[UDK] Misery

ZacD · Jan 2013

Normally I wouldn't start a thread this early, but some people asked for a break down of my grass.

This material is the same for the terrain and the grass planes, the only differences are the opacity mask and the WorldPositionOffset for wind animation.

For the grass plane you will need to set the vertex normal to vertical.

Eric Chadwick · Jan 2013

Good start. I would think about adding some diffuse texture for grass shading, unless you're going for a flat-like style. Like, lighting across the blades.

ZacD · Jan 2013

The main thing I like about the look is the seamless blend to the terrain. Since I already have vertex colors acting like a gradient mask acting I can easily play with adding highlights or textures that just effects the tips of the grass to make it pop a little more.

But first there's a issue I need to resolve about how to make this work on non flat terrain, because this only works if all the normals are set to vertical, including the terrain. I was thinking about setting up a 'lightmap' in an separate application with no shadows to add shaded slopes, and use world position top some how match a top view of the ground.

cholden · Jan 2013

oh nice, you made that tractor. You should link that one wiki/vid here because I think people would find it fascinating.

chrisradsby · Jan 2013

Hmm tricky to comment right now , I'll just wait a little bit to see where you're going with the grass

Snader · Jan 2013

I've been thinking about something like this too, about smooth grass/terrain blending. And one of my thoughts was that maybe a giant normalmap (worldspace, not tangent) could work. That way you could set every grass tuft to be perpendicular to the polygon it's planted on. It would look weird at steep angles, but it might be passable enough for light wobbly terrain.

ZacD · Jan 2013

cholden wrote: »

oh nice, you made that tractor. You should link that one wiki/vid here because I think people would find it fascinating.

[ame="

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S63Cy64p2lQ"]TEDxKC - Marcin Jakubowski - Civilization Starter Kit - YouTube[/ame]
http://opensourceecology.org/

ZacD · Jan 2013

Snader wrote: »

I've been thinking about something like this too, about smooth grass/terrain blending. And one of my thoughts was that maybe a giant normalmap (worldspace, not tangent) could work. That way you could set every grass tuft to be perpendicular to the polygon it's planted on. It would look weird at steep angles, but it might be passable enough for light wobbly terrain.

I kind of want to avoid having to manually placing grass, I'd love to just automatically populate a field with the udk foliage, and it automatically culls distant foliage, and with udk's foliage system you really don't have much control over the placement angles.

I'm going to be testing out getting some hills shaded properly tonight.

Snader · Jan 2013

Foliage slope blend, I think that's what it is called, is something you can turn on to make UDK automatically place the grass at an angle perpendicular to the underlying terrain quads.

ZacD · Jan 2013

I'll give that a go first, thanks.

ZacD · Jan 2013

Despite my worries, that worked pretty well Snader, thanks for the idea. And it is a lot less work, though I really wish I could some how bake the lighting on the terrain in udk, and feed it into the grass as well. I added a bit of highlight to the grass to make the edges pop a bit more.

Also some alpha's for some other plants.

fearian · Jan 2013

ZacD wrote: »

TEDxKC - Marcin Jakubowski - Civilization Starter Kit - YouTube
http://opensourceecology.org/

[offtopic]
This is one of the most exciting things I've seen this week. And I was nerding out the other day about a podcast with Gabe Newell talking about how he sees the future of the entertainment industry going. Thanks for that link, I'm a big fan of Maker/3d Printing stuff.
[/offtopic]

I mean, DAYMN NICE GRASS SON. are the model textures going to be similarly stylized?

ivars · Jan 2013

Nice grass. I'm doing some grass my self and you inspired me to improve my material

So thank you very much!

ZacD · Feb 2013

Progress has been slower than I hoped on this, got some cool reusable rocks based off the airborn thread I need to sculpt.

What has really been holding me up is working on the powercube for the tractor. I also modified the loading arms of the tractor to match the latest model from open source ecology mostly because it looked cooler, but I'll post some of those screen shots once I get further with the power cube.

This is what I'm currently working on building, the engine is giving me a lot of trouble mostly because I want a pretty highpoly model to put on my portfolio and figured something this complex would be perfect.

The only 2 parts I'd consider completely finished. My goal this week is to finish one part of the engine a night.

I did want to share some tricks I learned.
Softimage has a crease tool like modo I didn't know about. You can have a really simple wireframe and just crease edges on a subdiv model.

And this is a trick I learned from Bobo's Darksider's 2 stream. You can create hard edges, smooth once or twice, then smooth once more without the hard edges to get some good clean sharp lines.

Also I had some issues figuring out how to handle lighting on the windmill fan, a created a thread for that and got a bunch of solutions. http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=115880

ZacD · Feb 2013

Modeled the fuel pump, since it is so small I did tweak some areas to to reduce what the polycount will be on the low poly and for it to bake better.

[UDK] Misery

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