Demon's Throne - Environment

[JasonLavoie]

Man... cheesy ass name, I apologies in advance.

Anywho, since I'm in my final semester of College, we're working on a "final project" for our portfolios... and this is what I've been crackin on for a couple weeks now.

http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/7719/preview1e.jpg
http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/1691/preview1wires.jpg

I'll post up concept work / some of the models I've done so far. Basically what I've done was created a fast blockout, and replace blockout models with "finished" pieces when I can.

Still designing some key areas, and any crits would be much appreciated.

I've been heavily inspired by the awesomeness that is Darksiders, so picture that kinda style... but not nearly as good, and you'll have an idea of where I'm heading with this :P

Oh, and I've been following Adam's awesome thread - http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=69345 and would love to dive deep like that into the development process of this environment, but he's the king at that kinda stuff so mine probably won't be nearly as in-depth as his.

[Nitewalkr]

Sweeet!! Nice work so far...since you are following up with Sir. Adam's concept...I'll book mark this to see the project's progress.....:)

EDIT1: Oshawa, ON? May I ask what college do you go to? Sorry for being Off topic.

EDIT2: Please dont say UOIT.

[DnS]

Looks like a great start Jason, looking forward to seeing your progress on this. Darksiders was the first thing I thought of when I saw it (well, I have been playing it a lot..).

[turpedo]

Hey Jason, this is looking really cool. I thought of Darksiders as well when I first looked at it. Are you going with the same texturing style?

[MikeF]

looking really good so far. Nice mix of large and macro detail, no crits here

[JasonLavoie]

Honestly turpedo, I have it in my head now that I want to nail that kinda style. I mean I went in knowing that my zbrush work would focus on more broad shapes instead of crazy small detail you know, and I really do like the harder edges kinda style that Darksiders has, so I'm going to try and see if i can incorperate that into it... but I've never done anything like that before :P

Good time to learn now eh.

Thanks guy, I'll post some more work and breakdowns in the following days. It's slowly coming together but I'm feeling pretty good with this, the texturing is really going to have to bring this piece out though, I hope I can nail it.

Thanks again all :)

[Ben Apuna]

Even with a generic name like "Demon's Throne" this scene looks like it's going to be far from ordinary.

I really like the layout of the scene. The large bold shapes of the blockout meshes are very nice too, hopefully you can keep that feel as you further refine them.

[cholden]

It's about time you accepted Satan into your heart. It's the only way to get in to games.

[Raider]

I wish my final semesters at my uni let me do environments / characters instead of forcing an animation on me :|

[JasonLavoie]

It's about time you accepted Satan into your heart. It's the only way to get in to games.

Haha, what can I say, he offered cookies and I accepted... shits tasty man!

Raider - Its nice that we have the option to do what we want... I guess... but other schools handle it much better than this.

Ben - Thanks man, honestly... my main focus for this one is overall composition, I want to really have some strong shapes in the foreground, as well as some interesting shapes in the mid / background to really help create some depth to the overall scene... there is gonna be a lot of little things in here when I'm done that will hopefully breath some life into it.

Thanks again all.

[adam]

What sort of game is this for? It's pretty low detail..

[JasonLavoie]

What sort of game is this for? It's pretty low detail..

About 70% of it is still in blockout stage, but yuh... most of the stuff is more lower poly. Once I get the textures going I'm going to revisit some of the pieces and cut more detail into it, right now I'm just trying to get models done for the scene.

This will be going into UDK once I have everything modeled (initially).

[ae.]

Cant wait to see this develop bro!

[cycloverid]

Reminds me of a Diablo 3 concept that I liked:

http://us.blizzard.com/diablo3/media/artwork.xml#20


You've done a great job realizing this arena so far!

[Sirdelita]

you're gonna be bussssyyyy... :) Excited to see this one! good luck!

[onionhead_o]

dot worry bout the name. ur a great environmental artist. im excited to see how this turns out.

[Nitewalkr]

After hovering through your portfolio, I assume this piece of art should be easy for you......But like everyone else I cant wait to see the final scene. :)

I am more interested in knowing about your college in Oshawa <.<, and your program.

[brandoom]

Awesome work so far Jay. Can't wait to see how it pans out \0/

[seforin]

ah ok so this is what you meant by ripped earth when you messaged me.

ok yah man looking good

suggestion : if your using max 2010 take that low and testate it 1 time to get some more geo to this and take it to zbrush and start sculpting away

due to the size of this piece I suggest polygroups to get the most out of each chunk

[Snight]

cant wait to see where this goes...looking great so far man.

[Sneekyazn]

Lookin sweet man cant wait to see this finished up

[Daaark]

I love it.

[JasonLavoie]

Doing some re-design, now its not so much a Demon's throne room, more like an entrance now... maybe... so this place would host a smaller boss fight kinda thing.

http://img64.imageshack.us/img64/7938/preview2m.jpg

Again, still blocking out this piece so I'm missing some things (such as the statues etc.) that'll come soon. Still need to nail down the design for this area right now.

[makecg]

looking pretty cool :D

[Minos]

Looking great so far!

[JasonLavoie]

Ok so the goal is to get this puppy into udk tonight... and start on some sculpting while I edit some of these models as I go along...

Some quick shots from 3d max -

http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/2797/preview21.jpg
http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/9619/preview23.jpg
http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/6200/preview24n.jpg
http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/7098/preview25.jpg
http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/3097/preview22o.jpg

[slipsius]

lookin siiiiick buddy

[Prophecies]

Looks kickass. The only crit I would have are the small suspended chains near the top of your scene. I don't know if this is going into a game or not, but will they be far away from the player/viewer? If so, instead of having those small suspended chains modelled, they could simply be planes with a good diffuse, normal map and alpha channel. Just a suggestion!
Hope this helped out! :)
Keep up the great work!

[Pavel Petrenko]

Wow, so many details! Looks great!
Keep going!

[roosterMAP]

i like the WoW feel. good job!

[JasonLavoie]

Don't want to waste too much time on this... but I was wondering if anyone could answer this quick question for me.

I want to try and keep all my folders nice and neat in my udk package, and I was wondering... is there ways to create Sub Folders in main Folders?

For example: "Static_Meshes > Rocks > Penis_Shaped"

[JasonLavoie]

Double posting... I apologize.

Here is a VERY quick lighting test in UDK. This was the first time I've messed around in UDK, and I can tell you I'm going to have SOOO much fun with the lighting setup for this scene (and really any future work done in UDK).

http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/1273/preview31.jpg
http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/2726/preview32.jpg
http://img97.imageshack.us/img97/8665/preview33.jpg

Still need some meshes in there (bugging me more now since I've seen the quick bake)... like the main platform, really needs some broken up tiles / floor in generl to help break everything up more.

Still designing some areas as well, but at least this is a good base for me to get started on some sculpting, I'm hoping it will be a fun process, going to be doing a lot of tileable sculpts (which I haven't done before) so should be a good learning experience.

Need to fix smoothing groups as well...

[ralusek]

this looks cool. is that an AO bake you already threw on everything for that UDK shot or is UDK lighting just that good?

[StefanH]

looks really promising. keep up the good work!

[Szark]

Looking pretty slick so far, Jason! Don't let us down! :D

[Drumonman]

looking good my friend, can't wait to see the final scene

[fearian]

Did you throw everything into unreal as one big ass mesh? or did you import lots of separate objects?

[JasonLavoie]

this looks cool. is that an AO bake you already threw on everything for that UDK shot or is UDK lighting just that good?

Thats just UDK doing its thing, I don't even have proper lightmaps setup for the models
(well... I have none right now, this was a quicck quick test last night).

Did you throw everything into unreal as one big ass mesh? or did you import lots of separate objects?

They are in groups... like the walkways are 1 model, the spikes sticking out of the stairs are one model (etc.).

I figure that would be the fastest, but I'm gonna go back and separate that shit once I get all the uv's laid out (they are unwrapped, just not setup the way I want too right now...).

Its messy, but for some reason I did it that way, and now im gonna have to pay for it.

[acapulco]

I would suggest to give your plateau in the middle far more place to the sides. It has no place to 'breath'. It looks quite claustrophobic. It would also look more epic if there was some atmospheric perspective in it. It looks all to narrow...

[JasonLavoie]

This is just a quick post before I hit the hay, but I've been messing around with how i'll be doing the zbrush work annnnd texturing style (was inspired by adam's technique for his new scene).

http://img402.imageshack.us/img402/5477/floortest1.jpg

I prefer the flat over the normal, but I think if I can get it right (and seeing how unreal handles normals) it should be subtle enough to work out hopefully.

[Autocon]

Looking great Jason. Loving the Normal/Textured looked. Cant wait to see this scene all purdy like with textures.

[undoz]

This is looking fantastic already! Love the lighting in UDK.

[Pavel Petrenko]

Good job Jason! Looks near Diablo 3 style!
What Adam you talking about?

[adam]

This adam.

Jason - why do you prefer the flat over the normal? I think the bumped version looks fantastic and works surprisingly well with this style. INTERESTING!

How are you going to get this bitch in to Unreal?

[MoP]

Jason: Looks great, man! Nice texture style too, it will be cool to see that style all over this environment.

adam: It already is in Unreal? o_O

[vcortis]

MoP: I think he meant once he lays out his UV's properly and everything he'll have to reimport it piece by piece which will be a major pain in the ass. If you try importing multiple objects at the same time it can (and from my experience) often does completly fuck up the shadows in UDK.

Major time consuming...

[JasonLavoie]

Major time consuimg indeed, but the good thing for me is alot of the objects I made with a base model, so most of them share the same uv's... so that part will be quick.

And honestly, since this is only meant for show, I don't have to worry about placing my objects since when I export, I always have pivot point set to 0, so it snaps right in place when I import it into UDK.

Thanks everyone for the feedback too, I'm glad you guys like the style, I'm going to push it more with some more highlights in the texture / little more detail here and there (not too much) and I'm hoping it'll make everything pop.

I'm gonna work on the sculpting style a bit more since I know the Darksiders always has this nice hard edged look to it, and I think it really helped them with their stone floor tiles etc.

Edit: Oh... and everything is UV'ed... I just need to place them in a sexy map (like vcortis said... maybe not the exact words though :P )

[MightyPea]

Jason: try to make it more sharp and angular (like you said yourself) with flatten/trim. I'm liking how it's looking so far, but that will really push it.

[skylebones]

Damn dude, this is looking great. I'll be following this for sure!

[chrisradsby]

really great work there mate, you have my eyes, I'll be following :)

[fearian]

I prefer the flats because they show the 'texture' of the floor better rather than normal map everything because we have to. for the normal map to match the texture here I think it would have to be very crisp and sharp, keeping to edges to give it a subtle 1px rim light effect.

at the moment its a bit doughy.

Also I can't explain well :D

[JasonLavoie]

(look below)

Round 2?

I'll be adding more detail to the mesh (and breaking up the bricks so it works on the platform) but yar, I tried to go for a more hard edge look, is it working better?

edit: and this is (once again) a 2 second base texture... just messing around and see how the normals work so far.

[JasonLavoie]

(image below)

Round 3...

Alright so here is my last update of the night for the floor (Have early classes tomorrow and I'm tired :P )

I still have to fix seam errors / normal errors (along the ornaments in the middle) as well as tear up the bricks and what not along the edges to help fit on the platform... ANNNDD make the center of the piece... and get some nice spec working on there (I want the ornaments to read as metal).

I should have this done by tomorrow, and from there I'll start working on tillable textures (texturing) for the walkways.

sleep time :)

[JasonLavoie]

http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/8755/platformtest3.jpg

Okie dokie... I think for the most part I'm done messing around with the textures for this, now I just need to break it up, make the center of it look bad ass... and do it all over again with new stuff :P

I'm gonna try my best to see if i can speed up my process with this project, I know I am slow as ffaaccckk.

[ajr2764]

I like the style your texturing is bringing into the project. Thats a really good normal map.

[bbob]

Looking good, man!

[marq4porsche]

Nice work, theres a seam in that texture that needs to be fixed though. I can't wait to see this piece finished, looks like tons of work.

[Sean VanGorder]

Its coming together really nicely, I like it. Did you ever find out if it is possible to organize things into sub folders in unreal? I have been wondering that as well.

[crazyfingers]

This is going to start looking really good, really fast once you get those textures on! can't wait dude :D

Small crit for the stonework. I think you should tone down the normals a bit on the actual block geometry (just take a soft brush and paint blue over the seams), keep the cracks normals as they are. This way you can draw more attention to the decorative bits of the scene without having so much scene noise, plus it just looks more hand painterly. Or maybe it's the AO that's making the blocks a bit too noisy, hard to tell. I really loved your "flat version" from earlier, would be nice to see more of that in the rocks.

[roosterMAP]

sick texture!

[praetus]

This is shaping up nice man. Good work

[JasonLavoie]

Small update just to show some progress... I'm hoping to have some nice big shots for you by the end of this weekend.

http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/4629/stonetest.jpg

My schedule was to zbrush everything first, and then textures start next week... But i've been finding I'm sculpting then texturing the same piece all at once, I don't know if that's taking more time... so I think I'm gonna stop that for a bit and just sculpt.

[JasonLavoie]

Double post but...

Does anyone know a solid way to either crank up the normals in udk / more so try and replicate how marmoset handles its normals / spec, because right now my scene has absolutely no information from the normal maps kicking in, and I know it has to do with the lighting... but there has got to be a trick to really help push those normals some more.

[crazyfingers]

If i'm trying to bump up my normals really quick, i just create a new layer of the texture in photohop, put it above and do an overlay, you can do this multiple times. You can also do this in UDK by multiplying the red and green channels of your normal separately with a multiply by 3 constant node, multiply the blue channel by 1, focus on increasing the values of the red and green and keep their values the same.

Other than that don't forget the importance of ambient occlusion maps to get some of that bake data in your diffuse channel, and like the overlay above for the normal, you can multiply the AO over itself to make it more obvious. Spec Value and power is also VERY important for making your normals pop. I'll usually lower the specular power very low (4 is as low as you want to go from my experience) if I want the normals to pop out on the entire object because it allows more spec on the object at any given time.

One last trick you can do is the transmission color. You can use a Fresnel, plug your normal in it, do a one minus from there plug that into a power and multiply node so you can adjust it and plug that into your transmission mask. This will give you some rim lighting on your object, plug a vector parameter into your transmission mask (i usually multiply it by a constant so i can make it pop as much as i want to) and start tuning it up. This rim lighting will help give your normals some pop and works great for hand painted environments.

Lemme know if you want to see any screenshots from the UDK showing this stuff off, or i could even just give you a sample upk file showing these setups in a sample material, i accidently slept through class today and could use some karma points ;)

[cycloverid]

I've heard quite a few techniques for cranking up the normal map info in Unreal. Unfortunately, it is my opinion that Unreal3 just has a fairly cheap and weak method of rendering normal maps.

Making heavy AO passes in the Diffuse map is such a hack, but that's one good way of faking it. In Sandbox, by contrast, some of my textures barely needed much of a Diffuse map on my last project. Overlaying normals produced very marginal results for me in UDK.

I'm sure many will think me a fool for says this! But, show me a prop in UDK, and I'll show you much better normals in Sandbox or Marmoset on a prop basis. Once everything is all lit up in UDK it can be hard to notice though.

I'd love to hear that I'm wrong!

[crazyfingers]

oh one other trick you can use in UDK is the "derivenormalZ" node. It'll ignore the blue channel and reconstruct it using your red and green channels, so if you you bump those up it'll have a greater effect on the overall normal. Can make a bit of a difference.

[JasonLavoie]

Crazy - Post a sample of a piece you've made with those normal tricks, I would love to see what kind of effects you are getting.

I really like that Fresnel trick, I will use that on this environment I think, just gotta make sure I can get a nice balance.

Currently I'm working on the walkways... thank god I unwrapped a base piece and THEN made my edits, or this would take SOO much longer then it is.

Would like to get the walkways semi - finished tonight, so everything has a base texture / normal and lightmaps set, I'll probably mess around with the normal tricks as well.

Thanks again all :)

[crazyfingers]

Yeah, all these texture tricks can look pretty shabby if you go overboard, make 'em subtle.

Here's a shot of it overboard, i adjusted some values so you could really see it in effect and i increased the normal tiling so you could see it more:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1451094/matsample.jpg

It's a fairly complicated material but i tried to make the setup as visible as i could without too many connections getting in the way. You can toy with the values till they fit your scene. This stuff only really works with a fantasy environment as lighting in the real world obviously doesn't make things glow on their dark side ;)

You can take this in any direction you want, like if you don't like the glow, you could instead multiply this by your diffuse and increase the shadowing in the dark areas to bring out the normals, just be creative with it.

That "mask R G" node is a componenet mask set to only affect red and green, but isn't really necessary since i'm rebuilding the blue channel anyway. But if i were trying to keep the blue information i'd use that mask. Come to think of it you could probably add .5 to the blue channel, raise it by a power, and then subtract .5 from it and "append" it back to the red/green channels to get some cool normal map control of the height channel.

[JasonLavoie]

Alritghy so... I'm not at all happy with how this is turning out right now, but I just gotta get into a groove and hopefully turn it around... I figure I'll at least pimp some stuff so you guys don't think I forgot.

http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/6513/shot1k.jpg
http://img197.imageshack.us/img197/5241/shot2mr.jpg

Everything is dirtyyyyy dirttyy WIP right now, I've spent most of the time going back and fixing up UV's since I did a semi-half ass job before hand, so now I'm finally getting to the point where I can start texturing for realz.

Lighting is bawls, but I don't want to get caught up in the little things just yet, need to keep on rolling with getting textures out / looking good.

Meh!

[EricV]

very darksider ish for sure. cool

[adam]

This is going to be so sick when its done. Any fun shots you've setup that we could see?

[JasonLavoie]

No "fun" shots yet, I've gotten a couple of ideas of some angles I would like for beauty shots, but because I've really only worked on the walkways, there's not much to show.

I'll be cracking away at this, and hopefully speed up just a bit so I can get some good progress done in the next couple days.

Thanks guys :)

[Rurouni Strife]

Keep pushing through! I'm roughly at the same place with my project right now, and it does kind of suck but I like Adam's advice of keep working and don't get hung up on something you can fix later.

Everything does look really nice, I love your texture work. Very inspirational.

[JasonLavoie]

Some more updates... time to start moving onto the terrian / rock part for a bit cause I'm getting tired of some of this stuff... but I'm slowly starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

So right now im just gonna "rush" through a first pass for the rest of these textures, I've already started to do it on the door / entrance area, so at least I can get an overall feel for the rest of the environment.

http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/7656/23470505.jpg
http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/350/45266769.jpg
http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/8099/45073374.jpg
http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/4931/20583556.jpg

[Pedro Amorim]

<3 it son!

[jocose]

Your kicken ass

[cycloverid]

The last post I made only focused on Unreal hate, so I just want to add in that it has been a lot of fun watching this evolve. I'm sure your texture work will all be stellar as usual. I love the scraggliness of it all.

[Ooghijmiqtxxa]

Hey Jason,

This is looking fantastic. I'm really digging the lighting. Keep it coming!

[crazyfingers]

Pushing forward is a great idea. Your flat greys are really throwing the lighting off. Can see how your stonework could use more lighting, but throwing more lights at it is overblowing your whitebox materials.

You might consider tuning your white material in the meantime so you can pump up your lighting.

Other than that i think you need to bump your normals somehow and get more spec on the stonework, overall just looks a bit too flat compaired to your max shots. It'll get there man, keep on truckin'.

Another material trick you might use with your UDK materials that you might not already know: when adjusting your materials with multiplies, powers or whatever, use a scalar parameter, not a constant. If you're using constants you can right click them and convert to scalar parameter, name it something appropriate. For example, if you want more spec, plug your spec into a multiply and plug a scalar parameter into the b input (you can hold "S" and click to get this node), name the scalar parameter specboost or something. Set this to 1 to keep it defaulted. Once you've got some of these adjustable scalar parameters for your diffuse, spec, spec power, normal intensity, create a material instance constant copy of the material by right clicking it in the browser and create a material instance copy. This material will allow you to adjust your scalar parameters in real time using a slider method as well as vector paramaters if you want to adjust a color node in real time. Simply expand the collapsed stacks on the left side and check the white box next to each parameter, this will enable your adjusted values to take effect. Not only will this work in real time (especially helpful for terrain materials), but this will also allow you to make many slight variations of the same material to really fine tune your scene! Just remember to put the new material constant onto the meshes.

[brandoom]

Jay, you rock my socks.

[slipsius]

Everything is dirtyyyyy dirttyy WIP right now


Stop saying this every time you post your stuff! commit to your ideas Jason! its just as bad as saying "good for a student" :P dick.... love you!

[JasonLavoie]

I hate you stefan.

Crazy - you have been a huge help buddy, you have some great ideas that I think will push this scene more and more, thanks for all the feedback. I've never worked with referenced materials before, but now when I get some more textures done, I'm gonna go back to my materials and set it up the way you suggested, should make on the fly changes 10x faster.

What do you mean when you say "white material"?

[crazyfingers]

Glad to help, Jason.

I was talking about the white material you have placed on your untextured objects. If you were to tone down that white to be almost as dark as your finished assets, it'll help you get more appropriate lighting and material tweaks in as you work, you wont be adjusting things against what's not actually in the scene.

[DennisGlowacki]

Totally keeping an eye on this.

[ae.]

Fucking Amazing!

[Nitewalkr]

Amazing work Mr. Jason :)

[Pavel Petrenko]

Very good job Jason!
Keep going!

[JasonLavoie]

Hey all, more updates (sorry for the long wait).

So I've put on a lot of place holder textures for the rest of the scene, but found myself spending a lot of time on the lava and learning some new stuff within udk (like vertex painting). Big thanks to some good friends from class that helped me out with this stuff, really brought the environment to life... I got a kick of inspiration from it.

http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/1273/preview31.jpg
http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/2726/preview32.jpg
http://img85.imageshack.us/img85/8665/preview33.jpg

This week I'll be focusing on the last push to get the final textures done / finishing up some sculpts, then the last couple weeks will be focused on tweaking the materials, creating some particle effects / shaders to help tie everything together. And of course... LIGHTING LIGHTING LIGHTING!

Big thanks to those who have helped me so far, defiantly couldn't have done it without them.

WEOPWEOP... moar work!

[ENODMI]

Awesome! Reminds me of Darksiders... which is awesome!! AWESOME!

[crazyfingers]

Now we're talkin' man! this is lookin' great!

Tone down your bloom though, bit distracting, and some depth of field might help reduce the noise brought on by your background elements. Regardless, imma stop giving crits, you got this shyt in order ;). Keep doin' what you're doing looking forward to more!

[JasonLavoie]

Don't you dare stop giving me crits :P

I'll defiantly work the post processing more, figure I can get away without touching it until I get the rest of the textures finished up... then its the fun stuff :P

[Mladen Jovicic]

damn , now that's badass

[Sneekyazn]

this is looking awesome man... any thoughts on like dirtying stuff up a little? would be kool to throw in a little bitta grime and wear to stuff maybe use the mesh paint in udk and throw in a nother node into your mat of a dirty grimy texture and paint that on in the corners and such to kinda break up the edges of your textures - or lots of cards :p but yeah man lookin awesome

[ae.]

My only crit is to turn down the bloom a weee bit other than that it s looking great!

[fearian]

a tad noisy. Bloom on the lava is distracting too.

[JasonLavoie]

Ok so I apologize for the lack of updates, i've been busy with other stuff for school / website stuff (which should be up soon) but yar... I took a screenshot for my BOY ae (braah braah yuh yuh!) and I thought that I should at least post somewhat of an update here...

http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/1861/preview41.jpg

I've been avoiding those support beams for so long now... but i'll tackle those next I think. I'd like to get some lava splash effect done as well... and then tweak tweak.

This is due tuesday, but I'll be working on it afterwards as well.

I know remi said to have some sort of depth biased transitioning between the dirt and the broken tiles... so I'd like to implement that later on as well.

Anywho, more screenshots to come, but I'd thought I'd post just to let people know i'm still working on it.

[alexk]

kicks ass dude!

[doeseph]

This is really awesome Jason, great job. How long has this entire piece taken you so far if you don't mind me asking? And you're using Max, right?

[JasonLavoie]

bah just got back from the lab (5:30 am now) and the screenshot looks a lot darker on my screen, which makes me feel all icky inside.

Anywho :P

doeseph - Its hard to say how long i've been working on it, cause for the last couple weeks i've been focusing on other projects, but I can say in the last couple days... most of the bigger changes (as in direction of the piece) has taken place... such as particle effects, new models, new lighting, etc. etc.

It all started with that chandelier thingy, and it took off from there. Before that I really hated it, couldn't see the direction it was going, but once I established that piece... and put those grates on it, it kinda hit me where I wanted to take it, and here it is now :P

This has definitively been the biggest project I've worked on... learnt a lot so far... and hopefully I can learn a bit more from the finally stretch that I have hit :)

More to come.. now sleep!

[Mistry10]

nice work man !
I really like the colours you got going on there. Maybe push the purple a bit more ?

[StefanH]

much better than the blue lighting. overall you should bring the midtones a bit higher I think. so its easier to see what going on :)

[Spatz]

WOW that´s Awesome.... i like the last tones (darker) much more...

[Matroskin]

good progres man, im gald u continue this project ;)

Right now in my oppinion it is hard to read the environment.
All glowing stuff takes all the attention. The strongest atractions for the eye right now are lava "waterfalls"

Reasons are:

1) huge brightness difference.
Most of enviro is quite dark while self-illuminated objects are very bright and don't seem to contribute to the lighting. i am sure all that lava would lit the surroundings more.
Anyways, in this case bright areas look more bright due to the rest of stuff is dark. Contrary is also true - darks seem even darker.

2) Not good color composition
Normally the warm color stands out for the human eye . If there r cold colors it will even increase the "importance" of warn for the eye.
Because of that lava streams again win all the attention :)

All that makes it harder to notice what is the point of interest in your environment. Right now i can tell what is that only by seeing the title of the thread :P
your architecture is great, its composition works well, but lighting and colors break that.
I would reccoment that u change lighting colors a bit, reduce glows and make colors and light lead viewer's eye to your throne.
Reduce light intensity around the "throne island" and increase lighting around the throne.
There is a "red carpet" passage and circular space which just need to become more dominant.
u can add some torches to the brindge passage for example ;)

Make color difference less harsh as well.

[Diwan]

Hey Jason, about time posting progress!! :) Very cool stuff man, although I gotta agree with above comments to tone down your bloom a tad. Yeah your last shot is very dark on my screen also, I really liked your blue stone from before. Now its more or less gray. Keep it up, MORE SCREENSHOTS!

[shinobix]

Jason,
You're scene is coming along nicely! I've been watchin your progress on this for a bit now. Really nice texture work you've got going on there :D
I've noticed a couple of artists on here are from Oshawa. Are there studios there in Oshawa or just schools?
Keep it up! Its looking really good!!

[JasonLavoie]

Big thanks to you mr Vlad (chatting with you on msn but might as well say thanks here as well).

Shinobix - Thank you :) There is no studio here, but most of those Oshawa people are from Durham College's Game Development program. Most of them are from 3rd year (year I'm in) and we've been working on our final projects, and a lot of them are turning out great.

Sorry again for the dark screenshots... that will be fixed next update... as well as taking down the bloom (sorry about that) annndd re-focusing the scene on the center (thanks again Vlad).

WORK WORK!

[shinobix]

I've heard of Durham college before. 3 year program eh? Nice! My program waaaay back in the day was only a 1 year certificate program. I can't imagine 3 years. I lived at the school and survived off of Tim Horton's coffee, cigarettes, and bagels... I call it my dark year. :D

Keep pimpin your scene man, its turning out really good!

[haiddasalami]

I heard from John that you guys are trapped in the dungeon at B wing :P Its nice to see some of the third year work :)

[DnS]

Jason, this shit is getting HOT. Nice job. I'll give you some feedback when there are less dark pictures that I can see.

[Taylor Hood]

Awesome! Reminds me of Darksiders... which is awesome!! AWESOME!

Indeed, it has a really, really strong resembelance to the Darksiders art style.

[JasonLavoie]

My one wish is if some of the environment dudes from Vigil would post some work from the game, and just DESTROY me with it, I would love nothing more than that!

So... hint hint nudge nudge!

[BradMyers82]

Hey Jason Great Job! This is definitely my favorite work from you yet. Not being an environment guy myself, I have learned a ton just reading threw this thread.

I may have missed it, but how did you solve the unreal normal issues. I tried to import some characters in unreal a long time ago, and the normals looked so flat, I nevered bothered with unreal again.

So, if you don't mind, can you show a little preview of one of your models, the textures, and the material setup. It would be a huge help to me understanding how to get stuff setup properly in Unreal. Also, showing your lighting setup when you are done would be really awesome also.

Congrats on the great work thus far dude!

[Rens]

Jason?

[Szark]

Looking pretty slick, Jason!

Forgive me if this has already been asked, but are any of your textures hand painted? Or are they photo sourced then filterised? :)

[JasonLavoie]

http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/54/demonthronelargescreen.jpg

Update... so this is what I handed in.

So I think I still need to work so much more with the lighting and bloom and what not... but right now my eyes need a bit of rest from this sucka, so I'm going to take the rest of the week to get up the portfolio site, then from there clean up whats needed (which there is alot... but I want to touch on the key stuff and hopefully be done with this).

If anyone wants to rip this up, please do... cause I KNOW that the lighting and what not is... too much (over exposed it feels like) but for the life of me, I can't figure out how it SHOULD look. So if anyone could do a paintover, or anything like that... it would be MUCCHHLY appreciated.

Thanks everyone for the help so far :)

I'll be getting out a fly through aswell... i'm kinda more excited for that since I have worked on a lot of particles / material effects that (i think) bring this scene to life, and it see it in motion should help seal the deal.

[ae.]

You are my HERO!

[Progg]

Nice job man. Lots of epic projects going down around here.

[JasonLavoie]

Ok soooooo... a BIG thanks to mr Andrew "Wood in my pants" Wood (shinobix) for doing this paintover for me, I thought I would share it with everyone on here as well, since I think this really illustrates a big problem I have when lighting my environments.

http://img121.imageshack.us/img121/5268/crit02.jpg

When I'm lighting, in the back of my head i'm thinking that everything is a "focal point", everything must be seen by the player. What he illustrates with the paintover (and I know others have said this before in my sci fi thread) is that I need to reaalllyy push my focal point, and that its ok that some things aren't scene. CONTRAST CONTRAST CONTRAST!

It's a newbie mistake, and I'm going to try from here on out to make sure when I'm lighting, I don't get the thought in my head that I need to show everything... what matters most is where I want to draw the viewers eye (as Vlad said before).

Anywho, I thought I share that with everyone, and know that I will go back to my scene and fix the lighting... eyes just need a break from this sucka :)

[ZacD]

shinobix beat me too it, I was going to suggest making the lighting more dramatic, and paintover, the painted over lighting does the piece a lot more justice.

[shinobix]

Hey no Worries Jay! Happy to help!! :D

[Jungsik]

(i need to change my avatar its not funny anymore)

this looks amazing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Rens]

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1559778/4chan/1267525659213.jpg

[Autocon]

Jason this is looking fantastic!

Sure the lighting can use some work and it looks like you have got some great direction so far as where to take it but even now its just a great piece.

It seriously looks like in game shots out of the latest Prince of Persia game.

[Painbringer]

JasonLavoie this is great looking scene, nice

Haha Rens this pic is very appropriate :>

[Minos]

Awesome!!

Please post breakdowns and pics of your assets :)

[marlfox8]

way cool. you have great ideas

[Nitewalkr]

Its Awsome!!!!

[soulstice]

Wow awesome scene Jason. Keep up the great work!

[vcortis]

Hey Jason, completley top notch stuff you have going here and great inspiration for anyone. The lighting does need work as others have pointed out, but you really hit a home run with this piece. It's something to be proud of for putting in all that work.

The paintover looks like a good start thanks to shinobix, but be careful with pushing the contrast too far, especially with your lava and lamps etc. There is a very fine line between great lighting and contrast to... hey things are blown out and I can't see jack over there in those shadows.

[ENODMI]

I think everything has been touched on as far as crits, just wanted to say... Really Nice Work!

[JasonLavoie]

Hey all... I got a quick question.

Is there any way I can edit the cameras near clipping distant, I'm currently working on a quick fly through of the level, and I'm having made clipping issues.

I think its because my level is about 1/10th of the size of the unreal character IN game (but it was modeled based off of an unreal character). So I COULD resize it all, the problem is... lights don't resize (translation wise) so I have to re-place all my lighting and I rather not do that.

Any and all help would be much appreicated!

[doc rob]

In my opinion, the emittance is way overdone and distracting. Do you want people looking at your neon tubes of lava or at your architectural elements? Bring the glow elements way down and make them subtle accents. Then you will have the tonal range to brighten up the key areas with more spot lighting.

I would also use less saturated light sources in general until you have your values better balanced. Then, turn up the saturation a bit on the lights that need it.

Hope that didn't sound too negative, it's a very nice piece!

[JordanW]

Lot of good points in this thread. Its looking good but I cant tell what the heck I'm supposed to be looking at. What's the focal point? You need to guide the viewer's eye and break out shapes. Everything is the same brightness, I don't see any main shadows, there's also no sense of atmosphere or air. You should be using fog planes or regular fog to decontrast stuff in the distance and break out silhouettes of foreground and midground objects.

[JasonLavoie]

Brawahaha, thank you for those awesome crits!

Jordan - I quickly played around with a fog volume before I left (doing this during class) and you nailed it man, it really added weight to the scene (as you said) so I'll be playing with that a bit more, and will have some updates later on in the week I hope. Thank you for that, it's something fairly basic... but does wonders for the scene's atmosphere.

Doc - Nah man, there can never be too much negativity :P (I didn't take it as being negative, I took it as some really good crits).

I have been playing around with the lava and the intensity ofl ight that it casts, and thanks to Andrew's paintover, I think its going in a much better direction (i'll post updated shots later... sorry :( ).

The main issue I am still having, is trying to balance the intensity of the lava material itself, because If I take out of the emmisive-ness, or bring it down to much, it completely loses the effect of the lava... I want it too look really bright and fresh... but if I crank it too much, then it just blooms way out (i've messed around more with bloom scale) and draws the eye away from the focal point.

When I post the new shots I'd like to hear what you think (if you have time). Finding that balance has been very hard throughout this scene's development.

And for other news, I've really enjoyed how Adam has gone about adding some near DOF to his scene, so I tried it myself and I think I'm getting some pretty good (yet subtle) results, so it's not as obvious when the camera is moving, but hopefully the screens can show some of that effect off.

And again... if ANYONE knows how to edit the Near Clipping Plane value, pleaseeee tell me

I need to get this fixed before I can put up the fly through.

[haiddasalami]

Come on Jason :) Level flythrough needs to be done soon so us first years can look at it closer. Got our levels due soon lol....

[crasong]

Is your light setup pretty much final? I might be talking rubbish but so far best thing i can suggest is baking the lighting?

[Target_Renegade]

Looks awesome, i want to know more about how the lighting was tackled and the number of lights used:)

[crazyfingers]

lights don't resize translation wise... you sure? Do you have their locations locked? I once had to rescale my level for the same reason and I was just 1 quick and dirty scale away from fixing it. Selecting everything and resizing it shouldn't really be an issue.

One thing you can try is hitting tab while in "play from here", and do a "changesize .1", or maybe its 1 and 10 is default. Might be setsize. Haha, hope that helps. Oh then do setspeed .1 to match your smaller size.

[JasonLavoie]

Crazyfingers... you must help me :P

Ok so I have some prefabs... and lights don't seem to scale up with those, as well as particle effects and what not, how did you do this?

And the change size didn't work, thanks for that suggestion though.

I would honestly think there is some text in the config files that allow you to set the near clipping plane value... this is facking stupid.

[Kovac]

NEARCLIP [value] - sets the near clipping plane

Is that the console command you were looking for?

Edit:
If that's not doing it try using 'set Pawn scale x'. Not sure if that will even work but it's worth a shot.

[JasonLavoie]

Kovac - Thanks man, im going to try that out. the nearclip thing doesn't pop up in the console though.

Here are some new images... if they are too dark i apologize, these monitors are just so fricken bright.

http://img149.imageshack.us/img149/3756/preview51.jpg
http://img410.imageshack.us/img410/4629/preview52.jpg
http://img293.imageshack.us/img293/4686/preview54.jpg
http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/9201/preview55.jpg

[crazyfingers]

arg, prefabs. I've had nothing but problems with those myself, can't really help with that, other than to say don't use prefabs unless everything's done and working exactly how you want to in the future ;).

Worse comes to worse dude just scale everything up, you never know when you might want to do a playthrough of the level, especially one of this quality. If the lights stay small just add new larger ones on top? (Or go all the way and ditch the prefabs, just copy paste the suckers). Can't say i can help much more beyond that, level design can be a B sometimes, live and learn!

Scene also looks a little dark right now, might want to adjust some post process highlights, midtones, and shadows. Not too much though, love the unique dark setting but you still need to see what's there :D

[Zipfinator]

I like the lighting much better this way! It's much more subtle compared to your last lighting pass. As Crazyfingers said though, some places are a bit too dark. An example in the second picture is the back of the broken pillars. Those faces are almost pitch black (At least on my monitor).

This is a great scene overall though! I've been watching your progress for the past few weeks but haven't posted until now. I'm going to bookmark this thread and use it as a reference for when I start building scenes completely with my own assets. It's great to see a well documented start to finish process from another artist to compare workflows and pick up new techniques.

Looking forward to future updates!

[JasonLavoie]

Whew... this stuff gets buried fast :P

Anywho, I just wanted to say that when I update my site (getting rid of lightbox, adding more breakdowns) they'll be a new video on there with a fly through, plus some quick videos (hopefully loopable) of some particle effects (if i think it'll work out... maybe it'll suck though).

The other thing I was thinking about... (this would be my first time doing it) is maybe make a 10 minute video or so, and just go through my environment, explain the process, break down some materials if need be, etc. etc.

This idea was inspired by Adam and how he has been doing such an amazing job documenting his current environment, and how other polycounters now are doing the same thing (I think its a great idea).

If anyone thinks this would be a good idea, let me know some of the things you'd like me to talk about or show. I don't want it to be too long, and most of the scene is all smoke and mirrors anyways, but if anyone has any ideas as to what they want me to talk about, just let me know.

I'll probably do the video sometime within the next 2 weeks, I've also written a postmortem for a class, and I'd be more then happy to post it up as well, nothing too in-depth though :P

Should be fun either way... hopefully :P

[Zipfinator]

I think going through the process of how you make a texture for this type of stylized hand-painted environment would be great. I don't mean as much for your portfolio, but for others to learn from. I would love to see the entire process from sculpting to final texture as it's something I plan to learn and practice a lot in the coming months.

[Rens]

Jason?

[Timothy_graybill]

I want to see the process of you going from sculpting in zbrush, to how you texture the asset to the final model in max or maya

[JasonLavoie]

Damn, haha... gonna need a bit more then 10 minutes for that, and in all honest... my textures are shit... like I said, smoke and mirrors :P

Edit - Bah that sounded rude. What my intention is for this little video is to take a quick look at everything and talk about the process of starting from concept to ending with what I have now. I can certainly touch on those aspects, but I don't think I am prepared to do an entire video on that just yet, I feel as though I still need to get better myself before I start "teaching" or doing a tutorial.

I'd like too though, its just that I still need to get a little more confidence in that area.

Let me see what I can do though, I want to plan everything out before I go ahead with this.

[Zipfinator]

You're not giving yourself enough credit! You're scene is great and beginners like me could learn a lot from it.

A breakdown of this scene from start to finish would be great too. It doesn't have be super in depth. It would be awful nice of you to make a simple texturing process video/tutorial though! You don't have to show all the intermediate steps like a sculpting lesson and painting the texture in photoshop, just breakdown your workflow into steps to make it easier for beginners to jump in. An quick example would be A. Sculpting, B. Baking, C. Painting, ETC with tiny little explanations in important parts like how you get your sculpt to tile.

Sorry if it feels like we're asking a lot from you. We just want you to share your knowledge with us!

[Zack Fowler]

Hey, great scene man! I missed this during my slovenly PC hiatus. Dunno how much work you've done since the 4/8 posting but I did a quick paintover, hope you don't mind:

http://www.zackfowler.com/files/jason_paintover.jpg

Basically I'd recommend pushing the torches in the "playable area" so to speak into a more neutral coloration, that way you can help the visuals separate into zones while maintaining the high contrast. You could also push the lava and the light it casts to be more red to reinforce that further, and use the red light from the lava to help ground the center platform in the environment. Cheers :)

[JasonLavoie]

Oh shit... zack, man that is nice dude, those red highlights work so well... I'm gonna mess around with that buddy.

The reason why i took the intensity down from the lava was because people said it was drawing the eye... but I like how you're using the redish tone for the bottom / highlights, and using the more neutral tone for the playable area. I think someone else had said to do the same thing (it may have been Andrew) and looking back at my scene, i don't think I fixed that.

Thank you a bunch Zack, I will for sure fix it up in that direction, that really helps push the platform into focus I think. And its good to see you back on the forums man, I hope everything is going well.

Zip - Ok I see what you mean... I'll try and work that in actually. I don't think I do anything differently from what I've been taught from tutorials such as racer's and what not, but I'll defiantly go over it then.

Thanks again guys

[Zack Fowler]

Cool man, glad it helps. :) Things are going great, I'll have to get on MSN sometime so we can catch up!

[JasonLavoie]

Brah brah

http://img196.imageshack.us/img196/3278/52079334.jpg
http://img338.imageshack.us/img338/5013/12095906.jpg
http://img707.imageshack.us/img707/307/43798125.jpg
http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/2865/93436951.jpg


And here is my school demo reel -

http://vimeo.com/10966247

Last day of classes... I'm finally done, but back to work I go :)

[Timothy_graybill]

love this piece!

[Mistry10]

very nice man! i love it.
i really like you lighting it turned out really well
good luck on the job hunt !

[Zipfinator]

Love the red highlights. Not sure about those lantern things, but they aren't horrid. I'm just not sure that you need them. Sure they add some lighting contrast on the rock walls and they allow for some depth of field but they seem a bit out of place to me. I think the reason they seem out of place to me is because they make the entire piece seem a bit more playful and fairy-like instead of a decrepit Demon's throne.

Getting close to being finished!

[JasonLavoie]

Hehe... I think for the most part its done buddy :P Unless someone does another sick paintover, I would love to call this finished.

[haiddasalami]

o man...this makes our first year demo reels look like shit lol.

[OrganizedChaos]

That is a damned impressive looking reel, fantastic job on all of that.

[Zack Fowler]

Great work man, that's a very solid reel too! What is the soundtrack?

[[HP]]

Great stuff you got here Jason, also I loved your reel mate! :)

[ScudzAlmighty]

very nice enviro Jason, makes me think Darsiders and Diablo got busy, very cool.

the reel isn't too shaby either.

[Acumen]

i really really love each and every piece of this environment, but the lighting is still a huge letdown for me :(
as others have already stated the contrast is something im having problems with. while i never been to a lava cave, i'd imagine, if lava would shine and sparkle like in your environment, the environment itself would be lit much much more. i don't know something in my head tells me, that theres something wrong with the way the space is lit. i think lava that is so bright would emit much more strong light to the surrounding than it is in your scene. and that's whats throwing me off on this piece. my eyes expect way more light that the lava lighting level suggests, yet all i get is some red spotlight lighting on the surrounding rocks and the rest stays totally dark.
the contrast is so harsh and i think that's the reason why people were bothered with losing focus on the scene.
i really thought in motion it might be different, but after having watched the video, im getting the same vibe from it.

i'm no video game master, so i don't remember too many games with lava in it, so i just did some random google searching ;)

http://i821.photobucket.com/albums/zz136/lostsaga/lava1.gif
http://nostalgeek.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/lava_ballad_by_orioto-noscale.jpg
http://bulk.destructoid.com/ul/144445-preview-starcraft-ii-single-player/Lava-620x.jpg
http://i.ytimg.com/vi/JXdzUmD1C5U/0.jpg

it's clearly not the genre you're shooting for, but still i feel it represents what i'm trying to say, yet fail to deliver :D
i'm so bad at explaining stuff :P
i know, the video's already done, and you're probably not gonna rework it, yet it may be an indicator towards the future to digg even deeper into lighting your game environments.
your reel looks wonderful and sure it's just a matter of time, till you land an awesome quatro AAAA studio job :D

[vcortis]

Hey Jason,

This turned out great and it was especially a pleasure seeing the level in motion on your reel. You weren't kidding you really did go all out on this. Major props, it's a stellar piece. My only crit would be that it looked like the lava waterfalls were falling a bit too fast for the type of consistency molten lava is. In general I think it's pretty slow moving and very thick/rubberband like.

At anyrate, good luck with your job hunt, your stuff is really solid. :thumbup:

[crazyfingers]

Truly inspiring man! Not only is this stuff job worthy, but "good job" worthy.

Hope you have a good resume and cover letter made up, just as important as your portfolio. If you want crits on 'em don't be shy about sending a copy over.

Good luck on the hunt!

[JasonLavoie]

Hey everyone, I just wanted to let you guys know that the video series is now fully up on Vimeo, and ready to be completely destroyed by you lovely folks.

http://img265.imageshack.us/img265/6474/videoul.jpg

De-Constructing "Demon Throne" - A Postmortem / Tutorial Video Series

This is a Postmortem / mini Tutorial video series I have recorded to hopefully help those who are starting out on their first larger scale Environment.

Through this video series, I explain (in-depth) the evolution of my UDK Environment piece, "Demon Throne", as well as showing a basic process of taking a High Poly base from 3D Max, bringing it into Zbrush for sculpting purposes, then taking it back into 3D Max for baking. I also breakdown one of the texture maps that was used in the scene.


Video Here - http://www.vimeo.com/album/227064



I'd love to hear what you guys think... I know its probably pretty painful to listen to at points since apparently I can't talk and move a mouse at the same time, but HOPEFULLY someone will get something out of this, which will be more than worth it despite all the hateful things you will say.

Thanks again for all the help guys, couldn't have done it without you.

[LosPescados]

sir you are awesome! Hope I find time to watch all these vids ! :)
When I was looking through the whole thread and see your improvement I was impressed and at the end you 've posted some cool vids! Awesome thanks!

[3dflasher]

Awesome stuff. It's pretty cool you took the time to make this. The piece came out great and the postmortem vids are excellent.

P.s. Your voice sounds like mine and it scares me :)

[ENODMI]

Just started watching, really cool. Im about to embark upon building an environment for the first time, and this looks like just the thing to watch. Thanks so much for taking the time and sharing this with us:)

[PogoP]

Nice work, I'm gonna watch these through over the next few days. :D

[marlfox8]

awesome, im watching this thing

[Orb]

srly, one of my favourite scene using udk (i love darksiders/comics style)

I can try to find some solution to download FLV videos from vimeo, but, just in case, do you have any link, where we can direct-download it? To be honest i'd like to convert them for my psp, that way i can learn some stuff while i'm stuck in subway ^^"

btw, thanks a lot! huge work you did for us, and people who are intersted on this scene.

[haiddasalami]

NOM! Thanks Jason :)

@Orb: You can download files off Vimeo if you're a member and within 2 weeks of it being put up I believe. If not just grab flashgot plugin for firefox and download the FLV :)

[Rens]

"but ummm?"

<takes another drink>

[JasonLavoie]

"but ummm?"

<takes another drink>

Oh you love it rens!

As for downloading, I'll be finding some way to host it up on a site soon enough. I was thinking about using my own server, but I don't want to max out the bandwidth.

So i'll find a place to host the full download (at better quality too) soon-ish I hope.

[Devin Busha]

Wicked environment! Really loving your work man. Grats on the new job and thanks for doing the postmortem. Already learned a good bit from watching your section on texturing. Big thanks! :D

[Timothy_graybill]

Hey man, watched the video. you are really not confident in the way you talk about your work. and there is no reason that you should act that way, your stuff is really great looking, anyways I really liked watching the evolution of this piece while you were making it , and now actually hearing what you where thinking why you made it was pretty interesting. good Idea with the video. I really like the environment.

Oh and when I was working on my demo real while I was in school I ran in to the same problem of trying to bake z brush models in max , when they were way to High poly for it. When I learned how to bake in z brush it changed My world. like night and day. and its not very difficult. no need to uv map before you start sculpting either. let me know if you would like the steps or you can try and find the process on prologics website.

[JasonLavoie]

Oh man defiantly share, I remember when I first started using zbrush on this old ut3 mod, the guys said it couldn't be done, so it's been stuck in my head since then.

But yuh let me know about that process, would save me a boat load of time... and plus I still need to learn xnormal as well.

[Timothy_graybill]

Ill make one up real quick for ya right now.

[build.]

Awesome stuff, watched through some of them. Ill definitely have to finish watching the rest.
I'm just starting a new project, these gave me a nice boost of motivation.
Nice insight to your workflow. Very informative.

Thanks for the time you put into making these available.

[Timothy_graybill]

z brush normal map baking steps

1, Ok so your finished sculpting your detail in z-brush, now you want to make you low poly model in max and you want to make it reflect the silhouette of your High poly.
(I usually export a low poly version of the model from zbrush to model over with the low poly in max to get the silhouette just right)

2. when you have you low poly mesh uv mapped and ready to bake you import it into z brush just as you would any model as an obj format.

3. now that you have both models imported you want to start with the High poly model. you want to lower the subdivision levels to the lowest level or close to the lowest level (z mapper doesnt like high poly counts). (Important) Once you do that make sure and go to the texture menu on the right side of your screen and click the disable uvs button. only do this for the high poly model since we want the uvs from the low model.

4. now we go to z mapper . with the High poly model selected, click the z mapper button on the top left of the screen. In z mapper click the open configuration button and pick 3d max tangent spaced normals best quality. Then go to projection tab. click the button called Capture current mesh . (this stores you high poly model). Now click the z mapper button again to exit z mapper.

5. now go to you low poly model and go straight back in to z mapper. you High poly model should still be there and now all you have to do is hit Create Projection normal map. give it a minute to bake the texture. Now you should see your normal map applied to the model.
( if it looks correct move on to step 6, if not you could try adjusting the Raycasting Max Scans Distance. It works kinda like a cage. if this doesn't work you may need to go back to max to adjust your model.)


6. now that your normal map is made all you have to do is go to thetexture drop down at the top of your screen, and click the export button to export your normal map.

Tada, z brush normal baking made easy
and Our lives get simpler

[JasonLavoie]

Oh damn that sounds pretty sick man... just wondering though, does Zbrush 3.5 have zmapper? I'll have to give this a try.

Thank you very much Timothy :)

[GarageBay9]

Oh damn that sounds pretty sick man... just wondering though, does Zbrush 3.5 have zmapper? I'll have to give this a try.

Thank you very much Timothy :)

I'm almost positive Zmapper was removed in 3.5. More of pixologic's incomprehensible mental flailing...

[paulsvoboda]

Jason - Thanks a lot for the videos. Very insightful and I really enjoyed seeing how you worked on the environment - A lot of good stuff/tips in there. The last texturing one was really good.
Thanks a lot

[Timothy_graybill]

I'm almost positive Zmapper was removed in 3.5. More of pixologic's incomprehensible mental flailing...

lol yeah Im still using z brush 3.1. welll really I havent felt the need to upgrade because it works fine for me. aaahhhhhh poor me. lol

you right though. and heres why

Projection of Details from a High Resolution Mesh to Different Topology. This was actually the main reason why ZMapper was developed in the first place. However, thanks to the projection features that now exist in ZBrush (the ZProject Brush, as well as Tool>SubTool>Project All) you can now do such projections without needing ZMapper. What's more, you have much more control. Project All has settings that you can use to refine your projections. The ZProject brush lets you project specific areas. Masks can protect parts of the model from projection if you know that they will create problems. After projection, you can also clean up the results before creating your normal map. (With ZMapper, what it gave was what you got. You had no way to refine your results.)

for more reasons why zmapper is no longer in z brush go here
https://support.pixologic.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=39

[torontoanimator]

dude i cant thank you enough for these! im currently working on a character thats nearly done sculpting, but i have a plan for an enviroment piece already for when its done! this tutorial thing will be very handy :D

[Glode]

Hey Jason, awesome piece of work you've done here! I really love it! massive inspiration for me to start working again now that I've finished my course at University.

Big thanks for the video's man, they helped a lot! was great seeing how you went through the process of the scene and an even bigger thanks go out for explaining your texture process :) I r big Fan D:

some tips for the future:

just encase you want to do another video in the future make sure to create some notes before hand so you have some sort of script to go off so you will know what to say and if you forget anything the hints will give you a nice guide (you probs know this/do this anyway :P)

MOAR confidence in talking about your work! your hugely talented man, don't worry so much about it!

I noticed several time's where you said "I dunno", I used to do this until I started writing build reports about my projects (I do it for all of them lol). I write them so I know if I need to go back and look at how I did something or if someone else wanted to know how I did something, I can just refer back to my build report to see the process I went through. <-- they don't need to be in huge detail, just notes about the steps you took are fine :D this will also help with note taking for scripts for a video walk through.

But thats just how I do it! hope that helps some how, but I'm sure you know all this anyway :)

Awesome work man, really love the style! keep it up! :D

cheers again for the walk through!

[JasonLavoie]

Glode - Man those are some good ideas :) I'll keep that in mind for sure.

And yuh... moar confieence indeed, I think it has something to do with being my first video and I didn't want to say something and be incorrect, cause I knew this video series would be geared towards newer artists, so I don't want to tell them false information.

But yuh I totally agree, I'll keep that in mind :)

[EricV]

awesome tutorials/walkthroughs. Gonna have a go thru them all when I get some time

[A R K A I K O]

awesome work,incredible environment!

[Mistry10]

SICK!!!!!

[piippo]

Great stuff and big thanks for the videos.

[Vanlande]

Great work man! So you mentioned that you watched some tutorials on texturing and that you would paste the links for them, but i haven't been able to find them. Think you can pass them along please? Thanks.

[Graphix72]

I love it!

[JTerry]

I am very impressed by this one, highly inspirational. Love the lava man ;)

[kevorkio]

I want to see a render of this man

[A R K A I K O]

stunning work!

[XRevan23]

i know what tutorials im going be using with my next scene

[Inxa]

As I mentioned on your hallway thread, I am watching the videos, pretty sleepy so will do that tomorrow for sure. But, I went through this thread quite in detail. Fantastic final output.

Look forward to see the videos, all of them. Have seen first 2.

If you can make it available for download would be great.


Girish.

[linkov]

If you can make it available for download would be great.


use this: http://keepvid.com (it works with vimeo too)

[ZeroCartin]

Thanks for this! :D Im going to study your level extensively and ask some questions when I finish your viewing your videos :)

[JasonLavoie]

Thanks Inxa and Linkov :)

[toxic_h2o]

The vids are epic, thanks for taking the time to make them and feel free to make more! haha so helpful thanks again!

[shinobix]

It needs more cowbell.

[JonFF24]

Looking good so far can't wait to see more keep up the good work

[Insaneivan]

nice work

[mcunha98]

Nice work and greate videos.
Thanks for share

[hydzior]

Yummy :]

[willymelvin]

good stuff dude

[artsymptom]

Man, you are so inspiring, I think watching all this stuff I'm gonna skip learning rigging and topological structure of character for a couple of months, I think I love more this kind of environmental designs, they look so handcrafted, artesanal and... JUST LOVE IT. Thanks for sharing :)

[Baron Flame]

Brilliant work !! Absolutely Amazing!!
By the way I half expected Akuma/Oni to standing there :P

[krateos_29]

very impressive work, for sure :)

[cobra1979]

This is really great.

[WREA]

Nice work!

[m1neh]

Great work man! So you mentioned that you watched some tutorials on texturing and that you would paste the links for them, but i haven't been able to find them. Think you can pass them along please? Thanks.

I second this!!! Good job!!

[SanderDL]

I think the tutorial links are in here:

http://vimeo.com/album/227064

[globaltrade]

Thanks for sharing

[theNamesHasi]

Dayum son this looks tight. Saw this in the program reel john put together, kinda wish I stuck around 3rd year that time now.

[JasonLavoie]

Haha sadly they aren't too heavy on the tutorial part :(

[warcongalala]

great stuff for me to refer man,say...ya know how to create normal maps for fallen debris?I have no luck doing it,I sculpt debris some thing like a pyramid and then create a pyramid mesh to bake the maps on to,ya know of some different and easy method?

[shinobix]

Jason Lavoie, you are the man. When are we going to see some new stuff that you're tinkering with at home? Or maybe I could swing by your desk and see what you're working on here at work??? But your desk is so far away, and that would require me walking...

[Gods_Requiem]

Coming out real nice so far, can't wait till it's fully textured and done

[FullSynch]

Uhg this is PAINFULLY good. I don't even know where to start when making an environment. For now I'll have to stick to creatures and props and what-not. This is looking really great, what are the plans for this when it's finished?

[ReixDiffcerce]

Ïðè çàïóñêå ïðèëîæåíèÿ, ñêðûâàþùåãîñÿ ïîä èêîíêîé (ýòî ìîæíî ñäåëàòü ïî îøèáêå, ïðèíÿâ. Ñêà÷àòü àñüêó äëÿ ñåíñîðíîãî òåëåôîíà áåñïëàòíî (http://rggu-el.ru/fotoarhiv/mob/skachat-asku-dlya-sensornogo-telefona-besplatno.html) Î÷åíü èíòåðåñóåò êàê äåëà ñî ñîôòîì íà Àíäðîéäå. .