Home 3D Art Showcase & Critiques

[UDK] Sea Defenses

13
polycounter lvl 18
Offline / Send Message
Mr Smo polycounter lvl 18
Hey guys,

Here is something I have been working on in UDK, I posted last week in the WAYWO thread. I have been working on it for the past 4 or so weekends.

Originally I was going to do a very similar scene which I posted here, but in starting it I got distracted / scared and instead went on to do this. It is based on a concept I found by the crytek

guys:

e_005.jpg

I had to stray a bit from the concept, mainly in the lighting, The direction wasn't helpful in showing the more interesting areas of the scene. Aside from that I am trying to stay as close as I can!

Cliffs:

I had a few different approaches in mind for this, mainly sculpting tiled rocks, that was doing my head in so I went with crazybump instead. Using displacements made from crazybump as a base for the sculpting I think I got a few nice results. Half these textures were never used in the end how ever:

tiled.jpg

The main form of the cliff I sculpted in zbrush, then took into meshlab for an ingame mesh:

cliff_base.jpg

This was taken into UDK and slapped with a vert material. I had unwrapped 2 channels, one for tiled

textures and one for the lightmap. I used the lightmap channel to overlay normals generated from the zbrush sculpt of the mountain and in the normal maps alpha channel I had a leveled cavity map to pop the highlights of the cliffs out more. This was added over the top of the vert painted diffuses.

cliff_01_nm.jpg

In addition to this I had grass / moss texture mixed in for the z-up thingy method, thingy:

zup.jpg

Beyond this I added decals on top for streaks and bird poo etc. There are still more decals to come in this way as well as some vegetation for the entire scene.

The end result of all this is this:

lighting.jpg

Water:

!! BREAKDOWN TO COME !!

Castles:

The castles are fairly simple, a few variants of the one brick - damaged clean etc overlayed with a messy 1-1 diffuse for the streaks. The base of the towers have a few extra verts to paint in the flagstones, which I have yet to properly blend :(

The walls have a different sort of brick, it inst obvious when looking but adds a tiny bit more variation. The taller towers will also have a few different bricks.

Anyway enough rambling, I am very hungry! Her are some pics of the scene as it stands today:

shot1.jpg
shot2.jpg
shot3.jpg
shot4.jpg

I have a lot planned for this as far as atmospherics go, lighting, fx, flags and seagulls are all still to come.

Any feedback good or bad would be appreciated, I tend to get lazy and leave stuff unfinished if no one notices anything wrong with it.

Some more shots / progress shots up until this point can be seen here:

http://mrsmo3d.com/sea_defense/

Thanks for reading!

Replies

  • sipher3325
    This is looking great.
  • StormHertz
    Offline / Send Message
    StormHertz polycounter lvl 8
    Is it just me, or a few of your large images didn't fully load before saving? I see like 2 or 3 that are 1/8 picture, 7/8 grey/black.
  • AkiRa
    Offline / Send Message
    AkiRa polycounter lvl 6
    Phew, that looks awesome! Looking forward to the water breakdown!
  • vemadesign
    Offline / Send Message
    vemadesign polycounter lvl 12
    This looks great! thanks for the breakdown. :)
  • underfox
    Offline / Send Message
    underfox polycounter lvl 7
    yea same for me I want to see the water breakdown :P
  • Norron
    Offline / Send Message
    Norron polycounter lvl 13
    Dang that is a super sweet breakdown of those cliffs. never knew you could do that.

    How exactly do you go about using more than one uv channel in one shader anyway?
  • Treboras
    Offline / Send Message
    Treboras polycounter lvl 12
    OH I would not worry about not noticing :D this looks really great, especially the rocks! Love them!
  • Ryan Smith
    Offline / Send Message
    Ryan Smith polycounter lvl 11
    Beautiful method for doing the cliff sides! Bravo, sir. Also, the Z up grass looks great.
  • PhoenixWolf
    Offline / Send Message
    PhoenixWolf polycounter lvl 9
  • System
    Offline / Send Message
    System admin
    this is some pretty great stuff
  • locater16
    Offline / Send Message
    locater16 polycounter lvl 8
  • Clark Coots
    Offline / Send Message
    Clark Coots polycounter lvl 12
    looking really nice! love the tiling rock textures. I'm a big fan of rocks.
  • leleuxart
    Offline / Send Message
    leleuxart polycounter lvl 10
    Nice breakdown. Look forward to seeing more, especially the water. :)
  • Froyok
    Offline / Send Message
    Froyok greentooth
    Very nice work ! The cliffs looks indeed beautiful. :)
    I'm curious about you castle parts, you have some nice details in the diffuse. Is that a mix of vertex painting and big decals/patterns inside the material to break the tile ?
  • Blaisoid
    Offline / Send Message
    Blaisoid polycounter lvl 7
    wow, this enviro looks awesome!
    rocks are very convincing and i love the monumental feel of wall structures.
  • urgaffel
    Offline / Send Message
    urgaffel polycounter lvl 17
    This looks great already, very interested in how you did the water. Loving the cliffs btw, cool way of getting both macro and micro detail in there. /subscribed
  • divi
    Offline / Send Message
    divi polycounter lvl 12
    i just love stuff with realisticly sized details and completly over the top proportions. looks awesome, subscribed :D
  • Mr Smo
    Offline / Send Message
    Mr Smo polycounter lvl 18
    Thanks for the comments guys! I will get into the water breakdown tonight, it's a big hack :)

    Froyok - Thanks! The castle walls have a texture over the top of the brick work, the brick diffuses themselves are very basic, a few light and a few dark ones here and there :)
  • Froyok
    Offline / Send Message
    Froyok greentooth
    Mr Smo wrote: »
    Froyok - Thanks! The castle walls have a texture over the top of the brick work, the brick diffuses themselves are very basic, a few light and a few dark ones here and there :)
    Thanks for the info. Well, even if you say it's simple, it works really well ! :)
  • NickGW
    Offline / Send Message
    NickGW polycounter lvl 7
    This is looking fantastic Mr Smo! Thanks for the breakdown of how you did the cliffs, I had been wondering how you did them when I first saw this in waywo. Have you thought about putting anything else out in the water?
  • Peris
    Offline / Send Message
    Peris polycounter lvl 17
  • fearian
    Offline / Send Message
    fearian greentooth
    Dude your lighting! That is mind blowing stuff man, serious inspiration boner right now.

    How well does it hold up at player level? Any plans for shots at a human scale? Probably the only weakness in this atm.
  • tottot
    Offline / Send Message
    tottot polycounter lvl 10
    This is all seriously awesome. The initial approach you used on the rock sculpts, with the displacment maps, look excellent. I see why you went in another direction, but those sculpts turned out great. What approach did you use?
  • lucashug
    Offline / Send Message
    lucashug polycounter lvl 6
    Nice one dude! Cant wait to see it done!
    Your rock texture ROCKKKKKK!!!
    Cheers!!!!
  • Hellfire
    Offline / Send Message
    Hellfire polycounter lvl 14
    Holyshit this is awseome!!!
  • iangoold3d
    Offline / Send Message
    iangoold3d polycounter lvl 5
    that is one bad ass cliff :thumbup:
  • toolpaddz
    Offline / Send Message
    toolpaddz polycounter lvl 10
    rock textures are indeed looking great. Since you mentioned vert painted cliffs I assume you did not use world-aligned textures. This means the tileable textures are UV dependant, right? May I ask then how you managed to keep the stripes and crevices of the rocks mostly horizontal although using tileable textures? I never managed to get the UV layout straight enough without incredibly deforming it. Do you have some fancy UV layouting tricks? :D Would you mind showing the UV layout for the tileables?
  • Mr Smo
    Offline / Send Message
    Mr Smo polycounter lvl 18
    Thanks guys! I appreciate the comments!!

    WATER:

    The water shader is based on an idea I had on how to go about getting some nice tessellated waves, this was basically 3-4 heightmaps that were different scales / pan speeds controlled by how dark the output is.

    I used the output of the height maps to mask the white foam for the wave caps which added a bit of realism. When the waves crossed over each other the output got whiter and so the white foam caps came in more.

    This was working pretty well but I ran into a lot of problems that my brain couldn't handle. The result of the tessellation can be seen here
    [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtjXsIra_mc]here[/ame]
    pretty bad quality video I'm sorry :(.

    This was the base I used for the water in this scene, but instead of going down the tessellation road I used the wave set up on a normal shader.

    After ditching tessellation and keeping the wave setup I worked on the depth blending to pop out the sand bars under the water. As well as depth blending for the shore foam, which has a bumpoffset to put a bit more life into it.

    The waves are passed through a lerp with the alpha being a splotchy low res map that scrolls in the opposite direction to the waves to give it that sort of rolling foam feel, it worked to a degree, mainly in breaking up the solidness of

    The wave caps:

    caps.jpg

    The reflection is fairly transparent and desaturated then run through the normal map for its distortion. I changed the waves from simple grey scale heightmaps into nice volumed normals through crazybump, this brought the wave caps and

    depth of the wave into line, made a bit more sense.

    The Uv's for the water are bent in and around the geo from the cliffs and the beach / dock etc, again to put a bit more life into it.

    WAVES:

    Here's the hack, it's just a bunch of low poly planes on top of the water plane - vert blended to pop in and out:

    waves.jpg

    Things still to do:

    Impression of rocks / refs / seaweed under the water itself, either through diffuse on water or maybe tiling texture on the sand bed below it.
    Fix shoreline foam! Too blue :(
    Probably lots more.

    I hope this breakdown makes sense, let me know if there anything you guys want a bit more detail on!

    The Cliff uvw:

    faerin: Cheers! I hope to do some up close shot around most of the areas, I think maybe adding a few props, like barrels, cannons, rope and a ton of decals should help alot. and vegetation!

    tottot: Thanks! I ended up taking crazybumps displacement map into zbrush, polishing it a tiny bit, then baking that, and overlaying it with even more crazy bump love from the same tiled ref texture from cgtextures! A lot of back and forth trying to get the bigger shapes to read well.

    toolpaddz: You are right I didn't use world aligned. For unwrapping the uvw I used the normal relax in max. I got very lucky as to how well they came out, there is a lot of pinching here and there but it's hidden in all the noise :)

    Here is a shot of how varied the angles are:
    cliff_uvw.jpg
    Hope that helps.

    Thanks for all the feedback guys, I will be updating all this when I can :)!
  • Armageddon
    Offline / Send Message
    Armageddon polycounter lvl 5
    I've been trying to make a water shader like that for months, trying to duplicate the tessellated Arkham City water. Could never get it to work. Amazing work though!
  • cmc444
    Offline / Send Message
    cmc444 polycounter lvl 11
    Freaking awesome lookin stuff. Keep going with the great updates!
  • dissonance
    Mr Smo wrote: »
    Here is a shot of how varied the angles are:
    You're keeping this, right? It adds a whole lot of geologic character to the scene. All that buckling and folding makes it seem (to me) like the area is under siege from the Earth itself.
  • kasru
    Wow looks really amazing! I haven't touched UDK in forever but now I really might want to try it again.
  • Makkon
    Offline / Send Message
    Makkon polycounter
    Wow! Incredible! And your breakdown inspires me, and I want to give this a shot soon.

    You said you generated a heightmap and used that as a base to sculpt in zbrush. Any particular brushes you used? And did you sculpt it in 2.5D or 3D? If 3d, how did you get it to tile?

    You said you didn't use all of those cliff textures. Which ones did you not end up using and why? What made you decide to use the ones you did?

    How did you set up your shader to paint the tiling rocks? Are they all on one image, or are they separate texture files? If they're the same texture, what do some of your settings look like that helped you eliminate texture seams?

    The only critique that I have for you is on the large wall, the partial pilaster things along the length of the wall has some funky UVs that I can see in some of your archive shots. It looks good from a distance, and I don't expect the player to really ever get that close, but it may be worth fixing that eventually.

    Otherwise this is utter perfection!
  • Mr Smo
    Offline / Send Message
    Mr Smo polycounter lvl 18
    I have been working away over the weekend but no much difference to show yet.

    dissonance: I will defiantly keep it!

    Makkon: Thanks! yeah you are right the uvw's are lazy on the wall :(, I will definitely fix that up when I go back to the wall. Here is a little more breakdown for the tiled textures on the cliff itself:

    I did this in 3d on a basic plane, dynameshing as I went, flipping between perspective and ...not, i used orbs racks brush alot, trim dynamic and clay with a noisey alpha. All with the curve setting in the brushes options set to 2 so it tiles as I sculpt, then I would export that, bake the center part in max and offset it in photoshop, fix any tiling issues there may be. Bit of a redundant way but I am comfortable with it so it works for me. :)

    I experimented, switching them out for others and finally ended up with these:

    tiles.jpg

    Their shapes read the best on the cliff.

    It's 1 diffuse, rgba - each channel being a greyscale diffuse and then 4 normal maps that go with each diffuse., then over the top is the macro normal map from zbrush with its alpha channel housing the edge highlights to slap over the diffuse. colour for rocks comes from another small tiled texture, it having the gradient in its alpha to mask out the z-up grass closer to the base of the cliff.

    I will upload the shader for this at some point, when I have finished this at the very latest!

    Thank for checking it out :)
  • OccultMonk
    Offline / Send Message
    OccultMonk interpolator
    I really like the feel and the atmosphere of the level! The rock formations and the sea shader are especially nice. Could you maybe post a few screenshots of the water shader? How did you create the large corner stones on the buildings? (Maybe with a Second UVW and Mask?).
  • Mr Smo
    Offline / Send Message
    Mr Smo polycounter lvl 18
    Thanks! The corner stones are decals overlayed onto the edge of the bricks, it's a very temperamental solution as it behaves strangely when seen at certain distances, I may go back and mesh it into the actual castle itself. I didn't think of doing those in the way you mentioned.. wish I did now !

    I took a short video of the ocean shader and will post pics of the shader / upload it once I have cleaned it up at the end of this project :)

    [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOPgi-_a8Mc"]UDK sea defense - water_01 - YouTube[/ame]
  • Mellon3D
    Offline / Send Message
    Mellon3D polycounter lvl 13
    Mr Smo wrote: »
    Thanks! The corner stones are decals overlayed onto the edge of the bricks, it's a very temperamental solution as it behaves strangely when seen at certain distances, I may go back and mesh it into the actual castle itself. I didn't think of doing those in the way you mentioned.. wish I did now !

    I took a short video of the ocean shader and will post pics of the shader / upload it once I have cleaned it up at the end of this project :)

    UDK sea defense - water_01 - YouTube
    Man it's AMAZING!!
  • dissonance
    This is coming along nicely!
  • toolpaddz
    Offline / Send Message
    toolpaddz polycounter lvl 10
    I just realized you were the guy with the midgard environment. I loved that clip on youtube. One of my all time UDK environment favs! So no surprise you rock this one as well.
    I'm really excited for your progress!
  • Mr Smo
    Offline / Send Message
    Mr Smo polycounter lvl 18
    Cheers guys! and thanks toolpadz I am glad you liked it :)!

    Progress has been slow this last week / weekend. Here are some shots of it's current state:

    sd_1_06.jpg

    sd_4_06.jpg

    sd_6_06.jpg

    I have been playing with the sky, lighting and look up table. I'm not too sure if I have gone too far with the levels of everything. Any suggestions would be welcome!
  • Bolt
    This is so impressive, I'd love to give you critique but everything is looking perfect already.. Perhaps I can suggest a type of low hanging fog or mist above the water or in the distance. Currently in the top image of your last post, the farthest tower still looks too saturated and sharp to me.
  • serriffe
    Offline / Send Message
    serriffe polycounter lvl 9
    this is awesome--inspiring work man- what's your map size for the fort walls?
  • shinobix
    Offline / Send Message
    shinobix polycounter lvl 16
    Damn dude! This is looking fantastic!
  • Shyralon
    Offline / Send Message
    Shyralon polycounter lvl 11
    Looks really awesome, especially the cliffs :D
  • MercurialForge
    Offline / Send Message
    MercurialForge polycounter lvl 11
    This is looking really amazing. I love the brick texture you used for the castles battlements. The corner stones, foundation rocks and bricks really make the wall that much more interesting. You can see some blending between the foundation rocks and main bricks but it looks great from a distance.
  • Mr Smo
    Offline / Send Message
    Mr Smo polycounter lvl 18
    Thanks guys!

    serriffe - its a mix of 2 tileable 512*diffuse/normals and 1 512 overlay for all the dripping details. I will scale the tieables down to 256 at some point!

    Here are some updates, I have strayed even further from the original concept - adding an elevator for a king / nobles to escape through if they need to. As well as some variants to the towers and a lot more block outs. All of this is based on a paint over a friend did for me (much love seany bighams):

    paint over:
    paintover.jpg

    block outs:
    sea_def_newblock_01.jpg
    sea_def_newblock_03.jpg
    sea_def_newblock_04.jpg
    sea_def_newblock_08.jpg

    Please let me know if I have gone overboard as I often tend too!

    Cheers
  • curzed
    i like the opposite angles the most, 3rd image especially. I would totally keep that composition, looks incredible!
  • AlanSMitchell
    Offline / Send Message
    AlanSMitchell polycounter lvl 14
    Keep em coming thanks for the breakdowns as well!
  • ae.
    Offline / Send Message
    ae. polycounter lvl 12
    awesome job man, you really need to pimp this stuff to me more often!!!! we sit like 5 desks away from eachother :P
  • Ulwaen
    Really inspiring work. Thank you for sharing your technique.
    Do you plan to add some wooden structures on the wall like the ones used to drop projectile and fired oil? It may add some variation ;)
13
Sign In or Register to comment.