one thing that does bother me about the buildings is the wood. in some of the screens it just looks like brown concrete almost. and the highlighted edges seem too tacky (not sure if thats the right word, but i just dont like em. lol).
What do you mean by modular ? You mean that each wood beam, and wall is separate module ? Or the houses them self are self-containing modules ?
I ask because the first approach do not seem particularly performance-friednly in UDK (and not in any other engine for that matter)
The floors (with wooden beams etc) are modular.
So you have floors you can stack on each other if you want to, add how many windows you want, doors, stairs etc etc. And no it's not that performance-friendly, however you can always work around this by creating all the buildings in 3ds Max with the modular parts and then exporting the finished buildings.
one thing that does bother me about the buildings is the wood. in some of the screens it just looks like brown concrete almost. and the highlighted edges seem too tacky (not sure if thats the right word, but i just dont like em. lol).
Yeah a big inspiration ofcourse! I try to go with more tilable textures though. Hmm wooden beams yeah, I don't necessarily like it to 100% either it gives a bit more detail though. I'll probably change the textures during all of this anyway, but we'll see it depends on how lazy I am during that moment ^^ Thanks for the input though! I'll keep it in mind
nice, im doing the exact same thing in udk but with a viking fishing village (here). it's taken me a few months so far but with four peopel you should knock it out alot quicker .
Very cool! I can recognize Disting's clean style on it. Are we gonna have the wireframe and the texture soon?
Textures are actually my own, so right now the style is completely my own we do however try to get everything past our lead so in the end he decides on the changes that needs to be made
Looks great! I would loved to have worked on something like this. I'm a big fan of fantasy style stuff. Been meaning to update my portfolio and thinking of doing some fantasy buildings.
I've been wondering what is the best way to do roof tiles. How are you doing yours? The way you have broken up the flat areas looks good and the tiles really stand out. Would love to see a wire for them. I was looking at Fable 2 screenshots and it looks like they create detail at the edges/overhangs only and leave the rest flat.
Looks great! I would loved to have worked on something like this. I'm a big fan of fantasy style stuff. Been meaning to update my portfolio and thinking of doing some fantasy buildings.
I've been wondering what is the best way to do roof tiles. How are you doing yours? The way you have broken up the flat areas looks good and the tiles really stand out. Would love to see a wire for them. I was looking at Fable 2 screenshots and it looks like they create detail at the edges/overhangs only and leave the rest flat.
Can't wait to see how this progresses.
That's very interesting how fable does it. Hmm, well the roof was a bit tricky. Since I created my normal map from a photo and a heightmap I created from that photo. I had to actually go in and change stuff in the individual RGB-channels to make it look decent.
The trick was pretty much to control how the normal map would be generated from the heightmap. The end of each rooftile has a dark texture that meets white texture for the underlying tile, creating a weird edge in the normal map when generating it. So I had to go in and manually paint-away that bottom edge of each tile, so that the normal map only recognized the top edge making it look a little bit better. It's far from perfect though.
You could probably get an even better result if you do the tiled roof texture in Zbrush since you get a lot of stuff for free. I'm trying to adapt a photoshop-only workflow though for efficiency.
Ah, so this is what the buildings where for
Really sweet work, love the look you have got in udk, nice sharp shadows.
Now I feel that the roof tiles lack the same depth as the stone, looks really flat in comparison, I can see that you have added some poly's to the silhouette to the roof, but I think the normal map(or lack of one?) don't bring the depth out enough.
Hope you will be able to post the texture flats for this later, using mostly tiling textures?
Ah, so this is what the buildings where for
Really sweet work, love the look you have got in udk, nice sharp shadows.
Now I feel that the roof tiles lack the same depth as the stone, looks really flat in comparison, I can see that you have added some poly's to the silhouette to the roof, but I think the normal map(or lack of one?) don't bring the depth out enough.
Hope you will be able to post the texture flats for this later, using mostly tiling textures?
I will, they are mostly 100% tilable. The problem is the viewing angle of the roof which kill the normal-effect, I probably would have more detailed roofs if it wasn't so expensive ^^. Haven't seen a game so far where you walk on the ground with super-detailed roofs. Last thing I've seen really detailed roofs was in Assassins Creed for obvious reasons and even then 70% of the buildings had flat roofs.
However! I'll take another look at the normal map of the rooftiles to see if I can make it deeper. I could probably do it in the shader though by multiplying the individual channels of the normal map texture.
mm, I get what you mean, but it was the only thing that stood out to me
Doesn't the texture get lower res do to the mip mapping from that angle?
That might kill the normal map even more.
Since you are going for a flytrough, is that only from the ground/player height or from above as well where you might see the roofs in more detail.
And even if you don't do anything with the roof thats completely understandable, no need to waste poly's or resources on what won't be seen or noticed.
mm, I get what you mean, but it was the only thing that stood out to me
Doesn't the texture get lower res do to the mip mapping from that angle?
That might kill the normal map even more.
Since you are going for a flytrough, is that only from the ground/player height or from above as well where you might see the roofs in more detail.
And even if you don't do anything with the roof thats completely understandable, no need to waste poly's or resources on what won't be seen or noticed.
Hmm true, we might move the camera higher than the rooftops. I might end up having to put more detail in there. It's okay for now though, I'm not doing anything to completion just yet. We need to settle the artstyle and balance all the textures in the end anyways. :poly117:
any updates on this? i'm curious to see some progress ^^
I've been taking a big break before and a couple of weeks after Christmas but!
I'm actually I'm working on new stuff right now, however I usually like to show stuff when I have a batch of new things to show. I'm trying to cram in a couple of hours worth on this after work.
Seems like I'm the only one actively working on this project right now. Sooo it'll be a little bit slower But bear with me, it will without a doubt show up!
Lovely houses, Chris! The only things that bothers me is the chimney. maybe make the bricks tile a little more there? Right now it feels sort of muddy and undefined to me. Maybe add some hard edges? 'Cause it feels sorta too soft for a brick. Can't really put my finger on it.
Also have you've done any kind of more global preproduction? Any color, light, mood, design studies? Would be lovely to see your plans for those.
Keep it up, dudes! It's always great when you have someone to work on personal projects with.
Lovely houses, Chris! The only things that bothers me is the chimney. maybe make the bricks tile a little more there? Right now it feels sort of muddy and undefined to me. Maybe add some hard edges? 'Cause it feels sorta too soft for a brick. Can't really put my finger on it.
Also have you've done any kind of more global preproduction? Any color, light, mood, design studies? Would be lovely to see your plans for those.
Keep it up, dudes! It's always great when you have someone to work on personal projects with.
cheers
Oh yeah the Chimney, I plan for something more exciting to put on the rooftops. It's just quickly put together and slammed a texture on just to see how it would look. Thanks for reminding me though!
Regarding the global preproduction, well not a lot honestly. Been researching a bit what kind of environment and mood we want. We have a kind of moodboard but right now we're just prepping models and textures to go into the engine.
Since I'm the only guy working on it actively we'll see what happens, I might start creating a small environment by myself so I can showcase my portion of the project. Right now we're aiming for gritty fantasy with a touch of epic.
Sorry for the lack of proper Object updates , I'm currently working on the Master Materials for my Prop Materials and Blend Materials.
I'm trying to add as much as possible ^^
For my Prop Master Material I have this so far:
- Option for Diffusemap or Solidcolor
- Tinting my diffusemap option
- Desaturate diffusemap option
- Global Diffuse UV-scale
- XY Diffuse UV-scale
Emissive
- Option for Emissive, sub-options for Emissive Map and Rimlight
- Rimlight controls (intensity, fresnel power and bias)
Specular
- Specmap
- SpecIntensity
- SpecPower
Opacity
- Opacity from AlphaMap or just simple transparency.
Normalmap
- Normalmap with a depth control
- Detail Normalmap with XY UV-scale control
Then Heightmap functionality using bumpoffset for everything pretty much.
For my
Blend Master Material
- Blends 2 DiffuseTextures using Heightmap and Noisemap
- Individual UV-scale controls for Heightmap and Noisemap
- Option for Inverting Heightmap
- Noisemap Intensity Control
- Global and XY UVScaling for both Diffuse1/2
- Individual SpecControls for the textures, Intensity and Power (Not working correctly yet)
- Heightmap/Bumpoffset control for both DiffuseBlend Textures
Sooooo first time doing this, thank god for all tutorials out there. It's really fun to mess around with to see what kind of results you can get. Plus you feel really smart when you figure something out yourself xD
Right now I added the functionality to invert my heightmap.
I've added static switch parameters to my Master Materials now just to get the frickin instruction-count down. Getting expensive with all the fancy stuff. I still have some shader work to do, but then I'm on textures and 3d-stuff again.
Okay so I've been working on this for a while now, with christmas break, new-years, typical life stuff has come in the way of me completing this project quickly. I've got new shiny updates though!
I decided to say: F*ck it, I'm going wherever I want with this. So here you go, 14 meter tall houses and what not.
14 meter houses and skywalks made by the textures and materials I had.
Also made a quick new texture (cgtextures thx!) for the modular walls I'll have placed throughout the scene.
I still have a long way to go and yes, I haven't even touched post-processing, lighting or even lightmaps for that part ^^
I'll post a proper set-up of my layout and composition by the end of today probably.
Okay so I've been playing around with composition and some quick ideas but I started feeling guilty about not showing actual work in progress on this scene so this is what I've got so far. I still haven't done a proper post-process pass, I have spent 0 minutes on lighting (haven't even changed the direction of the sun) , haven't touched fog settings or even spent any time on the actual "ground", it won't be flat and super-tiled in the end so don't worry
I will keep adding stuff to the scene, I have lots of ideas that I want to try, lots of props to create as well as new textures.
Next week will not be as productive since I'll have other things to do, but I'll try to spend an hours here or there on the scene. I'm not sure how far I'll take it, but I'm pretty sure that this is nowhere near the end result.
Nice update!
I think this is heading in a very promising direction.
Right now I think everything looks a tad too pale, but I'm guessing that has to do with the lighting, fog and post process, which you said you haven't touched yet, so nevermind me.
Dude wicked, I really think adding the height to the buildings gave your project that something that it needed to make it stand out more. Really looking forward to seeing some more saturated bits and pieces throughout this scene!!
Really love the direction this is going. Subscribed and looking forward to further updates.
One thing to keep in mind is the material each floor/level your buildings are constructed from. Particularly heavy stone walls with wooden supports, great for covering texture seams but, masonry supports for stone walls, wood for lighter and often upper floor construction with some possible overlap in between.
Cool thanks guys , I'll keep the masonry support in mind. Might make the upper levels light with wooden materials. As said before, next week I won't show a lot of updates, but I'll try to work out some of the smaller scale stuff.
Replies
http://wiki.polycount.com/ModularMountAndBlade (may be good to keep on hand).
one thing that does bother me about the buildings is the wood. in some of the screens it just looks like brown concrete almost. and the highlighted edges seem too tacky (not sure if thats the right word, but i just dont like em. lol).
I ask because the first approach do not seem particularly performance-friednly in UDK (and not in any other engine for that matter)
The floors (with wooden beams etc) are modular.
So you have floors you can stack on each other if you want to, add how many windows you want, doors, stairs etc etc. And no it's not that performance-friendly, however you can always work around this by creating all the buildings in 3ds Max with the modular parts and then exporting the finished buildings.
Yeah a big inspiration ofcourse!
you and Disting will do a nice stuff (and document everything ;I hope:) the textures seem good.
following!
Textures are actually my own, so right now the style is completely my own
Oh right, yeah it kinda does! One of my favorite cities in Oblivion. Might have subconsciously made it look a little bit like that!
Michael Anderson and Søren Seeberg
Michael acts like the lead and the level artist, I don't know Søren role yet. He has just shown interest so far.
I've been wondering what is the best way to do roof tiles. How are you doing yours? The way you have broken up the flat areas looks good and the tiles really stand out. Would love to see a wire for them. I was looking at Fable 2 screenshots and it looks like they create detail at the edges/overhangs only and leave the rest flat.
Can't wait to see how this progresses.
That's very interesting how fable does it. Hmm, well the roof was a bit tricky. Since I created my normal map from a photo and a heightmap I created from that photo. I had to actually go in and change stuff in the individual RGB-channels to make it look decent.
The trick was pretty much to control how the normal map would be generated from the heightmap. The end of each rooftile has a dark texture that meets white texture for the underlying tile, creating a weird edge in the normal map when generating it. So I had to go in and manually paint-away that bottom edge of each tile, so that the normal map only recognized the top edge making it look a little bit better. It's far from perfect though.
You could probably get an even better result if you do the tiled roof texture in Zbrush since you get a lot of stuff for free. I'm trying to adapt a photoshop-only workflow though for efficiency.
Nuff said...
Really sweet work, love the look you have got in udk, nice sharp shadows.
Now I feel that the roof tiles lack the same depth as the stone, looks really flat in comparison, I can see that you have added some poly's to the silhouette to the roof, but I think the normal map(or lack of one?) don't bring the depth out enough.
Hope you will be able to post the texture flats for this later, using mostly tiling textures?
I will, they are mostly 100% tilable. The problem is the viewing angle of the roof which kill the normal-effect, I probably would have more detailed roofs if it wasn't so expensive ^^. Haven't seen a game so far where you walk on the ground with super-detailed roofs. Last thing I've seen really detailed roofs was in Assassins Creed for obvious reasons and even then 70% of the buildings had flat roofs.
However! I'll take another look at the normal map of the rooftiles to see if I can make it deeper. I could probably do it in the shader though by multiplying the individual channels of the normal map texture.
Doesn't the texture get lower res do to the mip mapping from that angle?
That might kill the normal map even more.
Since you are going for a flytrough, is that only from the ground/player height or from above as well where you might see the roofs in more detail.
And even if you don't do anything with the roof thats completely understandable, no need to waste poly's or resources on what won't be seen or noticed.
Hmm true, we might move the camera higher than the rooftops. I might end up having to put more detail in there.
I've been taking a big break before and a couple of weeks after Christmas but!
I'm actually I'm working on new stuff right now, however I usually like to show stuff when I have a batch of new things to show. I'm trying to cram in a couple of hours worth on this after work.
Seems like I'm the only one actively working on this project right now. Sooo it'll be a little bit slower
Also have you've done any kind of more global preproduction? Any color, light, mood, design studies? Would be lovely to see your plans for those.
Keep it up, dudes! It's always great when you have someone to work on personal projects with.
cheers
Oh yeah the Chimney, I plan for something more exciting to put on the rooftops. It's just quickly put together and slammed a texture on just to see how it would look. Thanks for reminding me though!
Regarding the global preproduction, well not a lot honestly. Been researching a bit what kind of environment and mood we want. We have a kind of moodboard but right now we're just prepping models and textures to go into the engine.
Since I'm the only guy working on it actively we'll see what happens, I might start creating a small environment by myself so I can showcase my portion of the project. Right now we're aiming for gritty fantasy with a touch of epic.
aaaahh, as good as fantasy gets, buddy:)
now where's mah update?;)
I'm trying to add as much as possible ^^
For my Prop Master Material I have this so far:
- Option for Diffusemap or Solidcolor
- Tinting my diffusemap option
- Desaturate diffusemap option
- Global Diffuse UV-scale
- XY Diffuse UV-scale
Emissive
- Option for Emissive, sub-options for Emissive Map and Rimlight
- Rimlight controls (intensity, fresnel power and bias)
Specular
- Specmap
- SpecIntensity
- SpecPower
Opacity
- Opacity from AlphaMap or just simple transparency.
Normalmap
- Normalmap with a depth control
- Detail Normalmap with XY UV-scale control
Then Heightmap functionality using bumpoffset for everything pretty much.
For my
Blend Master Material
- Blends 2 DiffuseTextures using Heightmap and Noisemap
- Individual UV-scale controls for Heightmap and Noisemap
- Option for Inverting Heightmap
- Noisemap Intensity Control
- Global and XY UVScaling for both Diffuse1/2
- Individual SpecControls for the textures, Intensity and Power (Not working correctly yet)
- Heightmap/Bumpoffset control for both DiffuseBlend Textures
Sooooo first time doing this, thank god for all tutorials out there. It's really fun to mess around with to see what kind of results you can get. Plus you feel really smart when you figure something out yourself xD
Right now I added the functionality to invert my heightmap.
I decided to say: F*ck it, I'm going wherever I want with this. So here you go, 14 meter tall houses and what not.
14 meter houses and skywalks made by the textures and materials I had.
Also made a quick new texture (cgtextures thx!) for the modular walls I'll have placed throughout the scene.
I still have a long way to go and yes, I haven't even touched post-processing, lighting or even lightmaps for that part ^^
I'll post a proper set-up of my layout and composition by the end of today probably.
I will keep adding stuff to the scene, I have lots of ideas that I want to try, lots of props to create as well as new textures.
Next week will not be as productive since I'll have other things to do, but I'll try to spend an hours here or there on the scene. I'm not sure how far I'll take it, but I'm pretty sure that this is nowhere near the end result.
I think this is heading in a very promising direction.
Right now I think everything looks a tad too pale, but I'm guessing that has to do with the lighting, fog and post process, which you said you haven't touched yet, so nevermind me.
Keep it up! Looking forward to more updates!
One thing to keep in mind is the material each floor/level your buildings are constructed from. Particularly heavy stone walls with wooden supports, great for covering texture seams but, masonry supports for stone walls, wood for lighter and often upper floor construction with some possible overlap in between.