I'd represent the main asteroid belt with the major dwarf planets symbols. I added the greek and trojans asteroid groupd around jupiter, but I recognize it's overkill.
I'd represent the main asteroid belt with the major dwarf planets symbols. I added the greek and trojans asteroid groupd around jupiter, but I recognize it's overkill.
Oh that is lovely! Didn't think of putting in the asteroid belt, very clever.
I did consider moons and dwarf planets, but was worried that it would get too crowded, but your arrangement works very well. I really like this direction, I'll do some variations of it today.
Quick question though. Is that an alternative symbol for Pluto, or did you replace it with a different planet?
Here's the video of the process. It's still uploading so give it some time. The final .avi file ended up being 1 GB of some reason (I'm clueless when it comes to video encoding).
I messed up in some way so the texture doesn't tile perfectly. I suspect it's due to a scale issue since the mesh was enormous and offset into a corner when I imported it. But the basic principle is there. If someone knows why it messed up like that I'd love to know.
Ok this took way too long. I tried doing everything by hand, then I tried doing it in zBrush, and finally I just said fuck it and bought nDo2 and did it all over in Photoshop. At least now I know how to do it.
So yeah. NDo2 makes things go fast. I did the second window in one night, compared to the main window which took a few days. Not 100% complete. I need some dirt and noise, and i don't have a proper specmap yet.
Yikes I completely forgot about this thread again.
Anyways. Things were going too slow and I'm running out of time, so I've decided to focus in on a hero asset and finish that up properly instead of crunching on a half baked enviro. I'll try to finish the whole thing eventually, but right now for the sake of portfolio and job hunting I need to get something out the door quickly.
Mostly done getting the main detail in. I will make another pass on it for tertiary detail like scratches, dents, and decorative engravings. Right now I'm just blocking in the textures and trying to get the material definition right. Pretty pleased with the copper but the brass and iron need a lot of work. Hard to tell how Marmoset's lighting translates to UDK or Cry3. Right now my diffuse texture is really dark but it still shows up in the toolbag as really saturated and bright.
That telescope is awesome, I love the silhouette/model!
I would get rid of that leather strap though, it's kind of ruining the scale and it looks way too flat. Also the wood planks on the vertical supports don't match the shape that well.
The copper looks really good, but the other materials need some more work. And the gloss of the glass needs to be way higher.
@komaock
Good point about the belt, I hadn't considered that. I'm going to make a second pass at the detailing for scratches and such so I will address that there. The materials do indeed need work, but I find myself a bit limited by Marmoset. I spent a lot of time yesterday figuring out how to import it into Cryengine3 since I've seen some gorgeous metal in there, but I find that it's too much work and learning involved in getting nice results so I'll stick to UDK for now.
@spectre1130
The windows were done in NDo2. I painted the pattern on separate layers in Photoshop and then used NDo2 to convert them to normals.
A quick update today. I fixed the color scheme to be less patchworky and garish. The colors are not really final, but the arrangement is a lot nicer now.
All right, I consider myself pretty much done with the telescope for now.
So now I have moved on to actually making an environment again. Pretty msall one for now, but the basic idea is the same. Rickety cobbled together observatory on a tiny needle tip cliff over the clouds. Still very WIP. Foliage is obviously lacking, and I need to make it seem more lived in by making a small tent or shack, some books and junk thrown around and a few lanterns.
The brass looks awesome in UDK, the copper is a bit too light, dull, and needs a bit more orange/red saturation. I love the scene so far, cool shapes, everything reads well.
Finally finished this gosh darn thang. Still lots of room for improvement and things I want to add and tweak, but it's time to move on.
The scene was designed with a point and click adventure in mind, so this is the angle it would appear in game. I laid it out in a way so that they player would always be visible. The general idea is that you take the lift up there and try to convince the hermit astronomer who lives up here to help you.
Here's the hero prop himself, the telescope. Once I got a cubemap of this environment baked down it fit in the scene much much better. There are still some stylistic clashes that I want to touch up on, like the wood, but that will be later.
Here are some simple sketches I did to work out some of the designs and layout.
Now let's talk technical art!
The whole scene uses five materials. One unique material for the telescope, and 4 modular materials that are instanced across the rest of the assets. I have one basic diffuse/normal/spec material, one metallic material, one window material and one foliage material.
This is the basic material, and as the name implies it's fairly basic. It has two parameters to control the specular strength and the glossiness of the asset as I find those always require a lot of tweaking. The Material Function is a simple setup to control the U and V tiling separately and I made it into a function because I found myself using it a lot over different materials.
The metal material is just the basic material with a cubemap added on top of it. Instead of just multiplying the cubemap right on top of the diffuse I use Fresnel as a mask into a Lerp node so the reflections are stronger at a glancing angle, which mimics how reflections work in real life. I also have a Reflectivity parameter that simply fades it out for a more subtle look.
The telescope material is similar to the metal material, but with some added effects for a spesific look. Looking around for tips on metal materials I found what some called a "car paint" effect, and i liked the extra boost it gave to the highlights. I'm also adding the cubemap and car paint effect to the emissive. The metal material originally had this as well, but I didn't like the look of it on the other assets.
For the foliage I had to rebuild the lighting because I was using custom vertex normals on the alpha planes. I also added a parameter to control the diffuse brighness to lighten the shadowed areas.The reason I did this is because I changed the Lightmass settings to give a much brighter and colorful look, but the foliage is dynamic and don't recieve the same indirect lighting. Some fine tuning is needed since the leaves turned out extremely bright in some shots.
It also has a simple sine wave in the WorldPositionOffset to give it the look of rustling in the wind. Vertex color is used to mask the weight of the wind for a less uniform look. I decided to go for a simple setup like this rather than deal with WindDirection actors because the scene was so small and only had a few assets it effected.
The first couple of attempts at the tree didn't turn out good at all so I took a close look at how the Airborn team did their wonderful foliage, and I discovered that they just had a ton of alpha planes scattered on a mesh with a tiling texture. Super efficient and gives really nice looking results. Using a script I was able to mash this together in 5 minutes. The central mesh also helps deal with overdraw.
Now to round this off here are some things I learned from doing this:
Don't overthink stuff. The simplest solution is often better and will save you a lot of time. The first iteration of this environment fell apart because I was getting too elaborate with the modularity and materials, which resulted in a slow and unsatisfying workflow.
Have a plan. The biggest mistake I did was to jump into this without a clear piece of concept art and an asset breakdown/list. Since I winged a lot of the designs as I went along most of the stuff in this scene went through several iterations before I got a result that worked out. This was a big waste of time and I could have finished in half the time if I had spent more time planning ahead of time.
Use lots and lots of material instances. In the beginning I kinda rushed through the process and had a unique material for every asset because I didn't really care about performance. But as soon as I cleaned up my scene and instantiated my materials it became immensely easier to do tweaks for each asset, and having them all draw from the same parent made updating and adding to them much faster.
Use more scripts. This is something I already know and need to work on, but it bears repeating. Using scripts and shortcuts for even simple stuff speeds things up immensely. If something usually takes 3 steps and you can reduce it down to 2 you've just sped yourself up by 33%! I still prefer doing some things by hand. Automation can only take you so far, there is no good make art button.
Take breaks. There were parts where I was so sick of this environment and strongly considered scrapping it because I felt it wasn't going anywhere good. This was usually after working a whole week straight on it with no breaks. After stepping away from it fora few days and doing something different like the Art Jam I was able to return to it with new vigor. But aside from big breaks like that taking small ones during the day are important too. I started experimenting with the pomodoro technique which means I have a timer running and every 25 minutes I'll take a quick 5 minute break and step away from the PC. I'll go outside, do the dishes, make a cup of tea. Anything that's not in front of the computer. When I return I've reset my mind and work more efficiently because it eliminates the habit of getting caught up in small details and gives you a chance to think about the problem at hand. And my room has never been tidier. It's probably not for everyone, but I recommend everyone give it or at least some variant of it a go.
And in general I learned a TON of technical stuff about UDK and game engines in general, lots of material tricks, some neat sculpting workflows, NDo2 and DDo, and how awesome the google hangouts are for productivity and learning. Thanks guys!
The scene looks really amazing besides the tree, the material definition on everything else is spot on. The leaves just look too blobby and uniform. I like to see a more clumpy appearance, rather than the smoother look it has now. Maybe look at some oak trees?
Also I feel the rope on the crank that goes over the tree limb, I think the rope look look better coming off closer to the side of the crank and not the center.
Ohh very good feedback. Thanks!
The tree definetely needs some adjustment. The material is being a bit quirky and blows out the colors, and I admit to rushing it a bit since I knew some potential employers would take a look at it this week. I did some heavy crunching this weekend.
Good point about the rope too. It will hide the seam from the pipe shoving as well.
The wood and telescopes materials are synergizing wonderfully to me . also going to be trying the pomodoro voodoo with a simple program someone posted on PC called "Tomighty". That and don't overthink stuff / use scripts is something I think I'll keep around the ol' noggin as well, good reinforcing tips Fingus!
The scene looks really amazing besides the tree, the material definition on everything else is spot on. The leaves just look too blobby and uniform. I like to see a more clumpy appearance, rather than the smoother look it has now. Maybe look at some oak trees?
I agree. I like the tree, I don't think it fits with the rest of the scene though. Perhaps if you had more transparent spots in the tiling texture and mix up the silhouette more, it wouldn't look blobby. Maybe even some slight color differences in the planes too.
The rest of the scene is great and the telescope is awesome! Thanks for the material shots too.
Cool scene, the telescope looks awesome. The large cliff rocks aren't doing it for me though, they could use striations or cracks to imply their scale, and maybe a bit more color variation.
Since you mentioned airborne, they project cracks and striations onto their rocks in worldspace, maybe you can look into doing that.
Might want to flip your environment, so that the clouds are below the horizon. The point of getting a telescope so high would hopefully be to get above the obscuring clouds.
So much good feedback. Ughhh I should have been better at posting WIP's.
I looked into rotating the skybox, but found that it was vertically symmetrical. But then I looked into the textures and materials they used and found out that it's surprisingly flexible if you tweak the parameters.
So I changed the skybox, tweaked the lighting, and looked into doing world space rock striations like m4dcow suggested, but I couldn't figure out the numbers or method to make it line up correctly.
Next on my list:
-Get rid of the crates and barrels, and use pieces of the telescope, planks, and rope to make simple spare parts and junk to populate the area.
-Fix the tree. The way I placed the alpha planes was quick and rushed, I need to redo it.
-Give the rocks some nicer textures.
Replies
I'd represent the main asteroid belt with the major dwarf planets symbols. I added the greek and trojans asteroid groupd around jupiter, but I recognize it's overkill.
Oh that is lovely! Didn't think of putting in the asteroid belt, very clever.
I did consider moons and dwarf planets, but was worried that it would get too crowded, but your arrangement works very well. I really like this direction, I'll do some variations of it today.
Quick question though. Is that an alternative symbol for Pluto, or did you replace it with a different planet?
When I saw the alternate symbol for pluto, I thought it was more apropriate and in-tone.
Any thoughts?
if you have time im curious about the 3dcoat instancing~
[ame="
I messed up in some way so the texture doesn't tile perfectly. I suspect it's due to a scale issue since the mesh was enormous and offset into a corner when I imported it. But the basic principle is there. If someone knows why it messed up like that I'd love to know.
I will probably update the front piece to make it match the side window better, especially the golden frame.
Anyways. Things were going too slow and I'm running out of time, so I've decided to focus in on a hero asset and finish that up properly instead of crunching on a half baked enviro. I'll try to finish the whole thing eventually, but right now for the sake of portfolio and job hunting I need to get something out the door quickly.
I would get rid of that leather strap though, it's kind of ruining the scale and it looks way too flat. Also the wood planks on the vertical supports don't match the shape that well.
The copper looks really good, but the other materials need some more work. And the gloss of the glass needs to be way higher.
Good point about the belt, I hadn't considered that. I'm going to make a second pass at the detailing for scratches and such so I will address that there. The materials do indeed need work, but I find myself a bit limited by Marmoset. I spent a lot of time yesterday figuring out how to import it into Cryengine3 since I've seen some gorgeous metal in there, but I find that it's too much work and learning involved in getting nice results so I'll stick to UDK for now.
@spectre1130
The windows were done in NDo2. I painted the pattern on separate layers in Photoshop and then used NDo2 to convert them to normals.
A quick update today. I fixed the color scheme to be less patchworky and garish. The colors are not really final, but the arrangement is a lot nicer now.
And thank you too Hayden.
Just adding some subtle material definition. Going to move on to making a proper spec and gloss map, and then finalizing.
So now I have moved on to actually making an environment again. Pretty msall one for now, but the basic idea is the same. Rickety cobbled together observatory on a tiny needle tip cliff over the clouds. Still very WIP. Foliage is obviously lacking, and I need to make it seem more lived in by making a small tent or shack, some books and junk thrown around and a few lanterns.
The scene was designed with a point and click adventure in mind, so this is the angle it would appear in game. I laid it out in a way so that they player would always be visible. The general idea is that you take the lift up there and try to convince the hermit astronomer who lives up here to help you.
Here's the hero prop himself, the telescope. Once I got a cubemap of this environment baked down it fit in the scene much much better. There are still some stylistic clashes that I want to touch up on, like the wood, but that will be later.
Here are some simple sketches I did to work out some of the designs and layout.
Now let's talk technical art!
The whole scene uses five materials. One unique material for the telescope, and 4 modular materials that are instanced across the rest of the assets. I have one basic diffuse/normal/spec material, one metallic material, one window material and one foliage material.
This is the basic material, and as the name implies it's fairly basic. It has two parameters to control the specular strength and the glossiness of the asset as I find those always require a lot of tweaking. The Material Function is a simple setup to control the U and V tiling separately and I made it into a function because I found myself using it a lot over different materials.
The metal material is just the basic material with a cubemap added on top of it. Instead of just multiplying the cubemap right on top of the diffuse I use Fresnel as a mask into a Lerp node so the reflections are stronger at a glancing angle, which mimics how reflections work in real life. I also have a Reflectivity parameter that simply fades it out for a more subtle look.
The telescope material is similar to the metal material, but with some added effects for a spesific look. Looking around for tips on metal materials I found what some called a "car paint" effect, and i liked the extra boost it gave to the highlights. I'm also adding the cubemap and car paint effect to the emissive. The metal material originally had this as well, but I didn't like the look of it on the other assets.
For the foliage I had to rebuild the lighting because I was using custom vertex normals on the alpha planes. I also added a parameter to control the diffuse brighness to lighten the shadowed areas.The reason I did this is because I changed the Lightmass settings to give a much brighter and colorful look, but the foliage is dynamic and don't recieve the same indirect lighting. Some fine tuning is needed since the leaves turned out extremely bright in some shots.
It also has a simple sine wave in the WorldPositionOffset to give it the look of rustling in the wind. Vertex color is used to mask the weight of the wind for a less uniform look. I decided to go for a simple setup like this rather than deal with WindDirection actors because the scene was so small and only had a few assets it effected.
The first couple of attempts at the tree didn't turn out good at all so I took a close look at how the Airborn team did their wonderful foliage, and I discovered that they just had a ton of alpha planes scattered on a mesh with a tiling texture. Super efficient and gives really nice looking results. Using a script I was able to mash this together in 5 minutes. The central mesh also helps deal with overdraw.
Now to round this off here are some things I learned from doing this:
And in general I learned a TON of technical stuff about UDK and game engines in general, lots of material tricks, some neat sculpting workflows, NDo2 and DDo, and how awesome the google hangouts are for productivity and learning. Thanks guys!
Also I feel the rope on the crank that goes over the tree limb, I think the rope look look better coming off closer to the side of the crank and not the center.
The tree definetely needs some adjustment. The material is being a bit quirky and blows out the colors, and I admit to rushing it a bit since I knew some potential employers would take a look at it this week. I did some heavy crunching this weekend.
Good point about the rope too. It will hide the seam from the pipe shoving as well.
I agree. I like the tree, I don't think it fits with the rest of the scene though. Perhaps if you had more transparent spots in the tiling texture and mix up the silhouette more, it wouldn't look blobby. Maybe even some slight color differences in the planes too.
The rest of the scene is great and the telescope is awesome! Thanks for the material shots too.
Since you mentioned airborne, they project cracks and striations onto their rocks in worldspace, maybe you can look into doing that.
I looked into rotating the skybox, but found that it was vertically symmetrical. But then I looked into the textures and materials they used and found out that it's surprisingly flexible if you tweak the parameters.
So I changed the skybox, tweaked the lighting, and looked into doing world space rock striations like m4dcow suggested, but I couldn't figure out the numbers or method to make it line up correctly.
Next on my list:
-Get rid of the crates and barrels, and use pieces of the telescope, planks, and rope to make simple spare parts and junk to populate the area.
-Fix the tree. The way I placed the alpha planes was quick and rushed, I need to redo it.
-Give the rocks some nicer textures.
what he said