Cliff and sand detailing.
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Right, so I've been working on making a Far Cry style island in 3Ds Max for my portfolio lately. Complete with foliage and wildlife. It is very early stage and at the moment I'm struggling with making some things look somewhat realistic.
At a distance my low-poly island looks ok to begin with:
But when you get closer, the cliffs and sand look flat and bland:
Now I have Mudbox at my disposal and am quite capable with it, so should I just take the island to Mudbox, subdivide the hell out of it and get up close and personal with the sculpting and paint brushes to add detail? Or is there a faster method or one that I would benefit from learning in 3Ds Max alone?
And while we're on it, any tips on making the trees look better? The leaf colour looks too uniform on every tree. Should I replace the leaves and branches with just a plane textured to look like a palm frond?
Thanks in advance.
At a distance my low-poly island looks ok to begin with:
But when you get closer, the cliffs and sand look flat and bland:
Now I have Mudbox at my disposal and am quite capable with it, so should I just take the island to Mudbox, subdivide the hell out of it and get up close and personal with the sculpting and paint brushes to add detail? Or is there a faster method or one that I would benefit from learning in 3Ds Max alone?
And while we're on it, any tips on making the trees look better? The leaf colour looks too uniform on every tree. Should I replace the leaves and branches with just a plane textured to look like a palm frond?
Thanks in advance.
Replies
I would suggest taking a look at the Rawk thread here on Polycount to get a good idea on how to go about making some high quality rocks/mountain pieces.
For the sand, it appears as if you're using a very low resolution texture (or a texture stretched across a large plane without tiling) without a normal map. Tiling your texture and using a normal map could probably benefit you a lot.
For the trees, I would point you to this page on the Polycount wiki.
Good luck!
I'm not using any specific game engine however, this is more just to showcase my ability with Max and Mudbox for my portfolio.
Also, it's not one specific texture for the sand, but i painted it in Mudbox using a few different images of sand. The cliffs, grass, and sand are all one object. I made them like that cause I figured I would sort them out in Mudbox. Should I have made them separate?
If you wanted to work on film or archviz stuff, then you'd probably benefit more from keeping things within Max to make high quality renders with Vray or mental ray.
Given the current state of the industry, it's assumed that you'll already have skills with various software packages like Max or Mudbox, and showing off a realtime environment would further demonstrate that, so I would suggest moving to UDK/UE4/Cryengine/Unity/etc. if you want to move into game art.
In terms of keeping things separate, it often depends on the project. I think you could benefit a lot from having everything as a separate object with separate materials and UVs simply because that is how game environments are made (assuming you were trying to make some realtime art.)
It might help to think of each object in a scene as a lego piece. Ideally you'd want to first blockout your scene by using basic primitives like cubes to set up the general shape, scale, and appearance of your scene. Then from there, try to create as many unique "lego pieces" as you think you'll need for the environment, and start replacing the blocky primitives from the blockout with your high quality meshes.
Once the blockout geometry has been replaced, you would then start focusing on other things to help sell your scene such as lighting, painted detail, etc.
I think the first step to improving your current scene would be to try to move everything into a game engine. Personally, I really love Unreal Engine 4, the people at Epic Games did a great job at making it easy to pick up and use and there are many awesome tutorial videos on the Unreal Engine youtube channel.
UE4 has some kick ass landscaping tools that make it easy to create the base floor, paint height/deformity into the ground, paint detail (with blended materials and even paint geometry for things such as grass, tiny rocks, trees, etc.)
It also has an incredible material system that with proper usage, will allow your assets to really shine.
I think you're off to a good start in terms of knowledge. With some nice rocks, some knowledge with a game engine, and some more varied trees, you could probably create something that is really spectacular.
Also keep in mind that you can probably recycle a lot of assets. Even in professional games, developers tend to make a handful of assets, such as a few rocks, and use scaling/rotating/material changes to make everything look different, so you don't need to worry about sculpting 100 unique rocks because you could probably get the job done with only a few.
Good luck, I look forward to seeing what kind of progress you come up with!
EDIT: I would also suggest checking out this video on the Solus Project by Hourences. He was kind enough to share a ton of information about his workflow in creating the island seen in the Solus demo. I know it's not Far Cry but he got an insane amount of detail in very little time. He uses the power of heightmaps (which he got from GameTextures I believe) but you don't need to purchase any textures to make your own (and it'd be a better learning experience to make them yourself.) I'd imagine you could generate them from your sculpting application of choice, but if not you can also probably make one easily from a texture using an application like CrazyBump or Knald.
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I would suggest to start from scratch in mudbox and create the terrain you like then export it as a displacement map to World machine, beef it up, import again in mudbox do the final details and the export the final maps for use either in max or a game engine.