UDK Jungle Environment Techniques and Level WIP
***UPDATED***
It's been ages but I decided to do a fly through and use this in my folio. Funny to see how much I have learnt since completing this:P Is my first time with camera fly throughs and compression so if there are crits, I'm listening:P
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsfYEiYDbJo"]UDK Jungle - YouTube[/ame]
20/08/2012 -FIRST POST
Hi everyone. I've been working on a jungle level for a game I'm working on in UDK. I thought it would be a good idea to start a thread to share knowledge. I have a lot of questions regarding UDK as I am relatively new to it. The more searching I do the more clear it becomes that there isn't a lot of good natural environment tutorials out there. Foliage is a tough beast to master. I thought if I get this thread going, people could ask and answer questions, direct one another to good tutorials and share techniques related to everything involved with natural environment building in UDK. My goal is to update my level progress weekly as well as ask for and share knowledge. Feel free to ask and answer at will as I'm sure there is a bunch of valuable information we can share to make us all better artists. Cheers. Garth.
It's been ages but I decided to do a fly through and use this in my folio. Funny to see how much I have learnt since completing this:P Is my first time with camera fly throughs and compression so if there are crits, I'm listening:P
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsfYEiYDbJo"]UDK Jungle - YouTube[/ame]20/08/2012 -FIRST POST
Hi everyone. I've been working on a jungle level for a game I'm working on in UDK. I thought it would be a good idea to start a thread to share knowledge. I have a lot of questions regarding UDK as I am relatively new to it. The more searching I do the more clear it becomes that there isn't a lot of good natural environment tutorials out there. Foliage is a tough beast to master. I thought if I get this thread going, people could ask and answer questions, direct one another to good tutorials and share techniques related to everything involved with natural environment building in UDK. My goal is to update my level progress weekly as well as ask for and share knowledge. Feel free to ask and answer at will as I'm sure there is a bunch of valuable information we can share to make us all better artists. Cheers. Garth.
Replies
p.s. the gray meshes are still inplace from my gray box to add depth and feel whilst placing finished meshes. Landscape hasn't been painted.
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A jungle is usually filled with a lot of colors, deep and rich greens. Yours is looking a little bit too Far Cry 2.
Make sure you have water-type plants along the edges of the stream, and incorporate rocks and roots going into it.
Make the water feel a little bit more shallow/transparent (with depth) if you can.
EDIT: Also notice the bowl-shapes along the banks of the stream/river. Like the water has been carving into the terrain, leaving it bowl shaped. So no outwards bulges facing the river.
good work so far
It'll be interesting to see how this turns out
nice. the kind of feedback I need. thanks mate:)
*subscribed
Definitely get some more color variation and depth to the scene going as Chris mentioned, it should help your contrast quite a bit. As it is now it seems a bit flat.
You could axe the height fog entirely and build something akin to a rocky mound that wraps around a pond, creating what is essentially a spring for the water to flow out of/from. I think that could make for a pretty interesting scene while also giving you a nice backdrop to keep things tied in close to the camera.
As far as building tree canopies, the wiki is chalk full of great foliage tutorials, check some of em out.
Wiki Foliage Tuts
LEGEND!! Thanks so much. It's really hard to tell in this screenshot but most of the ideas you mentioned are infact what I've designed. I'm only about 3 weeks into this since beginning so I have a lot of detail to add. Have a peek at my graybox. This might give everyone a better idea of the layout. Also, give people ideas for feedback. Cheers.
edit: p.s. the bright green meshes will be waterfalls
edit: some assets in my graybox are from UDK for design purposes only. All assets in my final level will be 100% hand crafted:)
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Check out Hourences water tutorial for a start: http://www.hourences.com/ue3-water-outdoors/
thanks man. Will pretty much use that tute for all water. thanks.
yeah I've had a play and it looks decent but not exactly what I wanted. More suitable for open bodies as you said. I'll use it if I can't make something better. I now have just over 3 months to get this done.
I'm not 100% happy with some of my plants and trees, I'm gonna upload some renders of individual plants I've made this week, in hope for some feedback. Cheers again.
By ntmrmggtt at 2012-08-25
By ntmrmggtt at 2012-08-25
edit: the leaves are actually off the surface. Floating just above it.
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Plants looking good! They look quite random which is good. Trees are tricky, i think your branches have a sense of direction that is too strong, maybe spread your leaves out so they don't point so much. And add more planes in different direction and different sizes.
Hi, Im currently working on a level with foliage in, I was just wondering how do you go about making the plants? Do high poly model them first then texture them, or do you collect the textures first and arrange them on a texture sheet and model from that? Also where do you find your textures for plants? cg textures or do you photo source them yourself.
I know there a good tutorial on 3d motive for foliage but it only covers grass and trees and I cant find anywhere else for a tutorial on plants. If anyone else has some good tutorials on plants it would be much appreciated, Thanks for your time.
yeah good. ill subscribe if you start one:P
cheers. what if I modeled say, 10 high poly leaves and baked them in RTT to a plane, added geo and then moved the pivot point jut below the middle? That sounds like a plan. Man, it's gonna be a pain placing them all in but totally worth it.
thanks again.
There's a paint object tool in the graphite freeform tools. If you place the pivot of the object right at the point where the leaf/branch/etc. should connect to the later geometry, then you can use mentioned tool to quickly paint the objects onto the trunk/thicker branch/etc. Also, you can play a bit with the tool's parameters (painted object's random rotation etc.) to get the best results.
Thanks heaps dude. Will be handy.
edit: i'm doing thsi with all of them, the results are amazing
edit: if anyone isn't clear on what my ramblings were.
1. make low poly in maya/max
2. unwrap
3. export to zbrush and sculpt
4. export low poly and high poly from zbrush (1st mesh with divisions) there is a slight tri count change but not much at all, it more averages verticies very slightly)
5. import low poly to max/maya and relax uv's/layout better and make light map
6. export low
7. bake normals out in xnormal
8. flip green channel in photoshop
9. apply
10. perfectly displayed normals (as good as zbrush displays them)
Please tell me I'm not doing this wrong.
garth
Hi Tim,
I originally used that 3d motive tutorial then made my own educated choices on how to adapt it to all foliage. It's definately worth getting that tute, it covers modeling from a photo to a high poly mesh, then bake that to a texture with normal, alpha and colour variation etc maps that are all perfectly combined in photoshop. This method is by far the best as you get light and normal detail from the high poly versions as well as accurate depth to the diffuse texture.
You can make anything foliage-wise using the methods in that tuorial. I highly recommend it.
edit: I get most of my textures from cgtextures but also take a lot myself.
edit: this is a rock and dirt ledge that will fit around the edges of terrain drops and river beds. It currently has only a nomral map applied.
By ntmrmggtt at 2012-09-01
By ntmrmggtt at 2012-09-07
yeah I'll make them wider and lighter and see how that looks. thanks.
[EDIT] Realized that you used UDK for this. Thought you used CE3 after posting the Crysis screen. I guess you should be able to do the same thing in UDK like the wiki entry..
thanks again. theres a foilage painting tool that paints chosen meshes to the surface of terrain, maybe thats what you are referring to. The hexagonal layout is a great tip, I didn't now that, I'll arrange my leaves that way for sure.
Did you mean make individual leaves to be arranged like this? Or groups of say 5-6 on a plane, multiplied a bunch of times, then arranged into a hexagonal group, then spread out over all tree covered terrain?
thanks mate. appreciate it:)
Like this
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see the light through the leaves? It's what I'm trying to do, but in UDK
If someone can link me to a tute I don't know about or post an example of a good jungle-like foliage shader, I'd be WAY more than happy to try it:) Thanks again.
As far as using it across multiple objects, you could do a master material for foliage and include the parameters for the 2D texture(mask) and a constant 3(color). Then, with the instance, you can modify the mask and color for each model.
Hey thanks man for the info. I'd spent a while with transmission last week and got some average results. Using dx9, I've managed to get my shader looking like the below picture. It's not great but better than what I was getting earlier. Now I am maybe pushing the boundaries of beginner in UDK so keep the feedback and suggestions coming it really helps. Thanks.
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p.s. the fog look MUCH better in game. This .jpeg looks good too but for some reason, since uploading to photobucket, it looks more dense. No idea why.
Oh, the shader I built for the foliage is not yet applied to the larger trees either, so that's why they look too dark.
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like the look of his enviro!
as far as im aware some effects don't work in tiledshot especially post effects so you'll have to settle for the standard screen shot command, go into your post fx settings and ramp up AA to give you better results.
Cheers. Didn't know about the AA setting. Awesome. Thanks.