Looking good, but grass is kinda weird. It reminds me of traditional oil paintings It works, but I think you can do even better. Here is some pictures, these are NOT MINE! though they might help.





they are from here: http://shurick.livejournal.com/195876.html

its a big article, regarding environment art direction for Allods Online. Quite interesting read, but sadly, only in russian. Some pictures are self explanatory, and I guess google translator can make some sense of it.

the blog journal post was realy interesting ! if u google translate it that is !

Nice link linkov, and great work here!

Thank you alloa - your work is realllly inspirational to me.

coots7 -

kelll - you are the second person already to suggest more warms for tree, so I will definitely touch that up!

linkov - Wow! Thank you for those images, and that blog post is awesome. The pictures are self-explanatory, and I will definitely be reading through the text. I will try to revisit the grass texture later, after my scene is a little more complete, and see what I can do about making it better It certainly has been one of the harder tileables to nail haha...

Jessica : Love your workups and all the extras that you have done. It's been a really great and educational thread.

I was thinking that the tip of your tree could use more love. The grey is looking strange to me. I think if you layered in either some deeper muted green for depth and allowed the top branches to pop or split up the geo at the top and pulled/ twisted them to get more life out of the texture might work out for you.

However it goes, you are doing a fantastic job, I think you will go far.

Thanks katana! I will go back to the texture and see what I can do to layer in some more depth

Hey guys, I have a question: currently I am sculpting my terrain and in my concept there are hills like way far in the distance. Would you put those on a separate terrain, or just tessellate this one a lot so that it is 'bigger' (I'm guessing lots of tessellation is the same thing as making the terrain bigger since you have more to work with??) I could also use fog to fake depth I guess - and could I also scale down the trees to help fake the distance, or do you think that would look weird and obvious? :0 sorry, i am noob at this haha...

Here is the concept again:



Thanks!
Jessica

I would use 2 terrains. One for detail one for distance. You could try just painting a plane and use that almost like it was composited. Make a normal map for the plane as well. As long as it blends nicely with the front stuff could look great at a very low cost. Some DOF and fog could really sell the distance.

Your work is pretty inspiring! Love your style

Thanks Chris - I hadn't thought of compositing! I will consider both techniques as I continue sculpting all the detail stuff on this one terrain. The more I work on this, the less appealing it sounds to cram everything on one terrain haha.

As far as tessellating goes, how many levels is too much/outrageous? I want a lot to work with, but I don't want to overdo it either. Also, I noticed that there is a new landscape editor in UDK - you can use 11 texture samples as opposed to the 4 you are allowed in the terrain editor - are those numbers correct? If so, I'm considering converting my terrain over to landscape editor since I currently have 7 texture samples I intend to use. Do you guys find landscape editor to be pretty legit, or is it kindof buggy due to how new it is still?

This thread is filled with a lot of great information! Your textures and work are simply outstanding great job.

Awesome work! good luck with the terrain The textures are really good! Hope to see more soon ~

Terrain depends. If it IS going in a game engine, you might be best doing the terrain there. I haven't used SDK so I can't make any calls on it. But most engines let you use a skybox camera for distance
(In Hammer you build a 16th scale version of terrian outside player area and it gets rendered full size behind player terrain at all times. so it's costly as far as always rendering, but in Hammer the actual play 'airspace' is costly, so having a tiny model and tiny textures that cover what seems to be a huge area makes sense)

If using Max it would be a great time to use the terrain painting tools (painting vert shape, not color).

As for tessalation I think you still want to try and match the level of detail of your models. If they are fairly low, and you put them on buttery smooth terrain it won't match up all that great.

I'd probably start pretty low poly on it, get all the massive shapes in. The tessalate a little, then paint in some details for more defined shapes/smooth things out. Then if it still looks rough you can tessalate more.

Thanks Baddcog! This scene is going to be in UDK, therefore I am sculpting in UDK. What you say about the tessellation is really helpful - sometimes I forget about the bigger picture haha.

You might take a look at the Airborn mod by Neox and his group. They tackled a nice distance issue with clever painting and equally clever poly counts.

http://www.moddb.com/mods/airborn/

Wow great work, don't know how I missed this thread. Really cool seeing how much improvement was made from the start of this thread.

I am so pumped to see this all in engine. Keep up the good work.

this stuff is awesome!! can't wait to see everything together, going to be great! keep goin!!!

Is there a reason you are still using Terrain?
Landscape handles tessellation much better. (http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Landscape.html)

Thanks guys! katana, I am going to check out that link today - curious to see what they've done :0

Chris, I actually didn't know about Landscape until after I had started sculpting for a bit. I was hesitant to start using it because somebody told me that when I convert my Terrain actor to be compatible with Landscape, I would lose some sculpting information or something (they didn't exactly say what, and I tried researching it to no avail). So I worried about it allll yesterday, only to decide, at the end of the day, that my sculpt was so much in the beginning stages anyway that I might as well switch over.

So I am going to convert my terrain now. Talk about over-thinking things, lol

Great updates!

I'm also pretty excited to see this completed. *subscribe*

Jessica, this stuff is awesome. It's great watching you prepare for each stage with the quick concepts/references you come up with. Really well-thought out and your textures are all really strong. I think your grass texture could be improved by more refined shapes. There was a beautiful grass texture painted a while ago by someone in the WAYWO thread (here: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showp...postcount=8492).

Keep going, looking forward to seeing all this in engine.

Thanks sybrix, paulsvoboda! I will definitely be revisiting my grass for further definition. I love that texture you linked - it's amazing!

For now, here is my Corkwood trunk. It is not a full 1024 height because I'm planning to fit something above it, and this particular tree is much shorter/stouter than the Cypress and won't be needing quite as much length. There are 3 256 x 256 sections, of which the top two are tileable, and the texture also tiles horizontally. Still working on the branches/roots and foliage; in the meantime, critique and comments welcome!

Here is my concept again:





p.s. This time I'm gonna set the model up with an attempt at 3pt. lighting. For jeffro x]

Thanks Jessica!

Awesome texture for the wood. Just lacking some subtle colors (blues and oranges). It reads a bit flat as a result. But the overall texture is gorgeous. It's a lot tighter and not as loose/painterly as the stuff you were doing previously. But the idea and texture itself is awesome.

You're making awesome progress on this thread. Keep it up.

Hmm, for the color, I do have blues for shadows, and the whole texture is already orange - so do you mean to add in some splashes of more saturated blues and oranges, and exaggerate what I have?

Ah, I didn't mean for this to look very different from my other textures! Maybe I will make the leaves nice and painterly to balance out haha - I definitely don't want there to be style discrepancies in my environment. Thank you for the critique!

Your textures are fantastic. Great work all round. Also cheers for the little workflow tut. This is going to be a crackin' scene to look at.

Maybe try pushing some brighter oranges in highlight areas.