Afghan / Kabul City
polycounter lvl 17
I have another project going on which I would like to show so far in todays snapshot.
My current job is to produce 7 city buildings with complete props and city set like pavement, vendor carts and so on. Goal is to take some beauty renders to show the capabilities of the engine as good as possible plus what can be done from an artistic point of view in a given timeline. Final images should look like a street in Afghanistan and all assets should be extendable to produce a mission area later.
At the moment the building texturing is done but misses a complete decal pass with dirt and grime plus the street stuff and props of course. I'll also try some GI pass at the end of the project and see what I can archieve. For the moment I'm doing attachments for the buildings and distribute them.
I have one and a half week left until deadline.
I need to do a lot of cables along the buildings and use splines but a more automated manner would be cool too. The Soulburn scripts (or was it haywood, hehe) have some Wire script which is nice but maybe more for longer wires. I also tried reactor but it looked a bit strange. Maybe I'll mix the three methods a bit until I doscover a tool with a "make-a-nice-cable-button".
I use Leadwerks Engine again for this project which features pureLight now, so 'll test it against Mentalray baking workflow.
My current job is to produce 7 city buildings with complete props and city set like pavement, vendor carts and so on. Goal is to take some beauty renders to show the capabilities of the engine as good as possible plus what can be done from an artistic point of view in a given timeline. Final images should look like a street in Afghanistan and all assets should be extendable to produce a mission area later.
At the moment the building texturing is done but misses a complete decal pass with dirt and grime plus the street stuff and props of course. I'll also try some GI pass at the end of the project and see what I can archieve. For the moment I'm doing attachments for the buildings and distribute them.
I have one and a half week left until deadline.
I need to do a lot of cables along the buildings and use splines but a more automated manner would be cool too. The Soulburn scripts (or was it haywood, hehe) have some Wire script which is nice but maybe more for longer wires. I also tried reactor but it looked a bit strange. Maybe I'll mix the three methods a bit until I doscover a tool with a "make-a-nice-cable-button".
I use Leadwerks Engine again for this project which features pureLight now, so 'll test it against Mentalray baking workflow.
Replies
Reminds me of the buildings we made for Insurgency (www.insmod.org). oohh those great times...
You could definitely use some decals to break texture repetition and give your buildings more depth (you could maybe even fake some AO with decals?).
Take a look at Fallout 3 environment assets, they make great use of decals.
Just adding a little more detail to the mesh will help you break up the tileing as well.
Minotaur0 what do you mean by giving more depth? Using AO and decals or additional geometry in front of the buildings?
I could use vertex painting for adding faked AO shadows or a secondary texture. Baked GI is also possible but bound to a material In Leadwerks.
Will post more when first city blockout is done.
Still just diffuse maps and no baked lighting by the way.
I have no idea about arabic text. Additional geometry will ne added later or some normalmaps.
Durk Durka, Bak a Lak
I also had some fun with panorama images. So I just took screenshots with "print screen" key pasted into Photoshop and let "Photomerge" (it's part of Photoshop) do some work. I had to cut the result because of roundings on the merged screenshots. Thats why it's so small in height.
Those tryouts had the background of doing very high-res screenshots suitable for print media in A1/A2 format or 10.000k pixels. I can render the buffer to a screenshots so I also get nice AA if I crop the image later since Leadwerks offers no AA in version 2.4 but will in 3.0.
For just one try it's not bad so I decided to share the result plus you see the current project state.
1 add the vertex baked ao it will help no-end...
2 more decaled edges and/or chamfer the edges slightly as everythings too sharpe...
3 more wires...along walls etc and more drains pipes and general stuff...washing lines, tarpaulins covering windows cloth etc can really help break up the "tooo square" environment
4 lots of work to the ground ;-)
Shepeiro you are absolutly right with your suggestions.
How Can I bake AO to vertex? I had the same idea but wasn't able to find a good guide.
I don't want to go to crazy with the wires and cables but some curtains and maybe cloth lines won't hurt. But I have to concentrate on the ground for now.
EDIT: Found it in the Wiki. I should have searched on Polycount first then on Scriptspot or other sites....
Works very well with the vertex stuff!
the bent concrete on the building at the second screenshot bothers me a lot
and some shapes are a bit hard to make out, due to the lighting. left side of the street looks good, right side is a grayish noisy mess. but good work so far!
Thanks for the kind feedback and hints!
Snippet from my company website:
"The city environment of a sub-urb in Kabul was done for "serious gaming" purposes which simply means a simulation of tasks in a save environment like a flight simulator. Our task was to develop seven buildings with complete additional props setup. The client will add vehicles and people with his simulation editor to fill the environment."
Doing the project was pretty much straight forward. Collecting references, thinking about what buildings would make sense. Extracting textures - mostly for billbaords - from the references. Other textures are from CG-textures. I also used the decals from there which saved me a lot of time. After doing the assets all stuff has been added into Leadwerks Editor. Last thing was light setup and a small surrounding mountain terrain like Kabul has.
I tried to get as much of the overall feedback into the project but time is money sometimes and I had to finish the stuff in time. Overall project time from start to finish was about 2-3 weeks. I would love to see add people and cars which would make the streets alive but it was not my task.
Enough writing, some screenshots:
I hope I can show some new work soon but have only NDA work coming up which is more CG rendering related. So it will be quiet for some time from now.
The rabbits are freelance work of Bartek Rydel who I really can recommend if you have some character or animation work to give away. THe fishes are my model and I'm very proud of it. My first "character" model, lol
the ground still needs a ton of work...
the pavements ok but maybe adding a ton of rubbish decals would help... but the road is way too clean... for starter sthe tarmac feels too dark and not dusty enough, it needs to be broken up a touch more with side roads being dirt and pay alot of attention to the roads edge with dirt broken tarmac and concrete etc...
also hot dusty places tend to water down the roads in the morning to stop the dust... a few grimy puddles here and there in the road edges and potholes etc would look ace
but you are right of course.
There are 25 models in total - including 7 buildings and 18 props - for only 89,95 EUR. This is only 3,59 EUR for one model. The offer is limited until 10th of October so make sure to save your 40 EUR now because after this period the Afghan City Environment will be 129,95 EUR.
If an Admin tells me to remove, I will remove.
EDIT:
Just about AAA. You throw around with it on your portfolio as well.
You think this is AAA quality?? (From your page)
http://www.nickfarley.co.uk/tropical/new/HEAD_wire.jpg
I've been always a fan of your work, but that post is just...well...it sounds like you spammed this on 100 forums to get some free promo. I know you make a living out of this, it just seemed out of place in this very special polycount forums. Don't know if this is kinda contra-productive for you in the end
There's an Eat3D thread in here every once in a while and other great releases that cost real money, but these people kinda make it more delicate, while yours is just "BAM-slamintheface" - even the red sticker is just pathetic in any possible way. Maybe you can tone down the priceisright/wheeloffortune-attitude and come over more professional in your advertizing ?
I don't know, just a thought
i think the time has come to simply ask people about the texts before i post ads.
also removed the picture.