Hi everyone!
A couple of mates at work are entering this challenge so they've inspired me to do the same. My idea is to create a Honey I Shrunk The Kids / Arthur and the Invisibles style environment.

The main challenges I expect to face are:

- Using UDK. I'm familiar with unreal3 editor basics from the Scene from a movie challenge I did last year, but to push the boundaries in terms of style and engine features will be a challenge.
- Creating a whimsical environment for a miniature person. My background is in doing real world scale scenes and objects so this will be a fun challenge.
- Dialing back on high poly modeling. I tend to get caught up in this lately, but want to work on increasing my work speed and getting that sweet spot in terms of concept to polish without getting bogged down unnecessarily along the way.

Well, onto the concept:

I suck at drawing, so i started blocking out a scene in Max with some throw-away textures to give me a sense of scale, colour and lighting. This is a few hours work and doesn't represent anything more than a sketch.



And here's a mood board of sorts. I want to make one of the sections have more depth with some far background shenanigans going on. Ideas on this are welcome!
At the moment the depth of the scene is very shallow.

Nice I really like the idea here, that log bridge should be made of staws or something.
Mhh I think a coin is smaller than a leaf btw

Anywayz Ill be keeping an eye on this, good luck mate

Love the concept Kysterama. Cant wait to see the end result.

Thanks for the feedback Kharn and Tesukaa I will have to pay close attention to scale as I go along. I'm making a post today to show i'm not being lazy :P

I'm still very much in block out and testing mode, but I did commit to a few meshes like the grass and drain pipe in the scene. I've had those buzz3d UDK videos playing on the other monitor while I work so I know what to do when I start exporting from max!

I've just quadrified up the terrain and am about to take into zbrush so that should be fun!

Notes:
- not convinced on adding the lawn mower yet (hence its rough block out stage)
- Grass is not scattered yet, only the test stuff is thrown in the scene
- The terrain will have more interesting elements added in zbrush
- Some sort of natural bridge to be added to the little river
- A far background element to be added like mountains or high rises


Anyway, here's some more WIP shots. Thanks for watching

Looking good matey!
Remember you were going to dial back the high poly stuff a bit tho :P

Thanks Jaiza!

Yeah, i couldnt resist a little bit of zbrushing on the pipe to make it a little misshapen and used looking lol. I meant more about not spending hours in max adding edge loops on complex objects. The pipe was super easy to spit out to zbrush, and then bake down to a normal in max later

Okey doke,

I've been getting my head around UDK and have exported a few meshes to see what is what. Here's a little test screengrab of my spartan little scene.




and a tree stump mesh i made in zbrush


Terrain textures are placeholders at the moment too (I realise there are elements like leaves etc in the texture which are no where near the right scale)

This part is a lot of fun!

looks like its coming together!

keep going

Sweet Stuff Kysterama!

Make sure to give some massive Depth of Field effects ago as well! will really hit home the fact of this being a tiny scene.

WICKED!

Thanks Rob! You read my mind about depth of field. I've always loved those tilt shift photography looks.

Here's we're I'm going with the DOF look. I had planned from the start to get foreground elements like blades of grass to blur out and also have the same effect in the background of the image to naturally draw the eye to the player position in the mid-ground

Hopefully its shaping up nice

looking better at each update, one crit on the grass still: to me it seems like it's too short if it's meant to be real sized grass clumps in a shrunk environment.

Well spotted ParoXum, thanks! I didn't even notice. I need to go out and take some scale reference photos in the yard methinks, lol.


edit-> okay scaled up the grass and brought in some more foliage

This is so cool. I love the idea and your execution is great so far. Grass looks much better now and the DOF is giving it a pretty cool look.
Only thing I'm wondering about is the terrain texture. If the whole world is scaled down I'd expect the cracks to be much bigger but maybe you have a different idea in mind.

Thanks! I'm not happy with the terrain either and i've ignored it pretty much until now except to throw some random materials on it at the start.

I really want to get that rough debris style look that is more representative of dirt at this magnified level

eg:


I dont think normal maps will cut it at this level or camera angle so i might try a few experiments with random debris and low poly scattered elements to really give a sense of that roughness in real life. Bark, pebbles, bits of fallen folliage, vines and tree roots etc.

Here's another update with a few more elements in the mix
I threw in a random windmill pic on an alpha plane to see if i wanted that as a possible prop. Still totally undecided on what to do with the background. Also added a wet look to the terrain material.

is the windmill supposed to be a miniature garden decoration thingie or a real one?
if it is a real one you need to blur it a lot more. same for the sky. that's one of the big problems with dof in realtime rendering. you need loads of samples to blur something far away without making it look like crap.

im also not sure if the ssao is doing you any favors. maybe use the lightmass AO.

the wet stuff looks really good and overall it's coming together rather nicely. good progress

loving the Sh*t out of this.

Its all looking good art wise i think the thing that stands out most for me is the scale of stuff. I think things have to be alot bigger compared to say that hose and coin.

I might suggest some cracks get modelled in, thats how big they would be at this level. and your like u suggested lots more low poly rubble and stuff, bigger grass and getting things closer to the camera, really getting us into the scene.

one more thing :P, what about more real life stuff down the tracks, massive dogs nose, super soaker, shoe, spider, background element of a house, (massive bricks). etc, My mind is going crazy!!!!!! Sorry!!!

http://allears.net/tp/mgm/m_histk.htm

Made those last two my background at work. This is looking really cool. Can it haz anthill?

This is just looking super cool, nice work!

Wow, thanks heaps

I'm on holidays in Thailand at the moment, and although I did install Max on my netbook, i'm reluctant to do 3d when i'm supposed to be on holiday away from my 9 to 5, which is 3d lol.

It means I'll have one week to finish this scene when I get back so I'll hopefully bust it out before the deadline!

wow i worked on something just like this in high school. maybe checking it out could help give u some ideas, mind u its pretty old we did it in Unreal 2004

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4050/...22f41f9c_b.jpg
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4152/...eb979ec2_b.jpg
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4090/...e7c53f95_b.jpg
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4020/...c7ca059c_b.jpg

Yours looks much better but reference is all ways good

If you're going to post reference, please use links instead of spamming images inside of somebody elses thread.

this is looking awesome.

Wow, those shots look so eerily similar itsamadman! Thanks for sharing

I'm back from Thailand and have very little time left, but I managed to spend most of today building and texturing more assets. One of my biggest problems is lack of grime/dust/dirt on my actual props, but I'm not sure I'll have to time to do this before the deadline unfortunately. Lets just pretend the kid only just opened his toy train set from its pristine box minutes ago shall we? :P

The dirt/soil is still falling way short of what's in my head but one of the last things i'll be doing is filling the remaining poly budget with ground debris, sticks and general nature doohickies to help eradicate that smooth look.

2 Days left, so crit me now! GO!








The List of frantic deadline doom:

- Some sort of far background element like mountains or something
- toy wooden train half buried to help sell the look of the train track set
- Much larger tree trunk hollow at the far right
- More ground debris, twigs, sticks, pebbles etc
- Window in side of building
- Garden tap on side of building that hose plugs into
- Extend and drape hose along new assets
- Drain pipe down side of building

looking fantastic!

Remember its a side scroller so focus on what that camera angle will see!

Really nice progress! I feel like the bridge is kind of taking a lot of attention and will hide some of the pipe/river stuff. But totally love the idea of wooden toys tracks.