[UDK] Small Fantasy Environment

[CrackRockSteady]

I don't normally use zbrush very much so I decided to do a small environment that would give me a chance to learn some of the tools a bit better.

I'm not completely satisfied with how everything came out, but I've been picking away at this thing for way too long and am just going to call it done. It was a fun learning experience and I think the end result isn't half bad.

C&C very welcome, I probably won't be making any big changes at this point but I'll still be fixing things here and there, and can always use crits and advice for future projects.

http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/8453/corridor01.jpg

http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/5005/corridor02.jpg

http://img715.imageshack.us/img715/5821/corridor03.jpg

http://img263.imageshack.us/img263/9629/corridor04.jpg

http://img502.imageshack.us/img502/3752/corridor05.jpg

http://img100.imageshack.us/img100/8349/corridor06.jpg

Wires for a few of the tiling meshes:

http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/5710/corridortiles.jpg

[Vrav]

Hey, nice work. I really like the colour balance in both the scene and its textures, makes for an interesting blend between artsy and realistic. The first thing that stood out to me, and that I anticipate would be mentioned by others, is the sharpness and overall "clean" look to the vertical intersections where the pillars meet the wall. At first it was distracting, but now I kind of like that cleanness; putting grunge and occlusion everywhere is probably overrated.

Still, that area is pretty crisp and might benefit from some shadowing or subtle transitions on the pillar or the wall, if not for any other reason than to simply match the presence of such shadowing in the details of the pillar itself.

[Bal]

Yeah the transitions from pillars to wall is definetely what bothers me the most, just needs a subtle touch to break it up, as it really creates clean vertical lines that don't quite fit with the scene.

Looks really nice otherwise, the only other thing that disturbs me a bit is the sword agains the pillar, it feel like it would fall in that position.
Maybe you could have an unlit torch to give the scene more diversity, and create more lighting variation.

[CrackRockSteady]

@Bal @Vrav - Thanks for pointing that out, I'll take a look at it tonight and see if I can paint in a bit of grunge at the intersection of the walls and pillars.

[Orb]

I really love the walls, and the cave atmosphere. I think you should have something less gradient blended from the smooth paint to the bricks, in that hole, it feels a bit unnatural right now. Something more like the paint fell off and shows the brick under it. The blended yellow liquid in the floor, is a bit undefined also.

keep it up!

[CrackRockSteady]

@Orb - Thanks man glad you like it.

I made a few revisions based on feedback. I painted in some grime around the pillars, seems to have helped at least a bit, what do you guys think? suggestions?

I toned down the reflections on the water too, was probably a bit much.

http://img256.imageshack.us/img256/5723/revisionv101.jpg

http://img213.imageshack.us/img213/6358/revisionv103.jpg

http://img850.imageshack.us/img850/1346/revisionv102.jpg

[SnowInChina]

looking better now

only thing that disturbed me was the part where you mentioned you turned down the reflections of the water
i was like "wtf, where´s the water?"
after looking through every render again i realized that the sand in between the stones is the water :)

but overall its looking really good

[CrackRockSteady]

haha, this is exactly why I need new eyes on this. I've been staring at it for too long so I just see what I want to see.

[Cordell Felix]

Hey man this looks really good. I really like the wall and floor textures. I like the sand/water you have in between your floor cracks.

There are a few things that look strange to me.
Scale - Right now the size of the walls and the negative space it creates with the whiteness of the texture...makes everything look really small.
I say double the size of your chests and flip a couple of your barrels up right. Every prop is almost on the same level of height, so break that up!

The damaged hole in the wall looks to clean, it's as if each brick was slowly chipped out. The hole is created with orthogonal lines which is just weird. You need to redo that hole and make it look like it was really blown up or whatever. Add some more bricks that lay down in front of that hole too, even like a huge pile built up with sand/debris that contain a few bricks.

Random suggestions:
-Maybe place a couple of those torches on the wall in-between the pillars and some off the pillars.
-hang up some weapons with a weapon rack on the walls?
-hang up a painting or fashioned rug on the walls?
-crack one of dem pillars up a bit with some of the chipped part lying on the floor?
-stack some of the barrels into a pyramid?

overall:
-THE ROOM NEEDS MORE CLUTTER!!!!

:]

[nathanbarrett]

Very impressive!

One thing I have noticed is the fire on the torches.. Is this a static mesh or a particle effect? it seems unlikely for a scene that all fire would be burning in the exact same way, at the same rate, and therefore give off an identical amount of light. The point light you've used and obviously duplicated for all the torches is the perfect colour, but you might want to vary the radius and falloff a bit so the fire doesn't all look so uniform :)

[shotgun]

i actually approve of the original sand-looking water
it makes the whole scene pop
make it sand if u must, turn what looks cool into reality
if that color and value works for u - make it work

other than that its a beautiful scene all around. just the cleanliness thing... not just the transitions, also the world objects etc, very clean compared to the rest

[CrackRockSteady]

@nathanbarrett -- it is a flipbook effect, I noticed what you are talking about also but I couldn't figure out if there was a way to offset the frames of the animation in the fx editor. I'll have to take another look and see if I can figure it out. Good suggestion on varying the radius and falloff of the lights though, I'll fiddle with that tonight and see how it looks.

@shotgun -- I may have to experiment with some different settings and maybe even make an actual sand variation of the material and see what that looks like.

[Rapture117]

Haven't been on these forums for awhile now, but I love the color scheme you got going on & really dig the cartoony/realism feel of your scene! Just curious, what engine is this rendered in? Also, this is kind of the exact style I want to make in one of my scenes, but haven't really learned Zbrush that much. If you have any recommended tutorials I would appreciate it man! Thanks again and kudos on the scene :D

[ladyknowles]

This is really great. Such good atmosphere.

If I was going to recommend anything, I'd say maybe more specularity/highlights on the rocks round the edges on the floor, but it's not really that necessary!

Keep up the good work!

[CrackRockSteady]

@Rapture117 - Thanks man! The scene is running in UDK.

As far as techniques I used for making the scene, I used 3dmotive's advanced mesh paint tutorials as a jumping off point and then tailored the materials to my needs for the floors and walls. The zbrush modeling wasn't anything very complicated, for the floor tiles and bricks I just sculpted a few different meshes I brought in from max (probably 3 or 4 different bricks and 4 or 5 different floor tiles). Mostly used mallet fast brush and some of the trim brushes. Then just brought them back into max to make tiling textures and bake out normal and AO maps. After that I did a bit of painting on the textures and combined it with low-opacity photo ref textures.

The stucco/paint/whatever part of the wall was done in zbrush as well, there are a few tutorials floating around out there that explain how to make tiling textures in zbrush (IIRC there are even a few links in the polycount wiki somewhere).

I can post some of my texture flats if you would like, just let me know.

@ladyknowles -- thanks for the C&C :) I think I'm calling this one done now, but I'll definitely keep that in mind for my next project.

[CrackRockSteady]

Alright, I think this will be my final update, if I don't call it done I'll be tweaking things forever.

I finally figured out how to get proper reflections on the floor, as well as how to offset frames on the torch FX, and I varied up the torch lights a bit.

http://img3.imageshack.us/img3/4514/revisionv201.jpg

Thanks everyone very much for your comments and suggestions, it helped a lot. As always, C&C still welcome and will be taken into consideration on future projects.

[Rapture117]

@Rapture117 - Thanks man! The scene is running in UDK.

As far as techniques I used for making the scene, I used 3dmotive's advanced mesh paint tutorials as a jumping off point and then tailored the materials to my needs for the floors and walls. The zbrush modeling wasn't anything very complicated, for the floor tiles and bricks I just sculpted a few different meshes I brought in from max (probably 3 or 4 different bricks and 4 or 5 different floor tiles). Mostly used mallet fast brush and some of the trim brushes. Then just brought them back into max to make tiling textures and bake out normal and AO maps. After that I did a bit of painting on the textures and combined it with low-opacity photo ref textures.

The stucco/paint/whatever part of the wall was done in zbrush as well, there are a few tutorials floating around out there that explain how to make tiling textures in zbrush (IIRC there are even a few links in the polycount wiki somewhere).

I can post some of my texture flats if you would like, just let me know.

Thanks for the write up man, will definitely check out some of this stuff after work! If it isn't a hassle, I'm really interested in the texture flats whenever you have time of course. Thanks again and kudos! :thumbup:

[Computron]

Are you going to post a video?

[CrackRockSteady]

@Rapture117 -- Here are flats for the floor, walls, and pillars:

http://img832.imageshack.us/img832/9485/textures01.jpg

http://img638.imageshack.us/img638/9666/textures02.jpg

Also made a few last tweaks to the scene, here are the final shots:

http://img580.imageshack.us/img580/56/fantasyenv01.jpg

http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/1983/fantasyenv04.jpg

http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/9497/fantasyenv05.jpg

http://img836.imageshack.us/img836/8807/fantasyenv06.jpg

@Computron -- I'll see if I can remember how to animate a camera in UDK.

[cholden]

I really like the technical execution of these scene. Looks nice, reads well, focal points, blah blah blah.

The biggest drawback is the direction. every surface looks like something from a different scene. There are at least four bricks of different scale, medium, weatheration and general painting style. The flats really give it away as each diffuse and normal is at varying levels. On the job, this would be your leads fault, so I don't see this as a that bad of an offense over the fact that the scene is well executed. It will, however, leave everyone thinking "something's not right" when they look at it, but possibly not understanding why. So without totally recreating some materials, it might be better to move on.

[CrackRockSteady]

@cholden -- I know exactly what you are talking about. I worked on this small bits at a time with large gaps of time between, and I did a pretty bad job staying consistent with all the textures and materials. Definitely something I'm going to have to try to improve on for my next project.

[sybrix]

I REALLY enjoy this scene and atmosphere. Gorgeous lighting work!

The transition of the stucco/stone material to intact fully formed bricks on the walls and top of some of the pillars is strange to me though. Especially around the hole in the wall. I think maybe a cracks texture instead of bricks would have been more of a believable effect.