Hey all I've been working on this lord of the rings scene for a little while now and wanted to share my progress and hopefully get some feedback. I'm also thinking of doing a day/night cycle of the scene after I nail the way the day looks.

Here's my reference:



Some modular parts to create the peasant houses:


And a shot of my landscape with some assembled houses:


I know its not from the same angle as the reference, dunno why I did that haha, and it does need a lot of work before it's done. Any tips on how to make it look better or get done faster would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

cool stuff man, those doors are looking pretty good.

Heres a few new screenshots, I believe the assets are pretty much done, and now im gunna start sculpting the landscape (which needs a lot of lovin') to its final shape.





Also I've run into a bug with my landscape, i created a new landscape (so I have 2 landscapes in the scene now) and on the new landscape my brush wont move up past a certain point, preventing me from completing my paintjob on the mountain tops, anyone know why?
Heres a screenshot of the problem:

The buildings are looking good man. The landscape issue is weird...no idea why its doing that.

Your wood and some part of your stone looks way too glowy. You should turn back the specular. Wood and stone shouldn't be so shiny

Yea I went a little over-board with the shine haha, hows this one looking? turned down the spec and the bloom I had

looks like a great start.
To me the textures look too intense and "muddy" though.
Also feels like a bit of mismatch between the sky and the ground (with all that's on it).

Btw, I think this can be a good ref/inspiration ;)

UDK Midgard updated - YouTube

- u can check his website for images too.

Thanks for the feedback, the sky is actually a placeholder udk asset

Not entirely sure what you mean by intense and muddy. By muddy I'm thinking sharpen to fix but sharpening it would make the texture seem more intense haha

Iv'e seen that video before but I forgot how awesome it was haha thanks! It does give me some good ideas for what I want to do with my scene.

Also here are some progress shots, nothing new with the assets, just placing em on a hillside and shaping the landscape to make it all work. Never realized how much time it took to drag around modular houses and flatten parts of a mountain :/

F5 F5 F5 F5

Thanks for that Olli haha made me smile

Just wanted to share a few notes I took on what I'm going to do next (thanks to professorXXX and his artistic eye) to fix up the scene:

And of course take replace the UDK sky and rocks, prolly make some new assets to fill up space like logs or carts or something

Btw does anyone have some tips on decreasing build times? I'm sure my landscape is the culprit to my long bake times, it reaches to the boundaries that UDK allows your map to be. It's huge and has tons of verts even on the max LOD. Is there a way to export the UDK landscape that I have and recreate it with less components or something? I just need to decrease the size of my landscape and make it look more or less the same and would really rather not have to waste all that time I spent shaping it.

Thanks for looking :-D

Good design,like your wood textures most.
It must have taken lots of your time,but I think it is worthy.

looks very interesting

Large scene eh? If you want to do a large scene and cut down on build times, there are a few options. What I would suggest you try is go fully dynamic with your lights. Dominant Directional lights make use of Cascaded Shadow Maps to render real time shadows. You can also adjust settings with point and spot lights to get them to render real time shadows as well.

The downside is A) Performance and B) No Lightmass effects. You could theoretically create some lights specifically for Lightmass but I haven't tried that. Your peformance will tank with a lot of lights doing real time shadows in the scene so you need to think about pretty vs. a playable map, if that's your goal. With no Lightmass Effects, you'll have to place more bounce lights manually and really think about "well this is too dark so I'll add 3 point lights over here to brighten it up a bit" and so on. But you have no bake times, so it speeds it up.

For your landscape, you can export it to Maya/Max via an FBX export in Unreal. I think, maybe it's .obj. Either way, it's doable. You can then try to recreate it using a mesh, although you'll end up with the limit of 3 blending texture sets (Dif, Norm, Spec, what else you need).

You can also consider a more detailed landscape close up, then a separate landscape for areas you can't travel to at a really low lod and low shadow map settings as needed. Might work?

Final note: I kind of feel like your wood textures all look very "samey" and it makes it hard to read both what's different between the buildings and the different elements of the buildings themselves. Maybe add a few more variants? Are you going to do any vert painting on those buildings to add different details and so on?