Rocks P1 Mesh Construction.

Right well I did have a look at rocks a few days ago but that was just before the presentation and I thought it would take a long time. I did some scouting around and found quite a quick and easy tutorial of rock producing albeit high poly but I thought I could use that and then use render to texture to get the normals from it, then can overlay my own textures which Ill get from Bradgate Park.

The tutorial was from a guy named Sasha Henrich http://saschahenrichs.blogspot.co.uk/ under the heading of Procedural rock creation.

I also found a few other similar tutorials on youtube doing this same work flow, so I will just do a quick test now to see how easy it is to do.

SO;
Create a box with a few segments,

Add a spherify modifier..

Add a turbosmooth modifier with a few iterations..


Next making a couple of displacement maps, the first using the 'cellular' built in texture, dragged to the material editor..

and doing a similar thing but with the built in 'noise' texture.

A couple of Noise modifiers to adjust how rough the surface is


Then a FFD 2x2x2 modifier to adjust the shape.


It really is that quick and easy to do and with this technique it would be quite easy to churn out a few rock models for my level. Now I do need reference for stone textures.. In a few days ill be going to Bradgate Park to get a few more snaps of these as well as more textures for my terrain so Ill leave it at this for the moment.
There will be a time where Ill use Mudbox which I have never used before to create seamless textures, I bought the education suite in the first year and its never been used. Having a quick look through Sasha's tutorial it seems fairly easy to use and im kicking myself for have never used it before.. Oh well!
Seems straight forward enough and I should be able to get some decent models produced - what I have done so far is pretty high poly stuff but then I would be making a lower poly mesh of my high poly and render-to-texture a few maps projecting onto the low poly. Im quite looking forward to this but without suitable textures it would be a bit pointless to continue until im at that stage.

Post Presentation

Alright so a couple of days ago we had a presentation of our work and mine went pretty well, what was said I had an inkling about anyway but it was good to hear the feedback first hand as this made me realize I was on the right sort of waveline.

First of all Ill post up the images I shown in my presentation here which was basically a run through of my level. The lighting went a little too orange though as I was building the night previously but this shows my most up to date version of my level.





















So yeah That was it, so the conclusion to this presentation was that what i had was good and coming along but the main concern was with the paths looking monotonous and that more effort needed to be made to the terrain - made less hilly and harsh but also to have a few rocks placed around, have more older looking trees in the area as one of the crits was that a lot of the trees looked the same age.
And yes to finish off all my other planned assets, get my day night cycle working, get my animals placed and animating, learn how to do fire for my lanterns for the night section.

A lot to do but im confident ill get it done during these last few weeks.

Work pile..

Again iv neglected to type in my blog much this week as iv been working solid. I did however take a few screenshots and saved them as I was working which for assets afterwards used exactly the same processes.

Right the first thing I did was texture up my terrain using my own texture shots I taken down the canal a couple of weeks ago. I made the sheets tileable but an attempt to make them less tileable. Since I taken my reference snaps during (technically) winter yet sunny there was still an element of decay which I needed to address in photoshop, mainly adding a layer above the photo - filling with a greenish yellow and setting as an overlay layer.

Anyway these were the textures I initially started with, I also thought having my textures at 512x512 would be sufficient;



So this was the starting point, I would require more textures than shown but my plan was to get a base texture down with a little bit of variation so I could then edit the terrain a little more.

Now I didnt take screenshots as I was doing terrain, as I was working on it for a good couple of days but in previous posts is basically what it was - I kept my terrain from my whitebox as it was pretty good and what I wanted. http://jrfmp.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/whitebox.html

So Ill post up some pictures of what the whitebox looks like now, also as I was constructing I made a few more tileable textures found from my canal reference and in previous texture shots I made LAST winter.



And here are the areas Iv reshaped /painted.


Here is my terrain from the top view unlit

and the bottom view lit. From this height it does look obviously tiled but up close its pretty seamless.










In general Iv tried to maintain a natural look with layers and angles and I have also raised the area around the level to try and enclose the environment. Now when all my trees are placed it shall be less obvious which leads me onto my next stage.

I wanted to make LOD's of my trees for use in the background to save on memory but I thought it might be good to use that wind foliage technique of vertex painting in max and with nodes in the material editor to make them react with the wind like with the real trees and my grass models.

So these next images are my screenshots of my workthrough.


Now yes my plan was to render out my trees with a skylight in scene and use that on an alpha plane, the render taken quite a long time so maybe next time Ill try without shadows ticked as the results seemed to look the same.

So this was the render but as you can see the colours are slightly different to each other which needed tweaked in photoshop.



This was closer and probably needs more editing but I wanted to test my theory.


So my modelling theory was to then use vertex paint like I did on my grass and trees so the alphas would react with the wind.




Above is basically 2 trees rotated and moved in position of each other.

It worked and it reacted to wind but.. I wasnt happy with how the trunk looked.

SOO I made a quick cylinder and edited slightly to fit the trunk on the screen and its looking a lot better now.

I will use this same technique for my other trees in level and then spread around my level. I may have to make another LOD with just the alpha plane with 1 side for a warning on memory in game.

SO that went well!.

I have most of my tier 1 assets done now but with this presentation comming up I wanted my level to look as complete as it can for feedback so I decided to work on some more foliage. In this case I wanted to try a fern, and researching them they tend to grow around trees particulary in the shade during full sun.
Now yes I wanted to do a high to low poly bake and then like the grass put them on planes, vertex paint so they would give the same effect.

SO started with modelling each leaf on the 'branch', as for texture I simply used a gradiant diffuse to get the general colour. The leaves on a fern are not like on a tree where its important to get the proper colour so I just left it as this.







At this point I thought about bending the leaves for each 'branch' manually but i thought it would be better if it was seen from straight up as it would bend in my alpha model ill do next anyway.


So that was the final branch I chose to duplicate around

And here is the final alpha model - I thought it looked pretty decent albeit the colours were slightly off but nothing a quick photoshop edit couldnt fix!