Home 3D Art Showcase & Critiques

souls fan art piece

Alright boys and girls
I am about to embark on my first real project, i'm looking forward to getting started and would love your feedback with this as I want to use this project to make some serious strides forward so. I am going to recreate the halfway fortress from Dark Souls 3, it is a fantastic looking area and one that I (think) is within my abilities but will also be challenging so first things first I've taken a few screen shots from you tube and playing it myself to analyse before i get started

At the moment the plan is: 
  • Do a scene block out in unreal (simple terrain and boxes) to establish scale
  • Create the base and modular assets in Maya 
  • Give everything a sculpt pass in Z brush or in the case of the brick walls do a texture pass in substance
  • re top then unwrap the low polys in Maya and create the normal's for the rocks through x normal
  • Get everything into unreal
  • light 
  • render
  • profit


Modelling
So above is the scene I want to make. In terms of the modelling i'm either gonna make the fortress out of modular assets (archways, walls, pillars etc) and once its finishedim gonna combine everything and add a bend modifier to put it into place. The rocks obviously will also be modular assets as will the rubble and broken wall to the left on the image. Foliage and tree will be made later


I have a base mesh of a character that I will use to measure the scale of the scene. At its highest the scene is about 3 pillar measures high and 1 and a quarter at its lowest. The BG bridge in the image below won't need any real texture attention. 

Sculpting
This is where the biggest challenges will be. the destruction on the top of the fortress will need a lot of attention and will need the most care in regards to re-topping later on. You can see below what I mean and if any of you guys have any tips on how to make this stage as painless as possible i would be eternally grateful :P

  
Texturing 
This is where I'm going to start to teach myself substance designer as its only really the brick and ground that need serious texture detail. The brick wall on the right here has some bricks sticking out which I've not done before, I've seen some tutorials on how to create this look in substance so ill try them otherwise it will be done in z brush with some final tweaks in substance.


This image is what made me think I could maybe get away with creating some modular assets. If you look just above the archway to the right there is a texture seam which makes me think the devs have done different LOD passes on the same asset and the combined them all at the end.

Engine
This will be done in unreal. I have the most experience with this and should hopefully have no problems getting everything in. Lighting will need some experimenting but shouldn't be too much trouble hopefully

So that is my rough road map, no doubt I've completely bitten off more than I can chew but I think this project will help me get the next level so any feedback or tips you guys could give would be very awesome 

Replies

  • Benvox2
    Offline / Send Message
    Benvox2 polycounter lvl 10
    That's an awesome area. Are you going to also make all the distant background parts like the giant bridge? It look so similar to my current project because the places we have both chosen use the same modular sets!
  • Murky_caribou
    @Benvox2 just had a look at your souls piece and its looking beastly :P I am going to make the distant bridge as its a great compositional tool it won't need too much work because Its so far away 
  • Murky_caribou
    Update*
    So this is what I've got so far. Haven't had a lot of time so progress will be slow but so far I think I've got a good block out




    Used the scale figure I got with Thiago klafke's unreal environment tutorial

  • gfelton
    Offline / Send Message
    gfelton polycounter lvl 6
    A very nice arena setting you've got. Looking forward to the final scene! :)
  • Murky_caribou
    So I've not a lot of time on this one but I have decided I'm going with the modular approach for the sections and then combine them later and add a bend modifier. I've separated the wall from the trims as well


    This is the first section using the guy for scale and I created a rough brick texture in substance designer that i will use as my base for the lowest sections. might go back in and crate the moss later but for now the photo will do



    And the substance

  • Murky_caribou
    hey guys. this is where i'm up to at the moment.


     I've got the arena laid out but i'm now stuck on how to proceed with the upper tiers. My guess is to take them into zbrush and make the sillouette of the destruction then fill it out with small meshes of bricks. If you guys have any tips or advice i would be grateful. 

    The section highlighted in purple below shows what i mean 

  • Eric Chadwick
    The lower brick walls look like they're made with 3 tiling textures, blended together using vertex color, and height-based masking to get the blending edges to sink into the cracks. You can read up on this process on our wiki:
    http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/MultiTexture#Modulation_Blending

    This blending workflow likely extends to most of the wall and arch assets in the scene.

    The upper destroyed walls are probably made with another tiling map for smaller bricks (seen immediately right of your purple color), a few unique brick models that might be packed into one shared atlas, and probably some heavy reuse of the existing lower-wall tiling maps by UVing them onto unique lowpoly meshes (and blending them with vertex color).

    Your existing substance stone wall texture looks pretty flat unfortunately. You could spend a bit more time on this to get more uneven stone sizes/heights/rotations, and more variation in grout width/depth.

    Good luck with this. It's an excellent project and you'll learn tons!
  • Eric Chadwick
  • Murky_caribou
    hey Eric thanks for the comments. Yeah i abandoned the substance method for now but im definately gonna come back to it. as for the brick texture I was gonna go with a height map to make some bricks stand out more. Do you think this is a good method ? still very new to this and its tricky finding good tips but i will trawl the pages you have linked. thanks again for the helpful tips

  • Zack Maxwell
    Offline / Send Message
    Zack Maxwell interpolator
    hey Eric thanks for the comments. Yeah i abandoned the substance method for now but im definately gonna come back to it. as for the brick texture I was gonna go with a height map to make some bricks stand out more. Do you think this is a good method ? still very new to this and its tricky finding good tips but i will trawl the pages you have linked. thanks again for the helpful tips

    The bricks do look a little flat. Create a separate height map that has just the blocks and crevices; no details like noise, chips, etc. Then make the normal map from that, and give it much higher intensity, like ~30. By entering the amount manually, you can exceed the normal cap.
    Then create your normal that has all the noisy details at a much lower intensity, and blend them together.
    If you use a tile generator node to create the brick pattern, you can set random luminance to make some bricks darker than others. This will make them protrude out less in the normal map than others.
  • Murky_caribou
    Awesome. Thanks grimwolf for the tip. All very helpful guys thanks alot
Sign In or Register to comment.