The Last of Us Inspired Environment (UDK)
polycounter lvl 7
Greetings Polycount!
I have recently finished working on an environment with a friend that is inspired by The Last of Us. I hope you like!
Video Link
and for those who love big pictures, here is a massive panorama stitch of the scene http://polyplant.co/Naughty_Dog/Panormama.jpg
I worked on mostly the textures, shaders and 50% modeling. For the technical side of things, I tried to keep it as authentic to the Naughty dog pipeline as I possibly can based on what information I can find on Zbrush central and vertex book. Almost every texture is created from scratch in Zbrush and vertex blended into the environment.
For the lighting portion, we choose the static route to get the most out of bounce lights. since there is no way to adjust the darkness of the dominant directional lights, my friend Joey Lenz found a way to create a simulated hdri and hand placed about 400+ lights in the scene.
C&C welcome!
I have recently finished working on an environment with a friend that is inspired by The Last of Us. I hope you like!
Video Link
and for those who love big pictures, here is a massive panorama stitch of the scene http://polyplant.co/Naughty_Dog/Panormama.jpg
I worked on mostly the textures, shaders and 50% modeling. For the technical side of things, I tried to keep it as authentic to the Naughty dog pipeline as I possibly can based on what information I can find on Zbrush central and vertex book. Almost every texture is created from scratch in Zbrush and vertex blended into the environment.
For the lighting portion, we choose the static route to get the most out of bounce lights. since there is no way to adjust the darkness of the dominant directional lights, my friend Joey Lenz found a way to create a simulated hdri and hand placed about 400+ lights in the scene.
C&C welcome!
Replies
Looks really nice!
There are just some minor things which could be improved in my opinion..
I think the concrete staircases could use some wear and tear (they look very clean and new atm).
Another thing is, that the trees look a bit "lonely" right now.. something like roots coming out the concrete near them would give it a more natural look.
The last thing which would be really nice to see is some water puddles in different sizes (on the street).
But I think these are just some minor changes based on my own taste
Great stuff, I like it!
Can't wait for the actual game
Also, do you really NEED all of those lights? I mean, that's gotta take an age and a half to bake, and it doesn't really come out looking any better than the single dominant directional light setups used in the UDK example maps. It also looks terribly impractical. What if your (hypothetical) boss walked over and asked you to change the angle and/or colour of the sun?
@kartoonHead: Thanks for the input, yes the lights are absolutely necessary. There is no bounce light/tonal variation in the shadow regions of the default dominant directional light. Hand placing the bounce lights is the only way to specifically control every region of the scene beyond what the default Global Illumination can do. Its very much a "old school" Pixar lighting technique, we are specifically mimicking "film look" in preparation for next-gen . Baking wise, the entire scene only took about 7-9 minutes on production quality. Practicality wise, using the hdri conversion, we went through about 5 to 10 iterations of the angle and color of the sun before "locking" the scene. Then the bounce lights was hand placed, which took about a few days total.
One thing I would mention is there seems to be a lack of colour variation with the foliage, it seems to be mostly one shade of green. It would be nice to see a few different shades of green, maybe some browns/oranges and a few more flowers to break it up.