[Environment] Desert Wreck
interpolator
I'm currently working on my first demo reel piece, it is a ship/submarine wreck in the middle of the desert with a house built around it. I won't be modeling the human/camel, so I'll change up the composition a bit. I'm considering putting a cactus or something in place, however at the moment I have the truck over there.
So far I've done a basic blockout, and as I'm eventually showing it off in UDK I'm going to start transferring my props over there and work more on my texturing there. I'm still slowly learning UDK though, so this might take more time than I would like.
No spec map on the sand yet. I've been slowly learning the UDK over the past month or so, and I've got a pretty decent handle on the important/exporting/materials/lighting so far. If anyone has some tips of guides to point me at (besides the UDK documentation, I've been reading that like crazy)
I've had some problems recently pushing the submarine further with normal maps and adding panels and such. I'm considering perhaps replacing it with another prop I'm making as a single piece. I'm still partway through modeling it, however I think it should be alright. If I do decided to use it to replace my submarine, I will most likely have it broken in half as it is realistically much too big for the scale of the house to match up if I decide to go down that route. I would REALLY like some feedback on this idea.
Battleship:
Finally as far as the house goes I plan to make it more shack-y feel, something like this.
(note this imagine isn't mine, its just some inspiration)
Anyways, that's all for now. I would love to have some critic on my work thus far and my plans for the future of this project. Thanks!
So far I've done a basic blockout, and as I'm eventually showing it off in UDK I'm going to start transferring my props over there and work more on my texturing there. I'm still slowly learning UDK though, so this might take more time than I would like.
No spec map on the sand yet. I've been slowly learning the UDK over the past month or so, and I've got a pretty decent handle on the important/exporting/materials/lighting so far. If anyone has some tips of guides to point me at (besides the UDK documentation, I've been reading that like crazy)
I've had some problems recently pushing the submarine further with normal maps and adding panels and such. I'm considering perhaps replacing it with another prop I'm making as a single piece. I'm still partway through modeling it, however I think it should be alright. If I do decided to use it to replace my submarine, I will most likely have it broken in half as it is realistically much too big for the scale of the house to match up if I decide to go down that route. I would REALLY like some feedback on this idea.
Battleship:
Finally as far as the house goes I plan to make it more shack-y feel, something like this.
(note this imagine isn't mine, its just some inspiration)
Anyways, that's all for now. I would love to have some critic on my work thus far and my plans for the future of this project. Thanks!
Replies
Ah that last image isn't mine its just a cool image I found off google, it what I want my shack to eventually look like.
Your rock formation on the right doesn't really look like an eroded/deserty sandstone rock to me...seems too blobby.
Lookin foward to seeing what you do with this. good luck
I would suggest to concentrate more on making a finished (textured and shaded) piece of every element of the environment for the sake of test and evaluation. For example a wall and roof portion of a house and a part of submarine wreck shell.
Since you are learning the engine I would suggest that u first focus on figuring out how to produce a small but finished part just to see if u can get the right feeling and if shader will work fine.
This way u will also evaluate how hard/easy it will be to do the whole scene and what problems u might experience.
Cauz if u r learning the engine and if u don't have experience working with it its better to encounter problems while dealing with a small "test" piece before
for example I would not mdel the whole submarine since I would try to figure out first how i will texture it - will it be several tileable textures or a unique one for one section which will be re-used few times for the whole lengh of the submarine.
No need to "destroy" it now either since the texturing was not figured out for it yet
Same for the house - i would not bother much yet with modeling but more with making metal sheets and planks fully textured which will be assembled into the house later on.
Edit: similar shack type house building approach:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=66308&page=3
and Wesley tack has a nice large submarine which cleverly uses tiled textures for it:
http://www.wesleytack.com/?category_name=models
The blockout looks great, this is gonna be really promising!
As Matroskin said, start small go bigger. When i first started with UDK i thought "Hey, it can't be that much new to learn". Years biggest understatement? Haha
When i first saw it I thought of, oh yeah, Matroskins Sci-Fi Junkyeard scene (which he should continue with! *wink wink* :P)
The approach he uses is pretty mutch big well thought and planned meshes with a tileing textures. Plus materials that blends cool - advanced vertex blending, there is tutorials (:
Otherwise you could go with good base textures that tiles, for the sub the house and the ground, and then pimp out out with decals.
Or, you could go with a big ass texture for the whole boat, like a 2k*1k texture or something.
As for the sand texture, you need more waves. It's very straight and directional right now. Like this..
Would be cool with something like this to..
Maybe a cool detail, ad with decals...
@Matroskin Whoa! Great reference, thanks! For texturing the submarine I'm planning on doing a tileable texture, I tried doing it with just a single large texture and i wasn't having too much luck with it. I think I have a pretty decent understand of materials with the UDK (been trying it out with a couple simple props earlier last month) so I'm not too worried about that at the moment, however I'm pretty sure by the end of this project it'll be me playing around with the engine a lot. The fact hat I modeled in the houses were just to get a sense of scale for the scene. I'll be working today making individual props to build the house.
@sltrOlsson Thanks! I've been reading up on vertex blending, and if possible I totally want to incorporate it in my scene. And great sand reference! For the terrain I'm using UDK's terrain tool, so for those bumps, would you suggest that I sculpt/model those in or simply use some intense normal maps?
Thanks for all the feedback everyone!
What we're going to do is do some UV distortion to introduce some eddies into the straight lines. We can do this because the UV Coord nodes in the material editor are essentially just images which means we can do whatever we like to them.
Here's the first step in the process:
We're interested in the three nodes on the right here.
Because we're going to be eventually creating a Material Instance (will explain what that is later) I'm using a Scalar Parameter here. Scalar paramters do exactly the same job as constants with one big difference, but we'll come to that later. Make sure you enter "Noise Scale" into the name property of the Scalar Parameter.
What we're doing with these three nodes is actually scaling the UV Coords. This is just like when you type the values in the UTiling and VTiling fields in the properties of the TexCoord node.
The next three nodes (circled in red) scale the intensity of a special texture that will introduce noise into the waves. It has to be very blurred with no sharp transitions in intensity anywhere and it must tile. Here's one I made earlier that you can use.
Once again we're using a Scalar Parameter here. All it does is lower the brightness of the texture. Make sure you enter "Noise Intensity" into the name property of the Scalar Parameter.
Okay, this is the complicated part (not too bad when you know whats going on). Now, the TexCoord node represents an image with two channels, Red and Green. We want to play with those those channels. In the past I've tended to get better results when splitting the two channels off and working on them individually. I have no idea why this should be the case but it seems to be.
To split off the channels we use a node called a Component Mask. The component mask masks out all channels except for the ones that you chose in the node's properties. Whats especially useful is that the material editor remembers what colour that channel represents rather than just thinking of it as a greyscale image. This means that when you combine it later with a green channel you get your two channels back again.
Create component masks as above, two red masks and two green masks, One pair of red/green masks gets the value of the multiply from the last section and the other gets another TexCoord. This new TexCoord node is the one we're going to be distorting and using.
Okay, next we add the outputs of the red component masks together and we do the same to the green ones. It's important to make sure that you add values that come from component masks only when you're doing this or the material editor will forget that the greyscale values represent a particular colour channel.
Finally. we need to use another special node called an Append Vector that looks for colour channel info and combines it all back into what is essentially a Constant2Vector or Constant3Vector. This is out distorted UV Coords. It might not look very different but even minute changes can have a big effect!
Now it's a case of simply attaching our distorted UVs to the normal map and, of course, plugging in some kind of sandy diffuse.
Material done! Save and go back to the content browser where you made it. Right click on your sand material and select "Create New Material Instance (Constant)".
This is why we used Scalar Parameters instead of Constants. A material instance is a, well, instance of a material. What that means is that we can change the values of the any "parameter" nodes of the material without having to recompile the material. Because theres a bit of trial and error involved in getting this material to look right being able to adjust the amount of distortion in real time without having to recompile is a huge time saver.
You should have a new material constant now, like above. Double click on that.
You should see a screen similar to the one above now. Click the triangle next to "Scalar Paramter Values" and then make sure you check the boxes next to "Noise Intensity" and "Noise Scale".
It's a good idea too apply your instanced material to a flat BSP surface like I have above.
Now move the Material Instance Editor window over so you can see the Scalar Parameter values and the texture on the BSP surface. If you move your cursor over the up down arrows next to the parameter values your cursor will change to an up/down arrow. If you click and drag up or down you can smoothly change the value and the material will change in real time on the BSP surface!
By playing with the two values you can get greater or smaller amounts of distortion. Here's two different settings I had:
Intensity: 0.98
Scale: 0.08
Intensity: 0.08
Scale: 0.98
Hope that helps! Good luck!
And thank for you all of the detail you put in, it's always nice to know what nodes do what xD
I hope I'm not asking for too much, but how did you go about making your initial normal map and what's your light setup? Because that already looked better than what I had done already, also I know nearly nothing about lighting in UDK.
Thanks again though the tutorial is fantastic!
For the sand waves I was sloppy but if you're more careful you'll end up with a much much better result.
First, draw smae lines that look like sand waves. Use Filter -> Other -> Offset to help you make the texture seamless.
Next, go to Image -> Canvas Size and make sure that all the arrows for the anchor are pointing outwards. If they aren't clcik on the centre tile to change it. Change the width and height to 300% and click OK. Make sure that View -> Snap To -> Layers is on. Now alt-drag your layer first to the corners and then to the gaps inbetween. If you do it in that order it should snap nicely and create a large 3x3 tile of your seamless texture. We need that so that when we apply our blurring the burring won't break the seamlessness of our texture.
Merge all the layers down to one large layer and use Guassian Blur to blue the lines to the point where they go smoothly from black to white and then back to black. Conceptually you want a sine wave in cross-section. Now create a duplicate of the large blurred layer and set the duplicate's blend mode to Screen. Use layers to narrow the white part of the blurred lines to a much thinner streak. This will add the little ridge to all the waves. When you're happy go to Canvas Size and change the size back to whatever the original size was in pixels (more accurrate to use exact pixels than 33%). Mine was 512 so I used that. You should have something like this:
Put the heightmap throught your heightmap -> normal map converter of your choice.
Edit: @sltrOlsson: Hey, thanks, that's kind of your too say! No idea how to go about that. Can anyone edit the wiki, or only some polycount higher ups? Never checked.
yes thank you for this.
I really hope you go with the submarine though.
Here's my current build of the house, shown in detail lighting atm, still working on the textures.
I'm moving on to all of the props beside the building now, stay tuned!
Keep it up, you´re doing a great job!
And nice sand tutorial in this thread!
I started out with building a skeleton of the building of out planks and simply layered the panels onto it. However I agree that it's too busy and would be more interesting if the panels also helped towards the structural integrity of the building.
I'll have to look up on how to do vertex blending and particles/dust, but I agree that my environment will definitely benefit from using them. I'll start looking through the UDK documentation later today.
However if anyone knows some resources that I could read through that would be fantastic and could save me some time of tracking down the necessary tutorials.
I plan to have everything on the platforms done by the end of the day so stay tuned!
Ryswick, for some reason your images aren't showing up for me!
Pic1
Pic2
I cant wait to see this done!
Hi very interesting post but what program are you doing al this?
This is all done in the UDK, mostly the UDK's material editor
http://www.macsteelusa.com/pdf/Metal_Roofing_10.12.pdf
Unless he uses something like two to five different pieces, then it'll only increase instanced polys rather than unique polys. Uniques are expensive in terms of rendering but once it has been rendered for the level, it costs almost nothing to display again.
I like this thread and I'm going to be doing something similar after April 29 (my finals end...) so maybe we can go back and forth about things we're stuck on, help each other out. I haven't decided exactly what yet but I'm going to document the whole thing start to finish on the forum.
AJ
PS. This is my inaugural post. Hi Polycount!
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy????
Why not?
Initially I made tileable texture for my wooden platform, but the edges were way too straight, since I simply took the model from my blockout and added a material to it.
So as you can see here I added in individual planks to break up the silhouette (also I changed the underside of the platform, giving it a slight lip, it just makes more sense than what was in the concept imo).
Here you can see exactly what I did. I used a variation of 5 different planks, scaling them to fit with the "tiles". All referencing the same texture of course.
And now here you can see I took your guy's advice and reduced the amount of panels. It's still a bit too busy for my tastes so I'll definitely refine it later this week.
Messing around with some vertex painting, I'm going to play with parallax maps later tomorrow to see if i can't spice it up a little bit. (texture is nowhere near done, but feel free to comment on it)
A crate! Also check out that sand! Thanks for all the help with that!
And that's all for today! I'm going to see if I can get everything in engine/textured by this Saturday, then I can work on lighting/rendering next week!
I look forward to any and all critics, every little bit helps!!!:)
Here's some examples of worn wood or color that is mixed with sand:
You don't have to listen to me
it was mentioned before but there's too many metal panels and they don't look built either, it looks as if pure magic is holding them in place.
as mentioned above, nothing is washed out and sun-baked enough. the colours are too saturated, as if it rained 5 minutes ago and everything is soaked and rich.
nothing looks battered by the wind and the sun and the sand.
the scale of a lot of stuff is off too, posts too thick, panels too large making the house look single storey when the concept shows it as being double storey, etc tec
Keep it up.
@Feanix Nice tutorials! Kudos.
edit: I failed, there was a second page and I managed to miss it >.>
I think some of your texture are making the scene muddy. The house is a bit of a mess at the moment because the busy textures are mashing everything together. Try not to just copy paste a picture on to it, try to think about where you'd find rust on a real object.
The wood needs to be sun bleached and I'm not sure metal would rust that much in the desert there is a reason they put aircraft graveyards out in the desert, low humidity.
It will also help to push/pull your sand mesh up in spots to create some smaller dunes, its pretty flat right now. Also if you can create piling sand around the bases of your supports that would help tie the two together.
You might want to create a 2nd sand material that isn't wavy, so you can blend the two together. Also I think you need sand just about everywhere, your shack would block and collect sand in specific areas unless someone is there constantly sweeping and removing the sand.
also, your wood is too dark. it currently looks like it's made from oak.
UV light would make paint become lighter, and eventually crack off.
Please critic everything.
Also anyone have any idea why this happens?
Id like to see more rust on that ship, like you had earlier. Id make the rust look like it was dropping/leaking from some of those metal panels. and especially at the front where the metal is ripped up. Rust the hell out of those areas. Make it look like the rust is eating the metal.
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Like that except exaggerated.
Once ur done with the scene I'd personally desaturate the final images because I like desaturated. Your colors on the wood (more so on the scaffolding and ladder) and the ship look a little too vibrant for its environment and setting.
Crits:
1) The mountains in the back should be more detailed and should help frame the composition of the shots.
2) Notice these foreground framing objects, these really help with composition, and they're so simple...
3) Notice the action line from the roof drops your eye right on a different colored metal awning. This wasn't a fluke color choice.
4) The sand tiles too obviously, need some misc items like scrub brush and a few posts. Notice the subtle dune that flows from the truck. You don't necessarily need the truck (it would be awesome if it was there) but that dune helps drive the composition. The difference in the sand types and in the lighting also helps define this action line.
5) Much like the dune coming from the car, the dune on the left also helps define an action line. You also want the peak of this dune to be just in front of the sub, your sub is resting on top of it.
6) The deck of the ship is lacking in clutter, especially they tower, its void of detail and clutter on top. The metal of the tower looks more like a solid chunk rather than sheets of metal welded together over a skeleton. There is a great effect where the skeleton shows through the skin of the hull kind of like this. It helps show age and that the ship was under great pressure at one point in time, really important history to show.
7) The building and support structures should be closer, the water tower specifically is quite a bit farther away than the concept. The shack in the concept is sort of built under the shade of the sub but in your scene it looks to be farther away.
8) The overall shape of the ship seems to be off, its shaped more like an A instead of a V.
9) several key compositional pieces are missing (the camel, the truck, and framing objects) the scene can flow without them but something needs to help bridge the gaps in the flow.
Also Think about the direction of the wind and where sand would build up, in the concept the sand is moving left and right, in your scene the sand is moving from front to back.
Great work though this scene is coming along nicely.
Any opinions of where they should be positioned would be greatly appreciated.
will finish adding the junk ontop of the ship, wooden poles sticking out of the ground and some grass later today. Also might add some different types of sand in the mix. Still need to retexture that water tower.
I *should* have enough time to do the truck, but if not i'll replace it with some other props unfortunately.
Any and all critics are welcome. Also as far as the additonal rust textures go, I'm not too sure how to set up my material to use more than 2 textures in my vertex painting. If anyone could help me with that I will greatly appreciate it. Also it would allow me to get rid of some of the metal sheet grooves that are found along the teeth and such.