Wow very nice indeed! I'm a huge Tolkien fan so I'll be following this for sure! Btw will you make it into a wallpaper when your done? Cause I'd love to have it on my desktop.
Helms Deep is the place where the King runs out on fire right? been a long time since I watched LOTR. great stuff and cant wait for next update. Also how much of this is modular?
Good feedback everyone, thank you.
Visceral: You're right, that's the first technique I'm going to try for the terrain. Supermasks and packed multi-textures+super normal map covering the whole terrain. It's the first time I'll be doing that way, so I'm going to learn all that.
mkandersson: I will surely make huge ass renders of it with UDK when doing my final shots
roosterMAP: Yeah, gonna have to find a good ref of the Rohan flag and make it big. I cant wait to paint more colors on the walls too, like in the film, the keep walls use to have a green/white/brown tint from place to place.
haiddasalami: Yes, it's that place. The ground and brick walls are hand modelled. The rest is modular.
Today I worked on finishing the inside walls of the keep with the arches and columns I made yesterday. Did some trims on the edges of the wall's ground to embelish a bit. (used the wall texture and I might use a real trim texture later).
Sunday I'll start with the king's room windows and battlements for the walls.
Et Earello, Endorenna Utulien.
Sinome Maruvan, ar Hildinyar
Tenn ambar-metta.
That's for good luck.
It's going great!
[Excuse my spelling off it. Hopefully it's 90% I know how to pronounce it and actually sing it but not any simple or 'ö' and the like]
Looking real athentic mate. Seems cheap too, with few materials going into it. With that, you can really put a lot into this thing mesh and decal wise.
Wow thank you so much guys, I'm impressed by all the feedback I get on this one.
zenarion: No, this isn't related. Taylor Hood: Thanks, but I have no clue how to speak it neither sing it, so I cant help you on this one !
whats_true: Yeah, it feels cheap indeed, and taking a break and coming back at it a week later helps me now. I've painted colour variations everywhere since that picture, and will add more texture variation later. And it seems like night lighting also helps into colour variation.
fearian: Skydome copyright, Epic Games. Temporary. The fog is hiding a good part of it thought.
kjell: I fixed some of the most obvious patterns in the brick wall texture now. I will try to go further another time but cannot erase too much data neither.
I have been a lazy-artwhore this week and finally didnt work at all on the map until today. I'd like to excuse myself with this picture and a question(s):
Is this night lighting good or not? How can I improve it?
Thing is I hardly ever try night lighting, so I need good/severe crits.
The night lighting is looking good. Maybe looking a little too ambient. Try adding a more dominant directional light source(a full moon) to get some subtle shadow casting, the brick texture is looking really good.
lighting is looking pretty good.. maybe the environment color needs a bit more of a blueish green tone instead of a blueish purple. also ive been meaning to ask.. whats up with the fingerprint looking patterns on the terrain. i know u said the terrain was only temporary, but ive just been wondering.
looks a lot like an overcast evening right after sunset and not like night. kill the ambient and add something that casts strong shadows. neither color nor brightness are bad, just lacking some really dark shadows.
i personally dont really think that a night shot benefits the scene, even though it might allow you to slack a bit on the distant stuff. kills a lot of the epic feel this scene is starting to have.
Night time is looking good, but it'd be interesting to see a dusk/dawn sort of set up to get some really nice colours in the lighting. (although a bit clich
Not really a LOTR fan, but this is coming along great!
I would opt for daytime lighting tho, because the shadows increases contrast and overall readabilty of the structure.
With the night time lighting everything has the same color and alot of the details will just get lost.
Stick with night time, but go for the look of a full moon. Keep the brightness about the same, but with a direction and shadows. I'd have the moon pretty high and to the left of the camera so that the main light illuminates the walls. Also add WAY more torches.
fantastic, really lovely lighting for sure its kinda bad that the lighting dosnt really show off the amazing texturing details and the time you put into the bricks but still night time it is .
But it would be a cool thing if you did a optional lighting setup, if you remember in the scene when Gandalf brings the riders of rohan to helms deep, that kinda early morning lighting, that would be sweet.
good luck on your work, and yes im still thinking about posting up my balins tomb work, but im worries about getting destroyed by crits haha. im not as proffesional as most people here.
Folks I've been working hard this last week on doing rockwall sculpts, rock pebbles scattering and baking, and terrain sculpting. I'll show my high poly surfaces when I have time to render them, so you can see how I worked.
I will also make a picture of the terrain shader in case someone's interested. And that way you'll be able to correct my failures in it.
Thanks to everyone for the good feedback on the night lighting. When I saw most of you asking for daylight I reverted to it.
Nighttime is still an option when I finish the piece tho !
SnakeDoctor: No, not yet, but it's coming. I will certainly use alpha masked overlays on the wall.
This update should be a start into giving a better sense of scale of the whole thing:
Off the top of my head, the ramp into the keeps texture is looking quite nasty as is the stone floor of the palisades. in general the stone looks like it should be smaller. those plocks are absolutely massive and they're making the scale a bit ambiguous. in the last shot it actually looks quite little.
I agree with r_fletch_r, mabe adding in some humans for scale would make the scale apparent?
Looks so damn awesome so far, and i agree with turning it back to daylight, though with better lighting (and rain? like in the peter jackson movie?) night could look really atmospheric etc.
You've proven to the world that UDK is capable of looking stunningly awesome without donut glaze specular/gloss maps on everything. This is simply breathtaking!
EDIT: are those default terrain/rock textures? If not, you have to show us the flats. I want to know how you did that...
AWESOME job man! Top pic looks incredible. Only nitpick I have is that you have obvious tiling going on along the long, bottom-most wall. The one that goes accross the valley. This is most noticeable in the top picture. But other than that, GREAT work, great lighting, well done!
Holy jaffa cakes! That looks awesome... Can't wait to see more!
I never really understood helms deep though. I mean, what exactly is the purpose of that long wall? There's nothing behind it to defend! I guess those steps that lead inward but why did they even make those if it meant adding an enormous additional wall!?
Anyway that's not related to this. Very cool stuff. I remember downloading a UT2K4 Helm's deep custom map ages ago, it was pretty damn fun, this brings up memories.
I never really understood helms deep though. I mean, what exactly is the purpose of that long wall? There's nothing behind it to defend! I guess those steps that lead inward but why did they even make those if it meant adding an enormous additional wall!?
I would imagine it gives you more space to put archers and stops the ennemy wrapping round the main fort, that and it would just look silly all by its self ^^
The only crit I can really see is you could do with a little more colour diffrence between the rock of the wall and the rock of the cliff.
I happen to be in love with this. Can I marry it? I am blow away by how you managed to break it all down too. Once I finish my little art vacation I'm going to do my best to take what I've learned from your pre production work and take it into my future works.
Also, how the hell did you make that crazy terrain? It's amazingtasticsauce!!
First thanks everyone, that was a really great page to read! Very good crits. Long post:
r_fletch_r: I totally agree about the sense of scale the tiles on the floor give. I have two solutions, either I increase tiling, or I add more small scale props and damage decals around to give a better sense of scale.
Maybe both can be done too.
Makkon: I did some screenshots of the sculpts and textures used, see end of the post!:)
roosterMAP: Yeah one of the next stop is banners and coloured stuff. I agree with the tower being empty at the moment. It's still missing its horns and the top crown with the arches. And texture tiling will be adressed soon.
whats_true: That's an idea! :poly122:
Prophecies: Yeah that tiling has been bothering me since the begining, I like it in the texture tho, so I'll keep it and break the repetition using masks in the coming updates. Should do the trick as it did with terrain textures.
metalliandy: Yeah that ramp is still -almost- the proxy mesh it was at the begining of this project. I have to model trims for it and sculpt/texture a new tile for it.
JFletcher: Thanks for the kind words! Yeah the long wall doesnt make a lot of sense apart from what Kharn said. But I think that in the book (and not related in the film) there's a cave entrance on that side of the valley where Gimli use to go at one time during battle. But I may be wrong, thought. It's been a long time I read that passage.
Kharn: Yeah I spotted this when I saw my picture on other monitors than the ones from my workstation. Seems like my monitors are over-saturating and it result in me desaturating too much the end result. I have to fix that ASAP, thanks.
mathes: I will include that small river I hope. When I have rockprops done (I already used them for the texture scattering), i'll be able to populate the terrain better around it.
Also I'm not sure I'll do an exploded version of the wall! That might be too much work, and therefore I wanted to do it before the battle.
Rurouni Strife: Marry me or that map? Seriously, thanks. For the terrain I sulpted from the basemesh I had for a long time in max, I did that in Zbrush. And for the "lowpoly" ingame actor I retopologized' in 3DCoat, Trying to not go over 25k triangles!
I tried the terrain actor of UDK before I took that route, I rendered a 16bit height map from the ZB sculpt on a flat plane, and imported it into the terrain actor but it was damn hard to get a good detail versus number of patches which seem to be distributed by the height map size. So if you used a 1024*1024 HM you ended up with a terrain being 1.4mil triangles or so, and that from the first subdivision! That was not going to make it.
Also terrain actor didn't quite make it neither in this very map case because some of the cliffs around the keep are concave, and it was then doing straight cliffs with stretched UVs.
I'll see if I have taken the right decision later on but I think hand modelled terrain wins over terrain actor at the moment for this kind of map..
Here's a wireframe:
And the rockwall sculpts and rock scattering (the first two sculpts were tests and were just Zbrush doodling without proper pattern organization, unlike third one which I first started in PS then took in ZB):
The flats:
Also some of the sculpts used on the keep(I have like twice that to show still but lack of time currently):
Replies
Visceral: You're right, that's the first technique I'm going to try for the terrain. Supermasks and packed multi-textures+super normal map covering the whole terrain. It's the first time I'll be doing that way, so I'm going to learn all that.
mkandersson: I will surely make huge ass renders of it with UDK when doing my final shots
roosterMAP: Yeah, gonna have to find a good ref of the Rohan flag and make it big. I cant wait to paint more colors on the walls too, like in the film, the keep walls use to have a green/white/brown tint from place to place.
haiddasalami: Yes, it's that place. The ground and brick walls are hand modelled. The rest is modular.
Today I worked on finishing the inside walls of the keep with the arches and columns I made yesterday. Did some trims on the edges of the wall's ground to embelish a bit. (used the wall texture and I might use a real trim texture later).
Sunday I'll start with the king's room windows and battlements for the walls.
Sinome Maruvan, ar Hildinyar
Tenn ambar-metta.
That's for good luck.
It's going great!
[Excuse my spelling off it. Hopefully it's 90% I know how to pronounce it and actually sing it but not any simple or 'ö' and the like]
Is the space playable though scale wise?
e: Oh yeah, did you make the skybox for this or is it one you had floating around?
zenarion: No, this isn't related.
Taylor Hood: Thanks, but I have no clue how to speak it neither sing it, so I cant help you on this one !
whats_true: Yeah, it feels cheap indeed, and taking a break and coming back at it a week later helps me now. I've painted colour variations everywhere since that picture, and will add more texture variation later. And it seems like night lighting also helps into colour variation.
fearian: Skydome copyright, Epic Games. Temporary. The fog is hiding a good part of it thought.
kjell: I fixed some of the most obvious patterns in the brick wall texture now. I will try to go further another time but cannot erase too much data neither.
I have been a lazy-artwhore this week and finally didnt work at all on the map until today. I'd like to excuse myself with this picture and a question(s):
Is this night lighting good or not? How can I improve it?
Thing is I hardly ever try night lighting, so I need good/severe crits.
looks a lot like an overcast evening right after sunset and not like night. kill the ambient and add something that casts strong shadows. neither color nor brightness are bad, just lacking some really dark shadows.
i personally dont really think that a night shot benefits the scene, even though it might allow you to slack a bit on the distant stuff. kills a lot of the epic feel this scene is starting to have.
I would opt for daytime lighting tho, because the shadows increases contrast and overall readabilty of the structure.
With the night time lighting everything has the same color and alot of the details will just get lost.
But it would be a cool thing if you did a optional lighting setup, if you remember in the scene when Gandalf brings the riders of rohan to helms deep, that kinda early morning lighting, that would be sweet.
good luck on your work, and yes im still thinking about posting up my balins tomb work, but im worries about getting destroyed by crits haha. im not as proffesional as most people here.
I will also make a picture of the terrain shader in case someone's interested. And that way you'll be able to correct my failures in it.
Thanks to everyone for the good feedback on the night lighting. When I saw most of you asking for daylight I reverted to it.
Nighttime is still an option when I finish the piece tho !
SnakeDoctor: No, not yet, but it's coming. I will certainly use alpha masked overlays on the wall.
This update should be a start into giving a better sense of scale of the whole thing:
Crits highly wanted ! :poly142:
Off the top of my head, the ramp into the keeps texture is looking quite nasty as is the stone floor of the palisades. in general the stone looks like it should be smaller. those plocks are absolutely massive and they're making the scale a bit ambiguous. in the last shot it actually looks quite little.
Looks so damn awesome so far, and i agree with turning it back to daylight, though with better lighting (and rain? like in the peter jackson movie?) night could look really atmospheric etc.
EDIT: are those default terrain/rock textures? If not, you have to show us the flats. I want to know how you did that...
also, the tower is lacking some detail. if you could somehow break the tiling texture on it, that would be sweet!
Anywho, looking smashing mate!
More please!!
The only crits are the tiling on the tower and the side bricks on the ramp get cut off a little oddly as it looks like the top stones have no depth.
Keep it up man, you are doing awesome
I never really understood helms deep though. I mean, what exactly is the purpose of that long wall? There's nothing behind it to defend! I guess those steps that lead inward but why did they even make those if it meant adding an enormous additional wall!?
Anyway that's not related to this. Very cool stuff. I remember downloading a UT2K4 Helm's deep custom map ages ago, it was pretty damn fun, this brings up memories.
Keep up the good work bro.
I would imagine it gives you more space to put archers and stops the ennemy wrapping round the main fort, that and it would just look silly all by its self ^^
The only crit I can really see is you could do with a little more colour diffrence between the rock of the wall and the rock of the cliff.
On the miniature for the film it looks green from the moss
http://www.warofthering.net/quintessential/movieshots/actual_helmsdeep_entrance.jpg
Also, how the hell did you make that crazy terrain? It's amazingtasticsauce!!
r_fletch_r: I totally agree about the sense of scale the tiles on the floor give. I have two solutions, either I increase tiling, or I add more small scale props and damage decals around to give a better sense of scale.
Maybe both can be done too.
Makkon: I did some screenshots of the sculpts and textures used, see end of the post!:)
roosterMAP: Yeah one of the next stop is banners and coloured stuff. I agree with the tower being empty at the moment. It's still missing its horns and the top crown with the arches. And texture tiling will be adressed soon.
whats_true: That's an idea! :poly122:
Prophecies: Yeah that tiling has been bothering me since the begining, I like it in the texture tho, so I'll keep it and break the repetition using masks in the coming updates. Should do the trick as it did with terrain textures.
metalliandy: Yeah that ramp is still -almost- the proxy mesh it was at the begining of this project. I have to model trims for it and sculpt/texture a new tile for it.
JFletcher: Thanks for the kind words! Yeah the long wall doesnt make a lot of sense apart from what Kharn said. But I think that in the book (and not related in the film) there's a cave entrance on that side of the valley where Gimli use to go at one time during battle. But I may be wrong, thought. It's been a long time I read that passage.
Kharn: Yeah I spotted this when I saw my picture on other monitors than the ones from my workstation. Seems like my monitors are over-saturating and it result in me desaturating too much the end result. I have to fix that ASAP, thanks.
mathes: I will include that small river I hope. When I have rockprops done (I already used them for the texture scattering), i'll be able to populate the terrain better around it.
Also I'm not sure I'll do an exploded version of the wall! That might be too much work, and therefore I wanted to do it before the battle.
Rurouni Strife: Marry me or that map? Seriously, thanks. For the terrain I sulpted from the basemesh I had for a long time in max, I did that in Zbrush. And for the "lowpoly" ingame actor I retopologized' in 3DCoat, Trying to not go over 25k triangles!
I tried the terrain actor of UDK before I took that route, I rendered a 16bit height map from the ZB sculpt on a flat plane, and imported it into the terrain actor but it was damn hard to get a good detail versus number of patches which seem to be distributed by the height map size. So if you used a 1024*1024 HM you ended up with a terrain being 1.4mil triangles or so, and that from the first subdivision! That was not going to make it.
Also terrain actor didn't quite make it neither in this very map case because some of the cliffs around the keep are concave, and it was then doing straight cliffs with stretched UVs.
I'll see if I have taken the right decision later on but I think hand modelled terrain wins over terrain actor at the moment for this kind of map..
Here's a wireframe:
And the rockwall sculpts and rock scattering (the first two sculpts were tests and were just Zbrush doodling without proper pattern organization, unlike third one which I first started in PS then took in ZB):
The flats:
Also some of the sculpts used on the keep(I have like twice that to show still but lack of time currently):
Stay tuned.:)