is there any kind of advanced vertex painting/blending in CRYSDK like in the 3d motive DVD for UDK?

yes, the blend layer shader will do that if you feed him a heightmap.

how do you paint it on the mesh? in a DCC tool? can it blend whole texture sets?

you can only blend two materials. It uses vertex alpha channel. And no, no in-editor painter which is a let down imo.

The house textures are looking good so far. You got pretty good results for using mostly photosources. I particularly like the alpha layering of the thatched roof. The only thing that catches my eye is the tiling on the slate roof isn't great in the middle. (You mentioned it needing more work so maybe this is what you were talking about.) I like the impurity those double overlapped tiles add but right now it just looks like it's where you overlapped your texture so it tiles. Maybe if you put a few smaller tiles like that underneath other parts of the texture it'd look better.

I agree with zip, the slates create a very distinguishable horizontal line in the middle that looks artificial.

Thanks guys, I fixed it after your comments. I'm bad because I hoped it would go unnoticed :P

More work done today, going forward on the village. Obviously lot's left to be done and have it looking alive. windows, doors, etc.



And since polycount is not your blog, I'll add a this little link to my new blog, where I go into a more personal critique of the update when I can.

Edit: updated with doors and windows

That's just awesome man, are you gonna add props in there? like barrels, carts?

Yes, for sure. I'd like the village to look alive in the end =)

The village looks really cool. Just having checked out your blog link, have you thought about including a building or two under construction? The thought you've given to the houses construction is great and it could be really cool to show it off in the actual scene a bit.

Yeah a construction scene would look cool, you could even put some medieval traffic cones around...

nitpick: that mountain in the background looks really really weird. praise: that's an awesome village you got there

Hah you've made more houses than I did

I personally really like how the colors of each element of the house match to each other (is this make any sense at all ? ;p).

But from close ups on your blog I can say that wood beams need more work. It lack of big details that cloud be seen, and those make it look bit flat.

I have an technical question.

How do you judged scale of you houses. I mean really. When I'm making this type of architecture, I'm always doing it with real-world scale and my buildings in game looks huge.. I mean they are realistic in terms of size, but I'm not so sure if that good from game perspective. And when I make smaller I start to think about "god damn, how those people can live is such small building, it feels smaller than my room".
On other hand, my real-world scale are to small anyway to make interiors (i tried and from inside it feels to small, especially with 3rd person cam).

@iniside: thanks for the feedback. I added another wood texture pass to my list ;) I also went over your topic, which is cool, you did them in a more photo-realistic style. I agree about the scale of your buildings, they look very big compared to mines. I think I tried to make my houses small because it's a poor village and the area I had for it was small, so in order to give a crowded feel, smaller houses everywhere.

The problem you're refering to with 3D interiors being too small is recurrent in games. We often end up cheating on interiors and door passes. Here I voluntarily kept the size realistic, even if I never lived the medieval era, I think people could use a bed, a chimney and a table. =) That's maybe because of that that games like Oblivion and Skyrim have you loading separate interiors.

e-freak: yeah it just terrain at the moment =P What's so weird about it?

Jenn0_Bing: I dont know for the construction site, but there'll be similar assets soon, I'm planning at least too huge trebuchets on the walls in the village.

Wait, you have a blog?

I feel old screens was better. :P

Long time no updates. I've been playing Skyrim a lot lately, and this explains that.

I've probably finished the church in the village, polished the postprocess and this helps blending the picture colors together.








Still lots to do, I should be able to work at a higher pace the few last weeks of December.

Hooray! updates! AWESOME!

You gotta show us your process for making these buildings.

And I though Skyrim looked good...

awesome update! but i don't really like those windows on the church... they look kinda low res compared to the rest...

Also i wanted to ask you how you make the roads and paths, are they some sort of decals?
Since the texture seems to follow the direction of the path i thought they couldn't be just vertex painted... a simple breakdown maybe?

So goddamn awesome

Cheers guys!

Fnitrox: roads are made using the road decal feature on CE3. You simply draw splines and all done.

The windows are indeed lowres, not that much but still not the same texel ratio as the rest, because it's reusing the castle ones. I wonder if it's worth a new texture?

Computron: what do you want? a wireframe shot or something more precise?

Very nice Cornerstone ? Is this flat texture or geometry ?

This is so damn awesome jesus hell.
Those corner decals look so fucking good.
crazy awesome

great update, looks fantastic.