right now it looks a little bit off. Add some more polys to it and mess around with textures. good work so far!

Arthur Ramazanov

Yeah - I've been trying to get a viewport render in maya - but maya doesn't do cast shadows - so i tried upping my diffuse and using mental ray...but mental ray is rendering the shadows of the plane - not the alpha unlike Max's viewport...But Max's viewport - I can't find out how to do the color lights in the viewport...

Any tips on rendering grass? I went to your website chrisradsby
and you have some nice environment work in there

marq4porsche

For this problem alone it may be better to work in UDK or Unity. Game engines work far better than either max or maya for getting the whole scene to look good.

Jessica Dinh

I agree you would have a lot more to work with if you set this up in a game engine

Arthur Ramazanov

yeah that's a problem for me - seeing that I am not as experienced with UDK and never even touched unity...I dunno how to get the whole ambient feel within UDK...since I mostly used it for next gen stuff - but I'll give it a try and see if it happens to work well - I was gonna take my winter break to learn UDK but now this is taking up all my time lol

not too familiar with cel shaders in UDK

marq4porsche

This project is great to learn udk on. It allows you every opportunity to learn something.

Arthur Ramazanov

Agreed - thanks for the advice everyone - already three assets imported into UDK - WOOT lol

Jessica Dinh

Yeah, go go for UDK! It will give you so much more to work with, I think your scene will look great in it.

Arthur Ramazanov

Since I'm new to UDK - I was wondering if anyone knows how to maybe somehow turn on anti -aliasing? or something - in Maya - I see NO seems...But in UDK I see a lot of seems in white from far away - but as I get closer to the object - they get smaller till I get so close they disappear...

Anyone know any solutions to this?

Also when I zoom out the textures get really blurry - how do I fix this?

Arthur Ramazanov

Problem 1 - Getting Rid of Very Visible Seems - may have to do with Edge Padding - When i zoom out it is very white...and visible

Problem 2 - How can I take a render from a specific point of view in play mode -?

I am a UDK noob...:( anyone have advice?

floon

No UDK Advice here sorry, but i like your textures. Hope you get this into a kickass udk scene

pixelb

1. If you haven't been leaving enough bleed on your textures it could be a problem. Try setting "Mip Gen Settings" in your texture properties to noMipmaps. Bad for performance, good for getting rid of seams.

2. Why would you need to? You can toggle game view and post-process volume previs in the viewport to get the same effect. You can also hit ctrl+(number) to store a view and that number again to recall it. If you wanted to set up a camera in the scene and switch to it in play mode, it would require a little bit of kismet and be not quite as simple.

Looking good, btw. Good luck!

marq4porsche

Prob 2 is one I can help you with. When you're playing in viewport hit tab to bring up the console and type in tiled shot. The screenshots will save in your udk folder under udkgame. Usually though, the viewport does the effects better.

Arthur Ramazanov

Thank you Floon, pixelb, and marq4porsche for your help I will now try this out

Justin Meisse

The end result is pretty great but from your flats, it looks like you have too many unique textures where you could get by with tiling textures. I will see if I have some time when I get home tonight to illustrate this.

I know there is a WOW model extractor out there in the wild, if you take a look at it you might see a similar house use maybe 3-4 textures.

Arthur Ramazanov

Yeah - I do have quite a bit of unique textures - but I reuse them over and over and clone stamp them in places...I didn't really care to optimize the scene as this was mostly a reason for me to learn handpanting techniques and to learn UDK since I'm new to it. I have used the WoW model viewer to see how they do their textures...But I was more focused on getting the look on this one rather than optimization. Maybe next time I'll work on that. haha

But yeah thanks for the response I know what you mean about WoW - it is super optimized and use a lot of mirrored textures since they have to populate an entire world and their texture sizes are super small - I think just recently they started using 512 maps as their highest? (what I heard anyway)

jmt

The overall brown color doesn't seem that appealing compared to the WoW environments. They usually put some blue, purple, green etc. into buildings to make them more distinct.

Steve Schulze

That grass is really letting down the quality of the rest of your scene. It looks quite nice close up, but just becomes a mess when you zoom out a little. If you were to reduce the contras and blotchyness significantly, I think it'd improve the overall look of your environment significantly.

Arthur Ramazanov

Tx for the advice everyone going to turn my attention to the grass and adding some extra color to it after I'm done with the steeple and bell - I do agree it needs a lot more work

Arthur Ramazanov

Still a lot to do...ahh lol

marq4porsche

Looking loads better!! I'm really enjoying the shapes you've got going on and the grass looks tons better now. I think you can have some more color in key areas like your roof tiles and get away from the white a bit for the main tiles and you'll be better. Get away from the brown except for the wood.

Arthur Ramazanov

the white bits on the house are supposed to be beige...but i did some post processing in UDK and it turned it more white...still one of the things to fix...but yeah thanks for the advice on the grass...gonna make some more adjustments tomorrow...been at it for 17 hours today lol

Arthur Ramazanov

BCos

Looks great. It looks to me like you fixed your white seams issue but I've encountered the same issue and it was indeed an edge padding problem. just add a bit more padding and you'll be fine.

and in regards to the tiledshot command. if you put a number after it, like "tiledshot 4" you'll get a super high-res render. I've noticed that some post-processing does not get saved into these renders however. Bloom lighting being the most visible. that may have changed in the newer versions of UDK however.

Arthur Ramazanov

Next Update - Almost done - some color tweeks left to do and to finish up the bell texture

Oliver_Farrell

really cool man! Im following a symilar building style for my project too. good luck in the comp! I cant even enter it

TheVortexKnight

Great model. Great textures, but how do you make them

Arthur Ramazanov

Are you asking my process? If so - 1st I came up with a concept...and since I suck at concepting I just blocked out everything with really basic shapes in maya then did a paint over in photoshop. Then modeled a low poly - unwrapped UV's and then hand painted the textures in photoshop...

Then threw it into UDK...

It's simple...No witchcraft involved lol

TheVortexKnight

lol how did you learn to make hand painted cuz i want to but where do i start

Arthur Ramazanov

watching painting tutorials and practicing...I'm still a student at an art school so I'm still not great at it either...but this is my final semester...This is actually my 1st time doing all hand painted textures

Arthur Ramazanov

Another Update - changed the trees and branches...Almost done