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!

Back on track

Ok Iv been neglecting my blog for a little while as Iv been on with work. Last week I had a list of assets I wanted done by Sunday and I did manage to do them, Modelled, textured and exported.


So not bad going really,
Since there is a presentation looming next week Id like to get as much done as I can before then for good feedback, this week Ill be doing a similar sort of thing of modelling, texturing and exporting all the larger assets, There are not that many left now so with any luck they'll get done. I think after this week the rest of my project will be tarting around with the final assets - texturing them and positioning. Im confident that Ill get my stuff done for the deadline provided that I continue to work. Iv came along quite a way and got quite a few things done now but its just a matter of continuing to do so.

SO my next Asset list (as things go I may add a few things If i get through them steadily.
A rickety Fence
A rickety Gate
Logs for my Log house
Another variation of houses overlooking my little field
the Pub building which will be based from my research and modified a bit
Alpha plane LODS for all my trees
Little Chicken house things
Ropes
and a Few rocks.
I also hope to get my terrain completed by the end of this week also which Today I have made a few tileable textures ready for painting.

Getting sorted

Right today id like to make a start on some more of the tier1 assets for my level, this time on the market stalls - how many ill do Im thinking around 3-4 but we will see how it goes.

I need to fill out my asset list with my updated models and also do a count for textures so I know where im at.

80,000 was my tri limit and 120mb for textures ill do this first so I can ready myself and also sort out my folder structures.

Ok so updating my asset list im at 35388/80000 triangles
and as for textures 52mb/120mb. With the texture ill continue as I am then if I realize that some files are rediculously big I shall rescale later on.

Ok so on with the market stalls

Looking at my research and reference, not to mention the other elements in my level there is a lot of wood everywhere and I think it might be interesting to have a bit of material, so i was thinking for my market stalls I could have a sort of canvas around the back which could maybe flap in the wind. It would add a unique texture to the area as well as a different colour to make it a little more interesting.





Ill like a little table also but I think ill make a separate model for that so I can position where I need it.

Water Continued

So With this I looked over that first tutorial again and went through the stages and it actually worked this time! (I did have settings from yesterday on a seperate material but I customised with the tutorial to get my desired effect) Still it remains very opaque and Ill have to look over the settings so it fades out at the sides. Again tweeking is nessesary but its comming together now!


The issue though is that the sun doesn't look like a sun on this, but just a circle which needs addressed also.





Ok so now I need to tweek it in my level as the sizes are different between BSP planes and all. It looks a bit iffy at the moment but thats because I dont have a skydome yet. Once i get a good texture it will look a lot better, ill borrow one for the moment while I test it.



Right getting a bit tired of water for the moment So thought I could make a few lillypad decals which can go on the surface.


Unfortunatly it didnt work as planned and went through my BSP plane and onto the terrain underneath.. Damn.
Well I have 2 options now - to either try on a proper bsp brush which might not allow the reflection to work as well or simply make a little model and apply the texture with an alpha channel applied.

Water

Right Since i recently got the pier finished I wanted to try out some water. Iv found a few tutorials online how to set up the shader but they are quite difficult to come by.

The first I found was http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/UT3_Water_Reflection_Tutorial.html
who specialised in real time reflections on water which would really help me as Im wanting to do a day/night cycle also....


But it didnt quite work, wasnt sure why exactly but the tutorial wasnt very clear. I tried playing around with the values which was slightly better but had a really weird colour style on it


Few more tweeks and I still didnt get it


At this point I didnt see much hope in that tutorial for me so I looked around some more.

I found one from Hourences and it looked alright but this was using a sky texture which wouldn't have been that much good since my sky would be changing but I thought I could use the same techniques as the previous tutorial to compensate.



Yeah this didnt work brilliantly first time either, for some reason there was 1 element which didnt work at all in the tutorial probably because im using a slightly different version but because of that I wasnt able to enable it properly, although it was slightly better around the edges than the other version.

Something about one of the nodes being undefined (even though they were?) It was very confusing.


Finding no help online I thought to abandon how they did it in the tutorial and try it with my reflection map that I was introduced to last tutorial... which gave the same error message.
I tried to tweak the settings to try and get it to work but still it wasn't having it so unfortunatly I abandoned it and had a look elsewhere.

I had a look on the example maps in UDK how they did their water and was pretty complicated with loads of nodes all over the place. I tried to borrow elements from that and with my tutorials. I managed to get that reflection map thing from the first tutorial and merged/moulded with the nodes to try and create something.



It taken me to this stage and it looked alright actually still some issues and I would like to try and get the effect from Hourences with the smooth fade to the shore.
Simply playing around with the panning and texture co-ordinate nodes makes it easy to adjust.





I managed to get to this sort of thing but you only got that nice effect from very high up and the reflection is wrong which ill try to fix now. Shader editing is pretty awkward I find as I don't fully understand how the nodes work and a lot of these changes are little tweaks in panning and texture coordinates by small values. I find it difficult to get what I want but thats shader editing for you.


The reflection is really weird as demonstrated above, even though the reflection plane is positioned correctly everything seems on an angle and I dont fully understand why. Also the colour from the projection is all wrong, let the tweeking commence..


In the viewport it looks alright, Im not entirely sure where this plane should be positioned, right now its only just above the water as iv found that under it looks a bit strange.


Managed to get the colour back by modifying my additional reference parameter to 0 which controls how much of the reflection to show. For mine 0 is probably a bit too low so will increase a bit.

f4, static mesh, rendering, detailmode DM_High and untick hidden game.

Ok so That didnt really work before but after several hours of testing and reading up more on material editors that I could sort of cheat how to get the reflection. With that reflection plane from my first tutorial - though it didnt work when I tested it (and not very well in other ones) I could maybe apply it.
I made a new default scene with a terrain in (Wanted to use the clouds in the default scene as something to work to) and Made another material with a couple of normal maps and arranged so it would simulate the wave movements. Then I did that reflection plane and somehow it managed to work properly and I found that the water material was transparent but could see the reflection also! I positioned the reflection plane just below the surface and it worked pretty well!




There is however 1 issue which I need to address, you may notice in the above images there are quite a lot of black areas which arnt really that realistic and the reason was basically that the reflection plane has reflected the underneath of the water texture which made it look darker.



Also yes in this test it was quite severe and for a river it would NEVER be that clear but these are things I can adjust with multiplier and vector parameters.. Tis all good but just needs tweaked a little more.