Hey ppl,

Starting a new thread of one of my current WIPs.
I started to work on the scene quite long ago, but i was busy with other stuff and only recently I thought I've got something to start showing :P

I did few explanatory vids to save me some time on typing ;)

Here is a rough composition and brainstorming for the setting:

You Tube

I started by figuring out main shaders for most of metal debris surfaces first as it will be used on most of the assets in the scene and will determine how i will model and texture the rest of the assets.
I definitely want to go with re-usable tiled sets of textures to be able to do most of things with them instead of doing large meshes with huge unique textures for them.
So i picked up the Vertex Color blend approach as it fits the large scale scene where various assets will need to have some visual variation while re-using same set of textures.
In the vid below I show few foreground rubble modules which I did and how my shaders work on them. That is my starting point to keep working on other meshes of various scale and detail to populate the scene in the future:

You Tube

And here are few screenshots which may show some details more clear since they don't suffer from video compression :P







And here i started the mesh for the "beginning" area. I wanted to establish the shape and location of the mesh surrounding "player start" area first as it will be the departing point to start placing other assets around it in the future:

Note: i haven't applied the vertex colors to it yet.




NOTE: the terrain is quite a rough shape for now just to get the feel. Same goes for the sky, fog and lighting. Water is a temp one taken from UDK and terrain is using a plain CgTextures image without any tweaks. It is a placeholder as well since i wanted to avoid checkerboard default textures in the scene :P

This is looking really great. Recently I've been really digging Red Faction: Guerrilla and the rubble you have going really competes with it. Keep it up

Hey, Vlad, this is really effin impressive. I greatly appreciate the amount of preproduction, the artistic approach in the first video and the technical approach in the second one. I also learned a thing or two.) Those random paint shapes were educational. It was your urban environment btw that taught me, that it's okay to use more then 2 uv sets on your models, so it's nice to see you keeping up the tradition.

Anyway glad to see you pump some work. On the art side, so far so good. Love the painted stuff. Keep it up and hoping to see some sort of a UDK blockout soon

Cheers!


p.s. those videos combined were around 10 mins. which is quite a lot and I doubt many people linger on a single topic so much. So by saving your typing time you might actually scare away some who would get a better idea through a couple of informative pics and few sharp and to the point lines of text.

hi Vlad, thats crazy panel masking you have there :O
very cool stuff!

Wow, awesome work so far Vlad, really loving the way you're using the masks and all. Definitely need to check out those tutorials you talked about! Looking forward to seeing this progress.

(It's Jobye btw hehe)

Originally Posted by d1ver

Hey, Vlad, this is really effin impressive. I greatly appreciate the amount of preproduction, the artistic approach in the first video and the technical approach in the second one. I also learned a thing or two.) Those random paint shapes were educational. It was your urban environment btw that taught me, that it's okay to use more then 2 uv sets on your models, so it's nice to see you keeping up the tradition.

Anyway glad to see you pump some work. On the art side, so far so good. Love the painted stuff. Keep it up and hoping to see some sort of a UDK blockout soon

Cheers!


p.s. those videos combined were around 10 mins. which is quite a lot and I doubt many people linger on a single topic so much. So by saving your typing time you might actually scare away some who would get a better idea through a couple of informative pics and few sharp and to the point lines of text.

First of all Vlad, wow you have just taken my working knowledge of udk and trashed it...got some learning to do.

About this though d1ver, all i can say is if someone cares enough to learn then they should be willing to stick around for the videos, if they don't want to learn then screw'em, its our job as artits to be enthusiastic about our craft and ready to learn new things on a constant basis to stay updated with the times!

I'll take a look at this lunch-time, it looks quite interesting

That was exactly my point, Derrick.) Vlad might miss out on helpful criticism and ideas. Sharing is good, but not as rewarding as being shared with.

Wow that was really impressive, it's pretty much the same idea I have for my approach with my scene I'm working on. Cool to see a working example, though you'd probably execute it way better than me Great work, I'll be following this to see all the progress!

Nice job, off to a really good start, like the way you work those masks and blending! ^^

I'll just echo what Snefer said, this is a very solid start. Smart use of vertex painting, it's really breaking up those surfaces quite well. Looking forward to more!

Wow! Really nice start! Didn't really understand how the "base metal"-texture wroks. Is the object UV mapped to fit the texture with metal plates, or do they tile and you modeled around the texture?

Moar!

Thanks guys, didn't expect to get that much encouraging feedback right away
I appreciate that!

d1ver - lol, u got me on that ;) I agree with your point that vids may take ppl more time that looking at images. Well, at least i can practice capturing/recording some stuff since I need some practice for a tut which i wanted to do in nearest (i hope...) future. So its my video capture test ground here then;)
Dunno, I personally like watching vids more, even if they r longer than reading the text, but u've got a valid point tho.

sltrOlsson - first i do a set of textures for panels, trims, grids etc keeping in mind the possible look of assets which they will be used for.
Then, i just model what i want but remember what kind of texture layouts i have. I assign appropriate texture IDs and map them on each mesh. In any case, the overlays (rust, paint etc) use masks the set of which every texture has. Those masks are done based on the original diffuse map, so the mask matches the same mapping as the diffuse UVs.
Does it answer your question?
Here is example of diffuse which i used for the meshes shown above:

Trims:
_

Panels:

Originally Posted by Matroskin

Thanks guys, didn't expect to get that much encouraging feedback right away
I appreciate that!

d1ver - lol, u got me on that ;) I agree with your point that vids may take ppl more time that looking at images. Well, at least i can practice capturing/recording some stuff since I need some practice for a tut which i wanted to do in nearest (i hope...) future. So its my video capture test ground here then;)
Dunno, I personally like watching vids more, even if they r longer than reading the text, but u've got a valid point tho.

sltrOlsson - first i do a set of textures for panels, trims, grids etc keeping in mind the possible look of assets which they will be used for.
Then, i just model what i want but remember what kind of texture layouts i have. I assign appropriate texture IDs and map them on each mesh. In any case, the overlays (rust, paint etc) use masks the set of which every texture has. Those masks are done based on the original diffuse map, so the mask matches the same mapping as the diffuse UVs.
Does it answer your question?
Here is example of diffuse which i used for the meshes shown above:

Trims:

Yeah, great. It was just the base panel texture i was a bit unsure of. But you are using the original diffuse ask mask? Not a separate alpha?

sltrOlsson - I use additional masks for those. Mostly every Diffuse has 2 more RGB textures which contain a set of b&w images in them (one b&w image per color channel= up to 6 images in 2 textures). This way I also put Spec in them as one of the channels since Spec can be grayscale for these materials.

P.S.: there might be a couple of weeks delay since I need to finish some stuff for Rising Storm MOD (as I promised to do that first). So i will resume the work on this scene in a week or two :P

really awesome work! I love that you put up your WIP as videos really gives me a good understanding of the approach you took to create the scene.

hey hey, it's been a while :P

Got some time to resume working on this scene once again...
Had it abandoned for about a year

Here is most recent WIP update, as b4 I made a quick vid to describe it, plus few images.

Overall I've got major layout with big/mid scale meshes done so far.
Now next thing I plan will be bringing more variation to the rubble color by adding paint layers and maybe globally tweaking the metal texture (to determine).

Terrain needs to be textured, smaller props and vegetation to be added afterwards as well. Still lots of work to do, but at least i am back on it

----VIDEO

Junkyard-WIP-03 - YouTube

Bah why didn't we meet up? I was in Montreal Ubisoft Office last week, would've had a bunch of questions for you haha.

Awesome that you've started working on this again, I remember it and have been looking for it for a while

Oh, I will be there next week :P
Would have been be cool tho. Maybe at the next opportunity ;)

Looking pretty awesome I'm loving your texture work and can't wait to see what you do with your vegitation and other props. My main crit is that your textures are very flat and monochromatic. I think there should be areas where the metal is more bleached from the sun as well as areas where there is more color. You can also define each area so they stand out from one another. Maybe sand gets built up in some corner areas where the wind pushes it up. Just my 2 cents.

Awesome work so far, I love the mood of the scene. Definitely keeping and eye on this post.

This is Really kickass

in case it hasn't been said enough yet, that's some sweet blending. looking forward seeing all those new big structures painted.

I noticed that your lightmap resolution for the "block in" meshes is 256. Isnt that a little high, especially for something thats usually hidden by a ton of other meshes? I understand that its a pretty complex mesh but that seems a bit extreme. But then again, i dont have too much experience with UDK so I may be way off base.

sry, a bit late reply from me, but thanks guys

@marq4porsche - u r right, that was just a base layout of main masses using base metal texture which was quite the same everywhere. Still working on it;)

@zakhar2 - good point. I assigned 256 thinking that it is still quite huge mesh, plus it is sometimes seen in the foreground too. But I'll definitely override/check lightmap res for the actors in the scene as a little optim polish. I already did so on some of them, even switched to vertex colors in some cases.

Oh well, worked quite a bit on this one since my last post. Not that it was taking long to do, just was lazy again :P
Still a WIP:
- missing small detail meshes on the ground and somewhere around (especially still want to add some hanging cables)
- missing some more old numbers/markings on the rubble
- maybe lighting and post-process tweaks in the future

etc - maybe u'll point out more ;)

But I thought I could already show something:





Just a closer shot of water where I tried to follow some good suggestion i've got to add some "spit oil" feel such as little rainbow patterns in shallow areas etc.