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Bell Tower

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Hello internets!

I have a new scene that I am going to be working on. It is an Eat3D "small contained scene" challenge. I wanted to post on here because I love the feedback that I have been getting on all my scenes :D
Here is the link to the challenge over at Eat3D:
http://eat3d.com/forum/contests-and-challenges/challenge-3-nextgen-small-scene

Reference photos coming.

Replies

  • Andrew Mackie
  • Andrew Mackie
    I'll be getting some concepts out a little later today :)
  • Andrew Mackie
  • Andrew Mackie
    So I decided to go with 'The Sinking Bell Tower of Laoag City' as my main piece. First off, I love the name and concept of this building. The bottom image is a plaque explaining when and how the building is constructed (WHICH IS AMAZING!). I'll be working with the grey boxing and internal structuring tonight.
    Let me know what you think of the reference.
    :)
  • Andrew Mackie
    Here is my WIP concepts. Just getting ideas of what/how I want to build this building.
    :)
    6mvJr.png
  • Andrew Mackie
  • Andrew Mackie
    I have not been uploading here AT ALL!
    ( Sorry )
    I will have more time later this month to upload and work freely on everything.
    Until then!
  • S2Engine
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    S2Engine polycounter lvl 10
    Cool concept, and looks like a lot of good reference and planning, can't wait to see more!
  • Andrew Mackie
    Hey S2Engine! - I'll post my newest screen grabs tonight!
  • Andrew Mackie
    Rock Sculpts:
    v41r7.png
    ilMtK.png

    Bell Tower:
    kIMvl.png
    1zpTL.png
    Z8Nzb.jpg

    I have more recent textures and some more modeling done, but I am going to bed right now...soooooo
  • S2Engine
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    S2Engine polycounter lvl 10
    Glad you're going forward with this, I think it's a great concept and if executed well will make a great addition to a portfolio. I think at the moment the textures are really killing it though; they're entirely too photosource, especially with the alphas. My advice would be to hold off on adding those decorative elements until you have a very solid base texture going, because it'll help with deciding what kinds of color values the other textures need. I'd go so far as to say even hold off on any textures until the modeling is more defined. At present it's too much primitive shapes - the cylinders, cubes etc, and needs more tweaking of verts. One way to check progress on that is to view your model as a silhouette (press "7" in Maya), and see how interesting it looks then. One other thing I find helpful when making game art is to try to imagine the model/texture etc in a specific game. Not saying you need to bite a style, but it can be useful to really do side-by-side comparisons to see how a certain game achieved a level of quality that you want to reach. Looking at your ref I immediately thought of Uncharted, and some of the temples in Nepal in Uncharted 2 especially. Maybe try referencing some games as well as life and see where that gets you with this?
  • ErichWK
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    ErichWK polycounter lvl 12
    Howdy, your textures are very, very tiled. And it is Very..very noticeable. I recommend you throw this into UDK when you get a chance...and you do.. look at this. http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/UDK_Advanced_Vertex_Painting.html
  • Andrew Mackie
    S2Engine - Thanks for the crit! I agree that my geo isn't very interesting right now and I will be taking your advice and tweaking it tonight and playing with some more interesting shapes. As for the texturing, I will also be working with the base textures and spicing them up with more detail :)

    Hello ErichWK - I will be putting this into UDK very soon! Also, WOW! That tutorial is amazing! I will definitely be trying to do that once I get a little further along with this project.
  • HughieDM
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    HughieDM polycounter lvl 7
    I second what was said but I also suggest making a scale figure to use in your scene while working. Your scale is all over the place the window or doors either seem small or the bricks in your textures are massive.
    Other then that keep it up and I def think you should get rid of the grime cards for the vertex painting in UDK it will look so much better and you have more control over the brick exposure.

    Hugh
  • Andrew Mackie
    Hey Hugh! - I will work on the scale tonight and pretty much dump all the textures to start from scratch. I figure that the second go around will look better :p
  • Andrew Mackie
    Newest screenshots.
    I started filling out the silhouette a bit more and adding some interesting shapes into the scene, building up a better looking foundation and I will being working with a new set of textures tonight and getting rid of the ones that are on the models right now.
    I have also placed the model into UDK and put a small light system on it, but the textures are not doing for me anymore, so I'll post those pictures once I get some better looking textures onto them.
    :)

    1f1BW.png
    ap7Uv.png
    KWKdG.png
    Wi4Na.png
    Jnkra.png
  • S2Engine
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    S2Engine polycounter lvl 10
    I know it's still early but this is getting much better. The statues really help give some life to it, and I'm interested in seeing those UDK shots. You can always post lighting-only shots from there as well, if you're not comfortable with textures. Subscribed to this thread and looking forward to it!
  • Andrew Mackie
    S2Engine - Thank you :] I will try to post some UDK shots tonight so you all can crit those as well. I'm still going to be building some geo for today and I'll be getting new textures onto the base of the building today as well.
  • Andrew Mackie
    This is the old geo and textures, but it is in UDK right now. I will be working with scale and silhouette tonight for the geo. I will also be working with creating new texture maps to test out.
    Don't crit me too hard on my lighting :p

    WVRWT.png
    WDHUd.jpg

    Some rock tests that I have been working with. Better ones coming as well!
    hSI2o.jpg

    Thanks for watching :)
  • Andrew Mackie
    Screen grabs from Maya.
    Starting to build a small scene around the Bell Tower now.
    I may have to get rid of the statues for polycount reasons, or I need to condense them down to a lower mesh.

    HrLcu.png
    E8lCA.png
  • Addieo
    The overall shape is good but your getting some really bad smoothing errors on your UDK renders, they seem to be around where you have modelled items coming out of the wall. With those beam type rocks coming out why not try making them as a separate object? Try and sort out some smoothing groups on the sides of building to combat those smoothing errors. I think your problem might be that the smoothing groups are the same for the wall and the parts that go into the wall. Try not to move on till you've rectified these problems else they'll just come back to haunt you.
  • S2Engine
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    S2Engine polycounter lvl 10
    Cool stuff, just be careful not to get too carried away with expanding the scene too much. I'd also recommend getting a skydome (even possibly one of the pre-packaged UDK ones) going in the engine soon, the black background can sometimes make it hard to really see your shapes. You said you may need to downres the statues; are you shooting for a certain set of specs in terms of polybudget? There are some areas on the buildings that can be optimized if you don't mind using tris instead of quads, but sometimes I find it's easier to take care of that later, as it makes subdividing a pain.
  • Andrew Mackie
    Hey Addieo! - I know what you are saying, but I have not had too much knowledge in the ways of smoothing groups. Could you explain them a bit more, or maybe link to something that explains them in great detail? I would love to be able to fix all of that weird shadowing now before it gets worse ( like you said ). Thanks for the feedback!

    S2Engine - I'm not trying to expand it too much, but I do have that problem so I will listen to you and stop now before I get too carried away haha. That is a huge problem I have with projects, I spread myself too thin and then I kind of forget where I was and then lose interest and direction. Do you guys ( or gals ) have any suggestions on how to not lose interest/direction on a project?
    Also, I have a 10,000 tri limit and a accumulative 4096 texture sheet for the entire scene. I will be optimizing the scene even more, but I want to get more of a finished scene put together first.

    Thanks again to both of you for the help and feedback!

    New posts to come, I SWEAR SOON!
    :D
  • Andrew Mackie
    Hey internets, sorry for not uploading this for a while. I've been busy with graduating :P

    New screenshots from UDK!

    P0dNu.jpg
    deUDP.jpg
  • Andrew Mackie
    I changed the idea slightly and I want the area to be snowing, so I should have some snow prefabs built by tonight. Expect those!
  • Andrew Mackie
    Wireframes out of Maya.
    If anyone was wondering.

    6ECDG.jpg
    Zv7pk.png
  • S2Engine
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    S2Engine polycounter lvl 10
    Hey Andrew, looking cool, glad you're keeping this going. Couple suggestions.

    First, although the stone bricks are nice and varied, they're a little too contrasted and it makes it really obvious where the tiling is happening. Maybe either tone that down in the texture, or you could possibly split up the large supporting columns into sections and rotate the sections differently so that the repeats are offset from each other and not as apparent.

    Also your alpha planes are very clearly just that, and that's never good. Have a look at Hourences's Decals tutorial. While that will help, I think a major part of the problem with those textures is that they're very clearly just photos with no processing, so a lot of the light information from the photo is still in the texture and it's fighting with the lighting you have in your scene. One way to minimize that is to take what you have for your texture in Photoshop and paint in some "fill" colors in a layer below it; these would be the base colors you want your texture to use and should match the style of your other textures/scene. Then use blending modes like multiply/overlay/screen etc. along with the Blend If function to get a more natural, less photosource look.

    Finally, smoothing groups; that's what they're called in Max. In Maya it's Soften/Harden Edges. This basically controls how shading is handled between two faces, as in whether it will be a hard edge or a soft one. There's a lot of good info here on the differences between the two and how to go about getting your desired result. In the case of your temple for example, I think you need to harden your window edges. Hope you don't mind, I did a quick paintover as an example.

    amackietempl.jpg

    Green edges should be softened and orange hardened. Those are just some of the smoothing errors I'm seeing, but the rest should be pretty obvious once you go through those. If you're not sure which way to go, try softening an edge and if it gives weird shading errors go the opposite way with it. Good luck!
  • Andrew Mackie
    Hey S2Engine - Thanks for the paintover and the info. I love getting help like this :D I'll be doing a lot more work now that the holidays are over ( ish ). I think the due date is Jan 4th so I need to really get going on this and start making it look A LOT better than it is right now. I'll be checking my smoothing groups/edges today and trying to make them look better as well. Thanks again!
  • Andrew Mackie
    Some new shots from UDK.
    I have fixed the edges and I shouldn't be getting that weird shadowing effect anymore. The tree needs more love which I am doing today. I am also going to be placing the objects in better places and figuring out what I need to do to make this scene and actual scene without adding anymore polygons :P
    I have also started playing with the mesh painter brush in UDK and thanks to S2Engine I will be able to start applying the snow effects to my materials the way I wanted to.

    Fma0R.jpg
    kpcXh.jpg
    GhoB7.png

    A lot of work ahead of me still.
  • Andrew Mackie
    Last day of work for the comp today...
  • Andrew Mackie
    Okay. So the comp is done with and I submitted my work. You can find it over here:
    BAM!

    I have been working on the scene still though because I want to finish it and create an entire environment out of the work I have done so far, along with adding onto it and creating more.
    Here is the work so far:
    ss8jN.jpg
    n572J.jpg
    jU2BX.jpg

    :D
  • Art-Machine
    You'll notice that people aren't commenting as much anymore. I'm going to make a comment about why. I'm not saying this to be a jerk, so I hope you're open to the following:

    People were trying to point out the problems in your piece earlier (which is mostly the approach on the texture) and you just kept going ahead without addressing it there. (Well you did allegedly restart the texture, but you did the exact same approach again).Now you're in the engine trying to show off your work, nobody's commenting because your skipped to the end too fast. It's a dangerous thing when people stop commenting, it means they give up trying to help.

    You won't improve if you choose to just go ahead the same way when people are trying to point out problems at an early stage. Unless your only intention was only to practice importing and setting up scenes in UDK, which I don't think was your plan.

    You can't rely on god-rays and fancy lighting to make up for weak textures or modeling, because in a pro scenario, you don't control presentation as a modeler. You need to deliver a piece that will stand up in any lighting, including your editor viewport.

    Your tower model was looking fine until the textured version. People told you that the texture had problems, which you left intact. As a result it still looks bad when lit. It would be a good exercise to scrap the texture, re-read the comments, ask for clarification if you're unsure how to do it 'right', and try texturing it again. It needs to look good by itself, before you slap on the extra layers from an engine.

    You don't only have to be attentive at the comments, but also your reference. You had excellent reference images, with a great guideline for how the texture should look. But compare your model in max to the reference shots. It should be easy to see the miles of difference between them in colour, texture, variance, wear, even the brick patches are nowhere near the same look.

    I'm not saying this to dig into you, but as someone who is also mostly self taught, I think it's important that someone tells you this. You won't grow unless you are not only open to learning from comments/reference, but also actively interested in putting them into effect. You might say that since this was a competition there was no time. I would reply that in that case it's too soon for you to be doing competitions, it's time better spent for you on taking it slow and doing it to the best standard you can muster.

    You're tossing in rocks and trees and a skybox... While your tower is a long way from being called 'finished'. Take it one piece at a time, and take your time and these comments to do it as well as you can. That's how you'll learn and grow.

    I'm also seeing that you're happy with just the 'impression' of a tree, or a rock, or a building. You're happy if we can tell what it is, but you're not asking yourself "Is that what it really looks like?" Is a boulder usually a giant smooth sphere shape sitting on top of the ground? Is a tree really just a fat trunk with a bush of leaves at the top? Does that really look like my reference? A boulder is usually more broken up and faceted than round. A tree has a certain logic to how it's built. You can simplify these things as a matter of style, but at the core of it should still be this understanding in how these things really look.
  • Andrew Mackie
    Hey Art-Machine! Thanks for the feedback.
    I understand where you are coming from and I agree with what you are saying. Now that the competition is over I will have more free time to do this scene. I know I have a lot to work on and I understand that the scene is nowhere near completed. This is only my third attempt at creating a completed scene so far and I am happy with where I am. I would never say that I am at the professional level of work right now, but I do hope to get there at some point.
    Hearing, "You're happy if we can tell what it is..." sucks but I will be working on getting better with each new scene that I do. I don't think I was hiding behind post effect from within UDK but I will work on creating better base models and textures and then showcasing them from Maya instead of UDK. I like to put my work into UDK so my friends and I can run around within the level and find faults for me to fix, it's just another way for me to get criticism.
    I will be re-texturing the entire Bell Tower as you said to do. This time I hope to have it look better than the crap you see before you now.
    :)
  • S2Engine
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    S2Engine polycounter lvl 10
    Hey Andrew, sorry my presence in the chat has been pretty sporadic the past few days, been taking care of a lot of errands and other similarly boring things. I should be back to a regular schedule now though. In fact, I'm there now if you're working and want some help. :)
  • proximity
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    proximity polycounter lvl 9
    i think it would be a good exercise as art machine has suggested to go back and make this look right not start a new scene with new mistakes, go back to you original bell tower delete your textures read the crit and start the texturing process again, spend a day a week a month howerver long it takes to get right. This will help you progress and learn from your mistakes but you cant do that unless you rectify them.
  • Andrew Mackie
    See you in a minute S2Engine.
    Hey proximity - I have already started on doing just that. I'll also be touching up some of the geo since that is what is giving me that weird hard edge in my screenshots.
  • Andrew Mackie
    High poly rock. I'm going to be reworking on the low and getting a better normal map out of it.

    az5mi.png
    Ko7pw.png
  • Andrew Mackie
    Tree update.
    I need to showcase the branches more so I think i might start adjusting the alpha to be more see through.

    KxfO0.png
  • Justin Meisse
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    Justin Meisse polycounter lvl 19
    Rocksmooth0015_1, we meet again.

    j/k, the rock is decent enough but I can spot using a straight texture from cg_textures a mile away.
  • Andrew Mackie
    Hey Justin_Meisse - Most of the textures are from cgtextures until I can go out and take my own textures. I'm not very good at taking my own textures and until I can paint them from scratch I have to use filler textures from online sites. I will work on changing the texture as well as baking the normals soon enough.

    I will be working on the wall first out of the tower. Trying to fix the geo, so the edges don't show up in engine.
  • Khalamea
    For the tree, the leaves are too dense and possibly too big, a little difficult to tell at the moment.
    Also you might want reference and observe how branches grow out and the shape that the leaf masses will take, it looks very random right now and unnatural. You don't really see branches that twist down like that very often. Also leaves usually tend to grow out in a canopy to better catch light, if that helps.
  • Andrew Mackie
    Thanks Khalamea! - I'm thinking of scraping that tree for right now. I do understand what you're saying for the ways in which the limbs and masses of each part of the tree should look like. I will be gathering more reference and posting it to see what everyone thinks of it, then going from there. Thanks for the comment :D
  • Peter H
    I don't think I was hiding behind post effect from within UDK but I will work on creating better base models and textures and then showcasing them from Maya instead of UDK.
    :)

    I may be wrong, but I think showcasing in UDK (or any engine) is fine if not better than presenting in Maya as you get a better feel of what it will be like from the end users point of view. I think what Artmachine was trying to say is when you present them try and keep it minnimal. so simple lights to show what needs to be shown, and not much else realy, maybe BSP brush for a floor to put in context if it needs it. Just avoid going overboard in adding post proccessing affects and the like until the model itself is done. I think thats what he was trying to get at anyway :)

    Looking forward to seeing this peice go further good luck! :thumbup:
  • glottis8
  • Andrew Mackie
    Hey Peter H! - Thank you for elaborating on that. I think I understand what you guys are getting at. I'll try to take smaller steps with my work and not just jump to where it "should" be for the end product.

    glottis8 - Hey and thanks. I will read through that and try it out. S2Engine and another one of my friends showed me this, but I will read through it again and try it out finally.

    Thanks for the comments guys :D
  • Andrew Mackie
    Playing around with the vertex normals. I do not know how to properly bring them into UDK so if someone could help that would be grand! Or their workflow of how they do their leaves for trees would be great :D
    I'll post my Maya shots of the vertex normals tonight if I ever get over this cold.

    QWCOZ.png
  • Andrew Mackie
    A very boring update, sorry. I just wanted to show everyone where I am starting from and post everything along the way so this time I'll pay more attention and correct my mistakes.

    ZLpPs.png
    LdIQK.png
    Wireframe:
    Td3Lx.jpg
  • S2Engine
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    S2Engine polycounter lvl 10
    Cool, looking better. I did a quick and messy paintover with some thoughts, hopefully it'll help.

    cloudengnfn.jpg

    At present it's obvious in certain areas (circled in red) that it's one close-up photo scaled across a giant surface, and that's a problem. You could just stamp/heal out those details and probably get away with it, but I think what might work even better is to break up the surface into smaller chunks, something like how I've outlined in orange. That way, you can map tiling textures to smaller areas for higher resolution, and you can also get in with some texture variations such as the green paint. Again, excuse the terrible quality of the example, just did a quick bucket fill and erased out some pseudo-wear at the top. Finally, you can make the arch of the doorway terminate to tris by following the blue painted topology if you don't mind having tris. If it's kept to a small scale it usually doesn't present a problem for me.
  • Andrew Mackie
    Hey S2Engine! - wow this is a HUGE help thanks man! I have a small update that I have been playing around with. It goes with your green paint idea.
    MRcqM.jpg
    I obviously still have a lot of work to do on it, but I really really like your idea for the modular sets/pieces of wall, it would break up the texture and give me more to use throughout the scene later on. I will work on the geo that you suggested and see if UDK likes it and won't give me weird looking shadows on it. Fixing the texture right now as well. Thanks :D
  • Andrew Mackie
    A little blotch on the upper side of the entrance way with this geo. I'll try to fix that in the next update.
    v6nVq.jpg
    Wireframe:
    QyWMj.png
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