Its starting to fill in bit by bit! Be careful about your lighting - where you're standing now feels like a mysterious ghost-lantern is filling the area. Of course all of this is tentative - just also be ready to handle the lights for the background elements.
Kinda curious why you're using an opacity mask rather than translucency for your your foliage. From my experiences you only get zsorting isues on flora from one side, you could just flip the normals if so.
Q:
just wondering if i could SWALLOW YOUR SOUL....er trade secrets......
is the grass/foliage in the foreground using the default unreal 'foliage actor brush thingy..." or its all your own custom created shrubs and grasses (w/opacity planes and all that) huh?
looking swell - good composition, setting up to look like a painting rather than a generic unreal map (a problem i seem to have)
Crazyfingers - Can you elaborate on this for me? I am not well versed in translucent grass. I want it that way but it depth sorts poorly. My grass is hand placed, and it sounds like if I did it your way I'd have to ensure all my grass is facing one direction. That correct? More info would rock!
Hope this helps, my biggest recommendation would be to use terrain materials and attach your foliage to that if you haven't already rather than using foliage volumes. Gives you WAY more control over where foliage is found. After opening up my old scene though i remembered how much of a pain the zsorting was, but i still stuck with the translucent flora, felt it was worth it and rarely caused too much of an issue (I really liked the painterly look it gave).
Couple shots, one showing the foliage with minimal zsorting issues and the other showing the setup:
You can see some zsorting on the right side of this image. If this were the intended angle for this scene i could have really quickly just painted that flora out with the terrain tools.
The alpha thresholds the important part, tells it what % of that material you need before it places flora in it, basically how hard the falloff is on it. If you want to get tricky with the thresholds you can paint multiple types of flora in the same area if they thresholds are low. By playing with the shades and size of your flora and terrain materials you can get some pretty cool effects, like taller, but more dead looking fora in certain spots, or a terrain material that's rocky and dry with no flora obviously.
For all i know you already have this stuff but i'm sure someone will see this and get something out of it!
Quick edit: Common issue when going to translucency is you'll get a white border at a distance, just gotta thicken up the outline on the alpha a bit till that disappears.
in most cases in games i see foliage done with mask - renders faster and less issues this way.
Just need to keep an eye on texture res
Btw, one great use of translucent grass i saw in HL2.
What they did is that on top of actual grass alpha they also added gradient.
That additional gradient in alpha was making the bottom of grass plane transparent. And it was becoming opaque gradually a bit higher from the bottom.
That made i impossible to see the edge where grass plane meets the ground. So their grass looks so nicely blending into the ground.
With "look at" orientation to the player camera it looked even better :P
But actually in UT i had issues with translucent quite often unfortunately :P But maybe try first to add 8 bit alpha and use "Translucent" in shader properties. See if there will be z-bufer artefacts or no. Sometimes it works fine.
Going in, I knew these shanty's wouldn't be used mid-to-background so I came up with the above set of objects to construct the 2 shanty's seen below. I'll use the 2 for now and come back to them closer to the deadline. For what we have planned for the background, these 2 may be enough.
this is coming along great, that last concept is awesome! The girders of the bridge/overhang bothers me though. For how much real estate they're using it's not very interesting to look at.
the terrain are you just using a static mesh you made and importing into unreal?
Or are you using unreal based terrain for this? If your using a static mesh are you setting up a deco layer for your foilage or are you manually placing it?
foliage is tied to one of the materials being painted onto that terrain.
Makes sense. So it's basically a greyscale grass and it gets it's colored modulated by the terrain mat underneath? They do that in Empire Total War as well. Nifty effect.
Scene is looking great
Mm, not quite like that. There's a grass model (single quad, texture) tied to a material. So when I paint that specific material, then the quad is placed. (Density, falloff, etc are all adjustable).
Small update from me tonight. Got most of the main forms done in highpoly, with a couple errors to iron out then move on to detailing the main form (the lemon shaped body). Hoping to have this textured and in the scene come Sunday evening.
ok, im going to stick my neck out here and buck the trend. I love your environments Adam and the way in which you go about making them, also i really like the technical efficiency with which you produce them but for me somethings missing from this one. When i look at the concept (even though technically its far better than most in the competition in terms of composition etc, and far more considered) i dont feel compelled to go and explore it. It doesn't really move me as i would have hoped an end game environment probably should and for that reason i feel something is missing.
Now i dont know why this is, if somethings missing or because its relatively generic from a post apoloclyptic stand point. I feel as though i have seen it in games too many times before and as a viewer i have become a bit used to it.
The only reason i post this sort of comment in your thread and not every other post apocolyptic city thread is because i think you will appreciate honest feedback and i think that seeing your previous environments you could push the originality of this one more. I could be jumping the gun and you may have plans to address some things i mentioned? If not it will still be a cool enviroment both technically and artistically but i think you could make more of it to make it really stand out amongst the crowd.
You're right we do appreciate it I can see where you're coming from, and I don't exactly DISagree with the statement. (What!?) Mainly because what you're commenting on, is unfinished work. Both my 3D work and concept is unfinished, but Carlo and I both know what we want to do.
Does this negate your comments? No, not entirely. We personally are not worried about 'standing out' once its all said and done.
Thanks fella Keep checking back, you might be pleasantly surprised!
Cool design, it would be cool if you would have the closest pods door opend and lots of steam and dust coming out from the doorway, as if they are just about to jump out and wreak havoc.
Wrapped up the highpoly pass for this. Lot's of the smaller (read: surface) details seen in the concept will come through when I texture it. So far I am on schedule to have the pod entirely finished and placed (DROPPED??? Eh? Eh?) in the scene for some time tomorrow. woot!
Can't speak for this team, but i remember seeing drop pods in mid air falling to earth. I mainly just wanted to chime in and say that having fully realized assets makes your piece that much stronger, regardless of whether you see it in your scene. Best example i can give is the dominance war VI winner. On first glance i thought his peice was a bit weaker than other's but after diving into his thread, and viewing the video he put out you come to realize LOTS of polish went into that asset that you simply can't appreciate in just a couple screen grabs. Same holds true for this challenge, if all that mattered were the last 2 screenshots i think we'd be seeing a hell of a lot more alpha planes than 3d assets
hmm I don't really like that color concept, it lacks color variation on the individual objects, and becomes hard to read. Feel like everything is just desaturated and then overlayed with red. Rather add just some red touches where the fires are, and maybe the sky glowing red
Replies
I am going away for the next 2 days (the last time I will have to do this during the contest this year. Grr!) so here's where I am at as I head out:
Enjoy your holiday, sir!
Not much to say about it, except for 2 things:
1) texture on the bottom of metal support beams is mirrored and that kinda pops into my face :P
2) grass looks too thick. Maybe texture could be a bit higher res in order to get thinner grass?
Other than that, great and inspirational progress here !
Mirroring is fine, it'll go away later.
Grass is bothering me too and I'll go back to fix it this weekend
Overall the scene's coming together really well!
just wondering if i could SWALLOW YOUR SOUL....er trade secrets......
is the grass/foliage in the foreground using the default unreal 'foliage actor brush thingy..." or its all your own custom created shrubs and grasses (w/opacity planes and all that) huh?
looking swell - good composition, setting up to look like a painting rather than a generic unreal map
achmedthesnake - Its hand placed
Posted from my hotel!
Couple shots, one showing the foliage with minimal zsorting issues and the other showing the setup:
You can see some zsorting on the right side of this image. If this were the intended angle for this scene i could have really quickly just painted that flora out with the terrain tools.
The alpha thresholds the important part, tells it what % of that material you need before it places flora in it, basically how hard the falloff is on it. If you want to get tricky with the thresholds you can paint multiple types of flora in the same area if they thresholds are low. By playing with the shades and size of your flora and terrain materials you can get some pretty cool effects, like taller, but more dead looking fora in certain spots, or a terrain material that's rocky and dry with no flora obviously.
For all i know you already have this stuff but i'm sure someone will see this and get something out of it!
Quick edit: Common issue when going to translucency is you'll get a white border at a distance, just gotta thicken up the outline on the alpha a bit till that disappears.
Just need to keep an eye on texture res
Btw, one great use of translucent grass i saw in HL2.
What they did is that on top of actual grass alpha they also added gradient.
That additional gradient in alpha was making the bottom of grass plane transparent. And it was becoming opaque gradually a bit higher from the bottom.
That made i impossible to see the edge where grass plane meets the ground. So their grass looks so nicely blending into the ground.
With "look at" orientation to the player camera it looked even better :P
But actually in UT i had issues with translucent quite often unfortunately :P But maybe try first to add 8 bit alpha and use "Translucent" in shader properties. See if there will be z-bufer artefacts or no. Sometimes it works fine.
Quickie max shot of what the shanty's consist of:
But now the grass looks kinda lacking density; anyways, it is a wip, it is advancing very nicely.
the terrain are you just using a static mesh you made and importing into unreal?
Or are you using unreal based terrain for this? If your using a static mesh are you setting up a deco layer for your foilage or are you manually placing it?
Just curious how your going about this.
Makes sense. So it's basically a greyscale grass and it gets it's colored modulated by the terrain mat underneath? They do that in Empire Total War as well. Nifty effect.
Scene is looking great
Cheers
More like alot of work to do :P
Now i dont know why this is, if somethings missing or because its relatively generic from a post apoloclyptic stand point. I feel as though i have seen it in games too many times before and as a viewer i have become a bit used to it.
The only reason i post this sort of comment in your thread and not every other post apocolyptic city thread is because i think you will appreciate honest feedback and i think that seeing your previous environments you could push the originality of this one more. I could be jumping the gun and you may have plans to address some things i mentioned? If not it will still be a cool enviroment both technically and artistically but i think you could make more of it to make it really stand out amongst the crowd.
Does this negate your comments? No, not entirely. We personally are not worried about 'standing out' once its all said and done.
Thanks fella
Edit: Almost forgot, kick arse pod!
Lighting needs work to show the depth of the env. But the assets and everything look really great. Keep it up!
Cheers,
Don