Alien Environment [CE3]

Dibbz · Mar 2013

Been working on this Alien environment for a couple of months.

I decided I need to learn Zbrush and CE3 so I felt this type of project would be ideal to learn how to create some good organic and natural looking pieces as well as work on my texturing.

I want to really crack on with this and get it done soon so thought putting it out there will push me. Been working hard the last week so hopefully I can keep this up.

Lighting is not final, well lots of stuff are not final and are not in, but I've got a good idea for where I want this to go.

James Ordner · Mar 2013

The ground could use a higher resolution texture, or tile the one you have some more. It seems to have the lowest pixel density out of all of the other meshes by far. It's too blurry, and the colors seem too random and noisy. It seems like colors are just thrown around on the ground for no apparent reason. The parallax effect is also really stretching your pixels, and it's making the ground (and so 30% of your screenshot) look very unappealing. Either raise your resolution, lower the parallax strength, or use some actual geometry if the effect is important to the scene.

The tree plant things on the right also appear to be almost floating, and the ground parallax will no doubt worsen the effect when the camera moves. You could cover up the base with some sort of bush or something else to hide where the tree sits on the ground, or find another fix for it. Good luck with the rest of your scene!

MikeGalli · Mar 2013

Hey Dibbz, I agree with James on all of the stuff he brought up.

For me, the first (negative) thing I noticed was that all of the colors seemed pretty monotone. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean that per texture, but rather the color palette of the entire scene is a bit repetitive and doesn't really lead the viewers eye anywhere. Also, the textures seem a bit noisy/muddy. It is mainly with the ground, the surface of it is kind of indistinguishable. It's kind of hard to tell whether it is a muddy/soft squishy ground or if it is a hard eroded rock surface. I would suggest taking a few steps back. Focus first on selling the type of surface it is, than add details to make it more appealing. Just don't overdo it or you will end up with muddy non-readable textures.

As far as the color palette of the environment as a whole, I would recommend trying to work in some complimentary colors in (other than the sky). Maybe some kind of green or blue vegetation. Nothing over bearing however, you don't want a small little plant to be the hero piece because it sticks out so much.

Also, it might be worth it to alter some of the values and hues slightly for the walls, or floor. Having them be the same tone makes the world a bit boring, and leaving nothing to lead the viewers eye.

Also, terrain doesn't automatically cast shadows (just in case you have any elevation on any of your terrain off screen), and the console command is "e_gsmCastFromTerrain=1". Also, about the plants look like they're floating, it might be worth trying turning on ssao to try to sell them being a little more grounded. It's console command is "r_ssao=1".

Keep it up!

I'm interested to see where this goes.

Dibbz · Mar 2013

Thanks for the advice. I've cleaned up the Rock texture on the walls right now as that was really bugging me because of how unreadable it was. I was playing around with my ground texture and it looks like I might just have to redo it as it is very noisy.

One thing that bugs me about CE3 is how textures never seem to look like they do outside of it. In Photoshop I'll have a texture done but the colour and brightness is always off. I end up having to stack a few adjustment layers to play with the brightness and hue to get textures to look how I want in engine. Bit of a time waste.

MikeGalli · Mar 2013

I've been having a bit of the same problem with ce3 textures as well. I've recently been working on my first ce3 project and there always seems to be little control over the saturation of the texture in engine. I'll have to put my textures nearly to greyscale for them to not be oversaturated.

Dibbz · Mar 2013

Ahh perfect time for the bump

Yep not sure what is going on in engine with textures but the results are very odd. Most of my textures have to be super dark to make them look normal.

Just some progress on my walls. I decided to go with a mesh for the walls and the floor instead of trying to use the terrain editor in CE3 since I get way more control over how things look this way.

Obviously the downside is less experimentation but I'm happy with the direction I'm going right now with the walls/floor.

So far just using my cleaned up rock texture but will work on a dedicated floor texture later.

MikeGalli · Mar 2013

You should make your texture (for the most part) how it would ideally like it to look in game. Don't make your textures too dark, but rather tone down the diffuse color in the material. If you look at the stuff in the ce3 Forest map that comes with the SDK, you'll see that they all use the illum shader and most of the regular pieces like the houses and other props have a diffuse color of 128,128,128. I think that that is more or less what should be default. Otherwise, if the diff color is 255, it seems like all the textures are blown out. I'm pretty sure this is the problem you're having. I think going with a mesh instead of terrain is probably a better choice for this situation so that you can get a more precise shape and definition. Rock texture definitely reads better now without all of the color noise.
Looking forward to some more progress.

Dibbz · Apr 2013

Been banging my head against a wall because of how frustrating it is to use CE3. Starting to get a bit more to grips with it but there just seems like so many hoops to jump through to get textures to look good in it.

An update since it's been so long. I've really wrestled with the ground and the walls and decided to take a break and add a tree in there. Might make a texture and detail the tree before I go back and deal with the floor and wall textures again.

Played a little with the lighting but I've not dug really deep into it. Don't like the super dark shadows at all, and it seems bumping up the GI multiplyer doesn't seem to have much effect on the walls or floor but everything else brightens like crazy.

Dibbz · May 2013

Been going backwards and forwards with this but I feel like I'm heading in the right direction. Worked on some foliage and worked on some new ground textures.

Alien Environment [CE3]

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