Home Featured Artwork

Demon's Throne - Environment

245

Replies

  • JasonLavoie
    Offline / Send Message
    JasonLavoie polycounter lvl 18
    (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
    Offline / Send Message
    JasonLavoie polycounter lvl 18
    (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
    Offline / Send Message
    JasonLavoie polycounter lvl 18
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    ajr2764 polycounter lvl 10
    I like the style your texturing is bringing into the project. Thats a really good normal map.
  • bbob
    Looking good, man!
  • marq4porsche
    Offline / Send Message
    marq4porsche polycounter lvl 9
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    crazyfingers polycounter lvl 10
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    roosterMAP polycounter lvl 12
  • praetus
    Offline / Send Message
    praetus interpolator
    This is shaping up nice man. Good work
  • JasonLavoie
    Offline / Send Message
    JasonLavoie polycounter lvl 18
    Small update just to show some progress... I'm hoping to have some nice big shots for you by the end of this weekend.

    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
    Offline / Send Message
    JasonLavoie polycounter lvl 18
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    crazyfingers polycounter lvl 10
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    cycloverid polycounter lvl 15
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    crazyfingers polycounter lvl 10
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    JasonLavoie polycounter lvl 18
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    crazyfingers polycounter lvl 10
    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:
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    JasonLavoie polycounter lvl 18
    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.

    shot1k.jpg
    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!
  • bluekangaroo
    Offline / Send Message
    bluekangaroo polycounter lvl 13
    very darksider ish for sure. cool
  • adam
    Offline / Send Message
    adam polycounter lvl 19
    This is going to be so sick when its done. Any fun shots you've setup that we could see?
  • JasonLavoie
    Offline / Send Message
    JasonLavoie polycounter lvl 18
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    Rurouni Strife polycounter lvl 10
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    JasonLavoie polycounter lvl 18
    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.

    23470505.jpg
    45266769.jpg
    45073374.jpg
    20583556.jpg
  • Pedro Amorim
  • jocose
    Offline / Send Message
    jocose polycounter lvl 11
    Your kicken ass
  • cycloverid
    Offline / Send Message
    cycloverid polycounter lvl 15
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    Ooghijmiqtxxa polycounter lvl 17
    Hey Jason,

    This is looking fantastic. I'm really digging the lighting. Keep it coming!
  • crazyfingers
    Offline / Send Message
    crazyfingers polycounter lvl 10
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    brandoom polycounter lvl 13
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    JasonLavoie polycounter lvl 18
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    crazyfingers polycounter lvl 10
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    DennisGlowacki polycounter lvl 7
    Totally keeping an eye on this.
  • ae.
    Offline / Send Message
    ae. polycounter lvl 12
    Fucking Amazing!
  • DrunkShaman
    Offline / Send Message
    DrunkShaman polycounter lvl 14
    Amazing work Mr. Jason :)
  • Pavel Petrenko
    Offline / Send Message
    Pavel Petrenko polycounter lvl 8
    Very good job Jason!
    Keep going!
  • JasonLavoie
    Offline / Send Message
    JasonLavoie polycounter lvl 18
    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.

    preview31.jpg
    preview32.jpg
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    ENODMI polycounter lvl 14
    Awesome! Reminds me of Darksiders... which is awesome!! AWESOME!
  • crazyfingers
    Offline / Send Message
    crazyfingers polycounter lvl 10
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    JasonLavoie polycounter lvl 18
    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.
    Offline / Send Message
    ae. polycounter lvl 12
    My only crit is to turn down the bloom a weee bit other than that it s looking great!
  • fearian
    Offline / Send Message
    fearian greentooth
    a tad noisy. Bloom on the lava is distracting too.
  • JasonLavoie
    Offline / Send Message
    JasonLavoie polycounter lvl 18
    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...

    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
    Offline / Send Message
    alexk polycounter lvl 12
    kicks ass dude!
  • doeseph
    Offline / Send Message
    doeseph polycounter lvl 7
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    JasonLavoie polycounter lvl 18
    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
    Offline / Send Message
    Mistry10 polycounter lvl 8
    nice work man !
    I really like the colours you got going on there. Maybe push the purple a bit more ?
  • StefanH
    Offline / Send Message
    StefanH polycounter lvl 12
    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 :)
245
Sign In or Register to comment.