The BRAWL² Tournament Challenge has been announced!
It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
It starts May 12, and ends Sept 12. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
[WIP] Old Arched house Environment
polycounter lvl 5
Hello again!
I've started another personal project to practice some more hard-surface after many previous projects focusing entirely on organic assets.
This time I've been very inspired by medieval scandinavian towns and wanted to work on, what I find to be an interesting arched house.
Below is my reference board
This is my progress so far. Will mainly be focusing on overall color and composition now then zoom in on texturing and prop details later on
Thanks for reading, feedback is welcomed!
I've started another personal project to practice some more hard-surface after many previous projects focusing entirely on organic assets.
This time I've been very inspired by medieval scandinavian towns and wanted to work on, what I find to be an interesting arched house.
Below is my reference board
This is my progress so far. Will mainly be focusing on overall color and composition now then zoom in on texturing and prop details later on
Thanks for reading, feedback is welcomed!
Replies
Good luck with the project!
My current idea is to have the main house as a more 'high res' detailed asset, with some high poly details that are added on top of the tiling textures and vertex painting I'm currently using. Since it's only this house like that I thought I would do it like that to be most efficient in getting detail for that particular asset. Otherwise, for the other 'background' houses, i'm using a modular set of individual pieces that can be swapped out and changed
Since my last post I've had some time to work on this project a bit more
Just been swapping out the houses for more a more modular setup and working a little on materials so I can get an idea of how I want this rather vibrant scene to look, color-wise.
Redid the roof tile material as I felt that the previous one wasn't clean enough. Still doesn't feel quite polished enough yet, so I'll get back to that one I think.
I decided I wanted some more detailed props in this scene and settled on having a bicycle in the scene and potentially some ducks crossing the road (still considering this idea a bit), which I'm working on modeling at the moment.
That's all I've got for the moment! Having a lot of fun working on hard-surface again, it's great to be practicing it more. For now I want to make some more modular pieces and make a few trims for glass, doors and window frames so I can get some more material work going!
Thanks for reading, feedback welcomed
This project is going a lot slower than I had hoped as the usual business has hit, but it's nice to always have this one to come back to when I get the time.
Since my last update I felt that this little environment was feeling too geometric, having all the assets neatly in place next to each other. Moving the houses around and breaking down the modularity a bit more I tried to make the scene more interesting to look at whilst leading the eye still.
In terms of assets, I managed to get a bit further with blocking the bike and polishing up some windows. I also made a different variation of the street spline piece to break up the symmetry.
Still working on this here and there, but it would be great to get some more feedback!
As of now I want to get some vertex painting going for the cobblestone road and polish the bike more.
Thanks for reading!
I've polished up the bicycle more aswell and looking to add a few more smaller details then start texturing in painter, which will hopefully be included in my next update!
This is my progress on the environment so far. The foliage isn't mine, Megascans is really useful for getting some quick foliage in. If I have time, I'll make my own bushes/grass but for now I wanted to focus more on the hard-surface assets. I started to like the idea of it having recently rained, so the roughness is bumped down a little, maybe with some water dripping particles on the arch and in the foliage.
That's it for now!
Thanks for reading, and as usual, feedback is welcomed!
I've had to learn Blender for my new job (yay!) and have been tweaking and making some new assets in Blender for this project aswell just to see how making assets from start to finish is like when replacing maya with blender. So far that's just been the case with the street light, wall lamp and electrical box models but everything else that's getting changed in modeling software will be done through blender for practice purposes
Alongside these prop and door assets, I've managed to finish up the bike! Overall quite happy with it considering my current idea of having the whole bike in shot, but if I want closer-up beauty shots I might want to refine some of the wiring and maybe re-export the textures into 4k res.
As of now, that's where I am! Next I want to look at smaller-scale props and decals that could make everything look a little more polished and find a way to have life going on behind the windows
Thanks for reading and feedback is much appreciated!
I also worked on some more of the props (with a beauty shot of the bike
And that's where I am at the moment! I thought another camera angle might be nice, and getting that shot through the window hints at a little more of the scene a little behind the camera.
Thanks for reading, and any feedback is welcomed!
A small critique, but an important one for believability. It helps to pay close attention to the way things are built in the real world, and make sure to examine photo references for clues. Wood window frames are built from multiple pieces of wood, and generally the wood grain follows the longest direction.
Here I marked red arrows to indicate where the grain should be rotated. And green lines where there would be seams between the boards.
For example https://st2.depositphotos.com/1520587/6259/i/950/depositphotos_62591923-stock-photo-windows-with-shutters-patterned-on.jpg
Hope this helps!
I think the buildings could use a bit more color variation.
Like this other pic I took also in Uppsala, so not only the grunge and tear but also variation on the color that can also be more expressive around the grunges. Also in the color variation if you make a sort of gradient top to bottom on the buildings where the bottom is a bit darker, it will look good.
It acts as a big AO effect in relation to the ground, also as a tiny "height atmospheric fog" or even weather damage to the building painting.
So its a big cue to make our brains perceive that the building is going up.
Anyway, great work!
The color variation is a good point, I feel that the big picture colors work but some more contrast and that idea of giving a bit of 'height depth' to the buildings.
Also, great observation regarding the wooden window frames @Eric Chadwick. Looking to draft up another pass with the buildings
https://photos.app.goo.gl/Cmda2cKFhg1u4wiQ6
Reference for the color variation:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/wWTphLnP9t2bmeqr9
And yeah, they`re both near the cathedral.
Starting back up in this thread as I have begun updating this project trying to do things a bit better than last time. The main thing has been the modular kit that I am remaking, starting with the arch house.
When I started the project, I wanted it to be a sort of hero piece but ended up having it not interesting enough to warrant being its own baked asset. So, I have went about modularifying it
I also wanted to update the cobbled road as that makes up a big part of screenspace and a great opportunity to practice my ground materials in designer. Still not entirely happy with the stone edges, but I settled on a trim sheet to make it easier to work with the road and sidewalk textures.
Lots to do and I feel excited to work on it! The lighting and cameras have been an eye-opener as the scene was so flat in standard daylight, so having the sun lower gives me lots of opportunities to draw the eye with shadows and warm light.
Thanks for reading and feedback is, as usual, welcomed! (Everything not mentioned by text in this post is going to be worked on later :P)
I'm a big proponent for using trim sheets... for trims. Not for large surfaces with tiled textures. So the cobblestone street for example is a worth using a tiled texture which is just stones alone. This gives you more variation and helps avoid repetitive patterns.
Another trick to avoid repetitive patterns is to mix two or more tiled textures together, using a trick like vertex painting. So you would create two or more versions of the cobblestone texture, and blend them together to create variation. Or blend in a dirty-cobble texture for the edges of the street where the gutters are, and occasionally in the middle where animals pooped or whatever.
So, just as one example:
I originally had the stones as tileables but wanted to get a seamless transition between the sidewalk slabs and stones. 100% agree though that I lose alot of variation using the tileable.
The point of vertex painting was nice. Perhaps I could do that for the slab/cobblestone transitions
Also, great reference from Arkham City!
As for some critique: The lighting is more interesting and works in general, but due to the layout of the scene, it's still pretty much head on, washing out the normal details on the house. The colorful bounce light on the surrounding houses is neat, though. You could try how it looks with more of the central house in shadow, perhaps.
You could play with the reflectivity/roughness of the glass. The green is just unfinished geometry?
The cobblestone seems quite uniformly shiny beyond the quartz bits. But if you like the effect, you could go for a scene right after a rain shower. Maybe some displacement or parallax occlusion for the stones?
The surface detailing on the walls of the main building seems quite deep and soft. Perhaps try sharper and more detailled to get more of a visible effect. Even if they patched over holes, they probably would have done a better job seeing the overall straight structure of the building. For example, it's unlikely to have such a big hole right to a more or less untouched edge like to the right at the base of the arch.
The head-on lighting is a really good point. I've been trying to boost the normal intensity to make up for the lighting setup but it turns out looking too weird, will play around with lighting and layout to get those surface details to pop more.
I am going for a 'just rained' look for the cobblestone actually. Have to make it feel more intentional though, perhaps puddles or more roughness variation would be good?
Perhaps you could include some dark streaks on the walls facing one direction from the rain as well and obviously the roofs will help a lot once done.
Since the last post I've focused mainly on getting the cobblestone road look less tiled, including a mix of vertex painting and splitting up the piece into different material sets.
Aside from that I have worked on the main arch house kit, tweaking material stuff and adding another layer of stucco damage on the walls. Still a little stuck (Stucc, perhaps?
Otherwise added a few new shots and tweaked the lighting to show off more of the surface normals, which I am quite happy with. Further adjustments will be made later on with post processing and such of course.
Thanks for reading and feedback is most welcomed!
About what should be peeling off, I don't know how familiar with proper solid brick buildings you are, but usually structures are built with bricks + mortar, then receive a layer of cement, then plaster, and finally paint. On external walls or walls that don't need to be smooth - when not due budget constraints - sometimes the plaster layer is skipped.
Keep in mind that this doesn't mean that walls with plaster can't look rough, it's just that when using cement alone even a perfectly even wall will be sandy-looking unless it receives an additional finish in place of the plaster, usually a resin + cement without sand mix.
Here's are two videos of people finishing a walls for reference. I couldn't find one showing both layers at once (cement then plaster) and they're long, so you'll have to skip around. You don't need to understand the language to get what's going on. You'll see the layers are quite thick.
Bricks can be painted, skipping both layers, but then they're very obviously painted bricks and that's not the finish you're going for here.
Thus when peeling off you'll see either plaster or cement, then bricks. It's very rare to see bricks straight away, that would mean the cement has fallen off, which means a obvious cavity going on where the layer fell. You'd also still see layers in the edge.
An extra data point about cement detaching from walls: This kind of damage is usually a bit concerning, either the wall has not been maintained or there's something wrong: The cement/sand mix is of poor quality, something hit it with impressive force (this is not puny drywall), it's due cracks (structural or not), or there's water infiltration. The reason it's detaching would hint at where it should be located and how it should look.
These are great videos to see what the different layers of plaster/stucco look like and how they blend together visually.