"Favela Revisited", a UDK scene.
polycounter lvl 7
For one of my senior project environments I wanted to re-create to my best ability and with my own design my own version of "Favela" from Modern Warfare 2. Here's where I am at so far. I still have some building to texture, and a good amount of foliage and clutter assets to add to it. I wanted to do an "entire" environment so that when I go in game any view form the players perspective looks like a game level. However this does means lot more work on my part. My goal is to the this pretty much done within 3 more weeks. The big open area to the right on the first screenshot will be a dense jungle/foliage area with some more trees I still need to create in speed tree. Comments and critiques greatly welcomed. Have a good memorial day weekend!
Replies
There's a few things i think you could do to it at the moment to fairly quickly bump it up:
- Add height-fog and depth of field
- Scene world process properties with the highlights and midtones
- Tweak your dominant directional light colours and brightness
- Saturate your sky, make it more azure, have more clouds in the sky to it break up.
And on a level design side of things, you currently have no focal point, it's very generic, you need something like a crashed helicopter or some sort of iconic piece of structure in the map.
Bloom scale: 05 - 1.2
DoF_Blur Kernal Size: 128
DoF_Falloff Exponent: 5
Dof_Focus Inner Rad: 25000
Scene saturation set to: 0.25
Gives the sky and fore/background a nice soft blur effect.
Is it meant to look like a real favela? High building density is the defining characteristic of favelas. Usually they are located on a hill side. Some examples:
http://www.math.ethz.ch/~hjfurrer/holidays/RioDeJaneiro/large/Favela.JPG
http://tupiwire.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/favela-morumbi-sao-paulo.jpg
http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/diplo/de/Aussenpolitik/RegionaleSchwerpunkte/Lateinamerika/BilderMitBU/FavelaRio,templateId=large__blob.jpg
Or watch Cidade de Deus (City of God) for reference.
First and foremost, check your reference regarding roof structures. If you can show me a single perfectly flat roof amongst all of those shit-houses, i'll buy you a coke. It is a very temperate area, and rain and runoff would constantly be an issue. Even the flat roofs have more shit piled on top of them.
The current weather in Rio De Janeiro it is raining right now, and will be all week hah http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/83755.html
Second, just like we talked about - get out of the habit of building these entire structures with solid meshes. This is an entry-level skill you must master. Build modularly. And this environment is perfect for it! All of these huts and structures are made up of massive amounts of junk stacked onto junk. So, make a bunch of junk - Wall panels, wood boards, metal sheets, plastic sheets, window frames, door frames, etc...and throw in a few plain walls with the holes cut into them for the doors and windows.
Wires. Tons and tons of wires and cables going to god-knows-where.
Go watch District 9 again and study how those buildings look.
Lots of clothes and things hanging. It is unlikely that the Maytag Man has come by to install a new washer-dryer combo lately, so all their shit gets washed by hand and hung up to dry.
Like I mentioned also, get that mesh painting, terrain painting, and foliage down and you will also be off to a great start, just gotta really get claustrophobic with this thing. Keep the updates coming!
Also I've changed the blending mode in my opacity setting in the material editor to a soft mask instead of just straight masked, which heled with drawing the mesh father out in game, but not has this eerie white glow to it. I can totally provide some screen caps if what I just typed was not clear.
TLDR: whats they best way to set up maximum LOD for small meshes/foliage?
also, which is preferred amongst everyone? Image shack or Photobucket or something else? Just wondering.
Also you should try to cramp everything together more, seems so open now for the most part. Makes it less interesting. And perhaps think about some height difference, all buildings in the playable area seem one story. I know the specops Favela map kinda has this too, but the MP Favela map is stronger IMO.
edit; oh and the textures for your tree are too dense, they go all solid in the distance.
Well I finished my sci fi thingy I was working on so now I am back to this!
and yeah, I still need to get this grass thing figured out... It's killin me.
Hopefully some good clutter and foliage will break up t he terrain tiling a good bit. Also played a bit more with some post process stuff, think the blur might be a bit too much in the background though.
The buildings look nice but I think it's the asphalt that's doing it for me, try varying it up a bit, more cracks, more patched sections, stains from various spills, etc. There is a lot of grafiti around so many some chalk drawings.
And most of all, garbage. Don't be afraid to overgarbage the place, this seems like a place with very little garbage pickup infrastructure.
Google image searching 'Slums' has a lot of good reference to what I mean.
try "10 Rua Nossa Senhora de F
Almost done with the last bit of asset to be created. Going to make some drapery such as clothes/cloth line/ etc.
Also the smoke and fire particle effects were done by a friend of mine Jake B/ at school. http://jak3dbaet.com/
the places are too wide and still too clean. also the lighting settings produce a too flat lighting. you really need contrasts. overbright lights. a bit lightcolor tweaking also. dont use too much yellow in your direct light. go e bit blueish in your ambient lights.
also you need some shader tweaks concerning normalmapping and (i think more important) speculars
i did half an hour tweaking your last screenshot. i like overpainting
but i agree shading/lighting is too flat, your front walls get hit by sun directly, but not the sidewalls, yet they have a very similar tone and brightness.
especially look at the AO gradients aphexx added (most noticable in the left alley) .. achieve that with baked lighting and you´ll have a win!
the other big problem is background work. those hills look outdated/lowres and rather do damage to your presentation than supporting it IMO - not sure if you already have plans for it but never underestimate the power of backgrounds
cheers!
edit*** ignore some of the pure black rectangles on some of the exterior walls. They are some posters I have to fix some light map issues.
well done. now just fix the floor textures and replace it with something more destroyed and dirty, dusty, then you took a great step forward!
watch the floor in the overpaint.
or just take more reference pics from the net.
And thanks for the complement on the interior LRoy.
These shots aren't really final. Just seeing which angles I want. How many pics do you all think I should use to show if this environment?
http://www.philipk.net/portfolio/bc/bc_port.html
look at phils 1-4 pics