Need help with environment composition

darthwilson

Hey folks

Been a long time since doing an environment and really need to improve my skills in this area!

I'm hoping for some guidance in composing a small themed environment based upon the "temple of Poseidon" and Games workshop "Dawn of War - Necrons".

I'm using the temple structure as my main concept and a "sarcophagus" as the main focal point.





So before I begin high res modeling and sculpting I have grey boxed certain stages in UDK however I have hit a brick wall because I can't seem to get any composition looking good. I'm trying to focus on the perspective of the tall pillars to lead down towards my focal point.

Of course my theory on composition is pretty bad so hopefully you guys can help.

1st greybox in UDK



2nd attempt with some "not so boxy" assets



3rd attempt with more assets however getting messier!



4th attempt:- starting to kick myself now =P Thinking of drawing up a laser effect from the two "summoning cores" to the middle crystal which may look cool.





So that's where I am so far! I'd like to get a good composition before I begin sculpting my meshes! If anyone can help it would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks.

PS - I hope there are some dawn of war fans here

Seirei

Yes! There can't be enough Warhammer 40k content in this forum. :P

Nice to see some nekrons for a change. You've made a good start, I'll follow this one for sure. ^^

SINtuition

I don't play WH, so I may be off base here but compositionally speaking everything is very vertical. The only element breaking that pattern is the crystal altar. It feels like there could be more variety in the vertical silhouettes.

darthwilson

Yeah I understand, maybe delete the curved pillars in that crystal structure or modify them?

darthwilson

I've decided to remove the curved pillars and add some terrain to add depth into the background!



Any more suggestions would be appreciated.

darthwilson

Some more progress.. Put some green fog in the background and tweaked some lighting!

Got an update on all my meshes with normal maps only!

darthwilson

May as well bump some more progress on texturing!

Working on base colours at the moment and then once everything is looking okay colour wise I will go into more detail in the textures individually.





At the moment it's looking to yellow so I'll add some brown or red tones into it.

Next up will be the Necron buildings. I'm planning to use nDo to paint some panels and hieroglyphics.

iniside

The columns. Make them smooth (more sides), or straight hard (less sides). Because now it's look bad.
Do not be concered with triangles. Push as far as you can.

darthwilson

Hmm, okay! I'll make a duplicate and see how that works! at the moment all the cylindrical columns are totaling 15k triangles so I'm kinda cautious with that!

I've pretty much got a base of all my colours now although struggling as I'm pretty S*** at texturing..

If anyone has suggestions please shout!

darthwilson

A few more screenshots with updated textures.. Also fixed some lightmaps and increased the lightmap resolutions.

darthwilson

I've now simplified my diffuse maps and got specular maps in which has helped a lot! Done some work on post processing, composition and lighting too..