[WIP] Stylized Village Environment

darktype

Alright, I really wanted to make a stylized and hand painted environment and began my search for lots of concept art and inspiration. Here's a few of them that I found and will be basing the environment on (with my own changes).

Concept Art:







There are a ton more, but I don't want to clog up the page :P

So far I'm made a basic block out of the city in UDK, and started modeling the first modular house.



The different colors represent each section being a modular piece, which should let me make multiple parts and arrange them together in UDK to have a variety of houses.

This is my first time making a stylized environment, any tips for modeling and texturing? I plan to scour the wiki intensively tomorrow

Jeff Parrott

Push the silhouette more. Your reference has insanely accentuated forms on everything. There should be little to no straight lines or 90 degree angles on it. Just keep that in mind with walls, support beams, etc. The exterior edges of the building could have some curvature to them.

Also add some windows.

aaronaton

yeh maybe use a lattice deformation, maybe after you've UV'd them.

Daehi

It needs more exaggerated shape and scale. Especially part of pillars.

whw

Good selection of reference material.

I'll echo what everyone is saying and suggest you try making at least 3 variations of wood slats up the walls and bow and sag some fo the support beams running horizontally. You could take this further and block out each panel separately before piecing them together into the final building. I think you'll find you'll make quicker progress that way rather than tackling the entire object in one go.

The straw roofed house looks like a one fun to make afterwards.

Selaznog

Hi Darktype!
I'm also working on a curvy hand painted fantasy town thread, and I do agree with everyone. Once you're done texturing/UVing, warp it a lot.

Also, if this is going to be for your portfolio, then make sure you add some more complex shapes. Right now the shapes are really rectangular and basically stretched cubes.

I'm excited to see this finished. You have a lot of reference, but do you know exactly what you're going for? If you mix all those images, the styles will clash. Can't wait to see some hand painted textures :P.

darktype

Thanks for your advice everyone, I've been experimenting with deformation and I think I'm starting to like it.

@jeffro: I was thinking of just making the windows a texture with a bump offset to simulate a fake interior, do you think that would be fine or should I also model the actual frames/bars? I'll experiment with it in a little bit.

@Selaznog: Yeah there are complex shapes, and I'll get to them eventually lol. The mixing of styles is something I am concerned about, and I'll have to be careful as I model more after this. It's likely that I'll just use a lot of the concept art as inspiration, not blueprints though.

Here's what I've got after a little bit of work, I'm going to re-do the roof though before I add anything like a chimney or dressings; I didn't like how that came out.

Selaznog

Looking much better! The only thing I'm not a fan of is the highest beam being bent opposite of the other ones. Normally, I think it would sag down

Jessica Dinh

Ooo, that's looking much better, really interesting!

darktype

Hey everyone, it's been a little while but I'd did a bit of work, unfortunately I couldn't do that much over the last day or so.

It's been a long time since I've painted, and even longer since I've done so digitally, but I like how this first texture is turning out.

This picture wouldn't scale on the forums, so I'll just post the link.



There is a little bit of a seam, but I'll fix that

ysalex

Looking much better with the deform, good luck on this.

Jessica Dinh

That wood looks nice although you could probably pop some darker darks and lighter lights in there for more contrast.

darktype

So it's been a while, but I have been pretty busy with other things. Anyway! I worked on a tree and I think it looks pretty good, this "stylized" modeling/texturing is actually really challenging lol.

Super fast turntable! (I've got to fix that lol)

Jessica Dinh

This tree is super cute :]:] I love the way you've stylized the bark especially. As a suggestion for the future, it might be good to make a rectangular tiling texture for the bark (instead of individual shells like you have here) so you could reuse the texture on multiple variations of the model. Painting out seams is also much easier that way because you can use the offset function. Also, will this tree be kindof shoved into the ground? If not, it looks a bit funny without roots of some sort xD Awesome though, I really like this :]

Selaznog

Looking pretty good. 2 nitpicky things: Next time you could add some dark cool colours into the shadows of the tree bark. Don't be afraid to randomly through in some purples or blues (just make sure you keep track of the colour you used so you can re-use it in other areas of your scene). What I like to do is (no necessarily right) to grab a colour, drop it in at low opacity, and blend it with the other colours. What gave me this idea was when I took a screenshot of Zelda Skyward Sword, boosted the saturation, and noticed a bajillion colours up in thur.

Again, I'm not saying it's right, but it is something I noticed. And for number 2: I'd say the centerfolds of your leaves are too dark.

darktype

@Jessicah Dinh - Thanks a lot Jessica! I like the idea of making a tileable texture for the bark, that would let me use it on other objects as well, I might actually re-do that one. And yeah, it does go into the ground - so I should probably delete those faces on the bottom of it. Seriously, I take a lot of inspiration from your work, so I really appreciate the advice!

I do have one question though. I get that painting out seams would be easy on the texture itself since I can use the offset filter, but what about seams on the model itself? How could I hide that when using a tileable texture instead of painting it in a program like mudbox?

@Selaznog - It's actually funny you should mention that, I just saw another post that showed the difference of adding more color into textures. It's a great idea, I'll absolutely keep this in mind from now on.

Thanks guys, I just finished a tree trunk and am working on making some grass planes, and tileable textures for grass, dirt, etc. So I'll make an update after I've done a bit more work

Jessica Dinh

If you texture with a tileable, there should be no seams on the branches, roots, or trunk - the way I learned is to build those pieces as perfect cylinders first, fit the seamless texture onto those cylinders, and then go back to the model and tweak it toward the final shape. It is much easier to change the geo after you apply the texture than to build a weird shape, unwrap that, and texture it.

The only seams you will have is where the branches and roots meet the trunk, but some of those can be hidden with foliage, and tbh those seams are overlooked anyway - it just kinda works

Snader

It's quite clear you've taken a couple of tricks out of Jessica's book when you look at her tree but you're missing one of the big parts: her trees use half the amount of triangles you use, even though they have more coverage. You're simply throwing far too many triangles at the trunk. Right now you have about 500 or so in the leaves and twigs, and the other 2000 in the trunk. Get that trunk down to 500 or 750 or so and you're great, but as of right now it's unbalanced.

darktype

Snader wrote: »

You're simply throwing far too many triangles at the trunk. Right now you have about 500 or so in the leaves and twigs, and the other 2000 in the trunk. Get that trunk down to 500 or 750 or so and you're great, but as of right now it's unbalanced.

Yeah, I rebuilt the trunk from a cylinder as Jessica suggested and everything worked perfectly at about 750 tris, and mapped correctly for a seamless texture. Then I realized I deleted the high res mesh *facepalm*.

I'll have to re do that part again as well, but I've got to work on another part first or else I'll get uninterested.