MOST RECENT:









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Just started on this one. Primarily working from this concept by Adam Brockbank: http://www.croftgeneration.com/image...pt_Art_008.jpg

This concept was for the first Tomb Raider movie.


Just a blockout so far:



Basically its a ship thats buried in a glacier.


Trying a few new things as I go along here. Main challenge for me is that I'm a 3dsMax guy, but I'm going to do everything in Maya. I know my way around Maya a little bit, but I haven't really used it to do a complete environment yet.

Also, no idea how I'm going to handle the ice yet.

I'm thinking that maybe the area with the hole in it (hard to see but you can see the light coming in from it) might be a hole that leads outside of the glacier, like the ship is close to the edge. I'll have to try some things out around there to see what I want to do.

I know its pretty early on, but critiques/comments are welcome.

That looks pretty cool, you should get started on the ice-shader as soon as possible I think, It's going to take a lot of trial and error. Maybe look how other games do it

Double down on what chris said. It's going to be all about getting that snow and ice right, everything else is pretty simple.

Looking at the guys shadow which is on his right, the lighting looks like it's actually coming from the left. Like the ice has built up and frozen over a hole in the hull and all the light is getting filtered through that.

Which would be a cool effect to do, pain in the ass to figure out but awesome payoff.

Thanks guys.

chrisradsby:
Absolutely no idea what I'm going to do for the ice shader. Your right thought, I need to dig into that first.

DeadlyFreeze:
Oh yea, it does look like the light is coming from under the steps. I do have it set up on the left side, there is a hole after the second pillar, definitely hard to tell from the shot though. I really wasn't sure what I was going to do as far as how light comes in. I was thinking of having a hole there, like an entrance was dug to get into the ship. Having icicles cover that opening and diffusing all the light coming in sounds like a gool idea.

I had been busy doing other stuff the past few days..but I did a sculpt for one of the ice wall pieces today:

Maybe this will help

http://www.terrymatthes.com/unreal-2.../icy-material/

chrisradsby:

Thanks for the link!


I got around to doing a test bake on the wall piece above and I threw it into UDK with a basic material to see how it looked:



Haven't put too much thought in the material yet, I set up a matcap material to see what that would look like...but it looks like you cant use vertex colors with the transform expression since it colors all vertices white.

I made a sculpt for a second wall and a few single icicles...I'll finish those up and get them in UDK, then I'll focus a little more on the materials.

Also, I just picked up a new graphics card with dx11, so I may toy around with some dx11 stuff in this environment as well.

Haven't put too much thought in the material yet, I set up a matcap material to see what that would look like...but it looks like you cant use vertex colors with the transform expression since it colors all vertices white.

Try turned on "Per Pixel Camera Vector" in your material properties. It's an unfortunately obscure thing in UDK, but that will allow transforms to work with vertex color.

diggin' it. Keep it up.

My humble opinion is that ice in glaciers is very blue under the initial surface; I hiked up one literally about four days ago (south of Katla in Iceland). You may want to look at faking some kind of subsurface scattering effect like the one presented in DICE's publications, or at least some fresnel bashing as it should really help to bring out the colour of the ice in all the right places.

I might have some decent reference photos if you'd like me to upload some for you? I've literally only just got back and not sorted through them yet.

WarrenMarshall:
Hmmm sounds promising, I'll try that when I get home from work.

Orchidface:
Thanks!

ambershee:
Thats pretty awesome that you got to see some in person. I'm gonna try to get that blue in there. I do want to get some sub surface scattering going on, but I have never really tried that, so its gonna be a learning experience. Reference photos would be awesome!

WarrenMarshall:
That definitely worked. Thanks for pointing that out!



Baked the 2 ice/snow walls and the individual icicles and got them placed in the scene. I started toying with the material on the snow wall. I ended up getting a directx11 card last week, so I've also been trying out different dx11 features. I'm using tesselation on the ice/snow wall here.

This could end well.

Replying to subscribe. I like where this is going. I love the setting/mood.

i love that ice material!

awesome material definition on the ice! you got some SSS goin on there or how did you manage to make it look so good?

What Olli said! that ice looks near perfect!

Thanks guys!

Olli:
Yeah I was using SSS on here. I got that look mainly from having a medium value, high gloss spec, a soft fresnel, and some parallax..which kinda makes everything look glazed over.

I fiddled with the shader some more...I was mainly looking to get that translucent blue that you see in glacier walls a lot. I ended up setting up the matcap and using a little bit of emissive and came up with this:



I also tinkered with the icicles material a little bit..

That little bit of emissive looks like it really made the ice. I'll be watching this one in hopes of stealing your secrets for myself.

:O

That ice is wonderful!
Any chance of a cheeky screen-cap of the material?

*S-s-s-s-s-s-s-subscribed*

I'm digging the atmosphere and vibe it's giving off. Keep it up!

Norron and SirCalalot:

Here is now the material looks at the moment:



I'm sure this will change before I'm done with the environment...but this is the set up currently. Besides the snow, I haven't really touched the textures yet...so theres still plenty for me to do there.

If you have any other questions about the material (or anything else)...definitely let me know.

@gsokol, I could hug you

As far as I can see, your textures used are:

- COLOUR MatCap from your High-poly
- COLOUR Diffuse of the Ice and Sub Surface Scattering map
- HEIGHT Parallax map for BumpOffset as well as DX11 Tessellation from High-poly
- COLOUR Diffuse of the Snow
- SPECULAR Spec' map for the Snow texture (I'm guessing a noise map?)
- NORMAL MatCap from your High-poly
- NORMAL Detail normal for general detail

Is that right?
The grey-scale maps can be combined into single textures, or tacked onto colour textures as alpha channels, so you could probably reduce the texture draw-calls to about 4 or 5 too for some optimisation

*Starts trying out material himself*

this is lookin super cool dude

dat ice is nice

Really awesome stuff! I really appreciate your explanation of the material. I'm working on UDK mats for school atm. So thank you!