Tuesday 11 January 2011

Plants and foliage for the Warhammer Warpub scene.

I first created my grass texture a mud texture and a merge texture grass to mud UDK is great at blending textures but wanted an edging texture which I could lay pebbles etc on later. I then creted a grass blade texture and object to be used as a foliage layer allowing me to paint on the grass where needed.





 I also added a sky dome using a panoramic photo from http://www.cgtextures.com/index.php edited in photoshop and mapped to a hemisphere. This uses emisive lighting to give a nice starting point to the lighting. I also added fog to get the mood of the scene taking a break from modelling and keeping things interesting.

I also had some problems with shadows on the grass but lighting it independently of the scene and turning shadows off sorted it ..
 


 When creating the trees I started with speedtree to see the kind of results I could achieve. It was very fast and convenient but slowed my machine it had nice animations but also couldn't control the blending of texture at base of trunk as trunk texture was tiled looked pretty good though.




 Using what I learned from Speed tree I constructed my own fantasy tree from some warhammer Fantasy reference first creating the trunk, mushrooms and surface detail and then unwrapped.

Then I created a separate cross plane object for the small branches and applied an alpha texture which was on a separate smaller 512 texture sheet.


Next I tested in unreal to see the scale and how the textures were working..


After getting the grass in I decided to add more dacal objects first a kind of Hero Decal object with the Toadstool. These were created in a small group as they seemed to grow like this and seemed to make sense the size and rotation could be varied for each object in UDK.
Then to add some colour and variationn I added flowers and changed the Alpha on one of the grass objects. this was a quick fix but added a lot of detail making the scene more natural. I think adding a slight transparancy to the end of the grass material may soften it further. Also I think bushes and brambles need to be added to give the ground a more wild feel and give more variation to the ground.

Monday 3 January 2011

Environment objects for the Warhammer Warpub scene.

 After finishing the Warpub model I wanted to learn more about UDK and its tools so decided to create an environment for the building to go in...

The Concept

 After creating a reference/mood board I created a quick concept covering the layout and mood I wanted for the scene.

 This then gave me a clearer idea on what objects needed to be created and rough scale. It also was useful to plan what objects could be instanced to fill the scene.






Objects and scene elements

Generic Barrel

The first object I tackled was the favourite in FPS games the generic barrel again modelled in XSI in 3 sections and sculpted in Mudbox. After creating the textures I did a quick test against the emissive light to see how the normal map was working OK.

Later when finalising the textures I think the wood parts the door and barrels need a little de saturation...
Wooden cart

Next I tackled the cart using the same method as the warpub building remembering to add smoothing edges before subdividing!! to make sculpting easier in Mudbox.





I only exported half of the elements needed for mudbx as these can be duplicated and the repetition removed in the texture.







  

Testing the rendermap results the handles lost some detail when generating the maps but I will resolve this with Crazybump.
 Also the emissive material was a worry so had to be tested and textured now Im happy with the results created with an RGB Mask emissive specular texture. It looks a bit weird too with all the windows being lit so will amend the final texture when detailing.
 The scene so far now I have tested each element and material in the scene and pretty much got it to where I want it I will continue to construct all the final scene objects and could do with some trees!!