Mountains are done

Finished the mountains quite some time ago, but some technical problems got in the way. My GPU crashed and burned so I had to stick with integrated GPU which meant that performance on quite a bit of stuff was rather low. Interestingly enough, performance on Headus UV layout was tragic on integrated GPU, pretty much unworkable.

But anyways, finished the mountain meshes, here are some shots.

Learned quite a few things in World Machine, but still feels like there is a long way to go before I can say that I’m good with it. Workflow is much more different that I’m used to, but it does make sense once you get past the initial barrier. Still haven’t come up with a good pipeline on how to tweak results out of WM, like adding specific features in, say, Zbrush once you done in WM. Tweaking and sculpting the heightmap isn’t really an issue but if after you sculpt it and you think of plugging it back to WM for texturing it gets really fiddly. For texturing you need certain information that heightmap alone simply doesn’t provide, although there are workarounds for that but in the end they still don’t provide great results. So at least for now, I got to be quite careful when tweaking heightmap afterwards, since I’m not doing textures afterwards but rather have to be sure that my tweaks work well with existing texture.

I’m sure there are ways to get past this but my tiny brain can’t figure it out. Yet. 

High are the Mountains

So I’ve been working on fairly low-poly background mountain meshes meshes to put in Unreal Marketplace. Initial plan was to go somewhat more fantasy oriented route, but it proved to be rather hard to pull off, had to scrap and redo a lot of work to achieve something I would like and in the end it’s not exactly fantasy, just a bit more stylized. Here are some latest screenshots:   

 

First screen is one mesh, second screen is another. In each of them just a single mesh was used to create the scene. One of the goals was to create meshes that would work great from multiple angles and would look different. World Machine is essential to create stuff like this, it simulates many complex geological phenomena that would be crazy hard to sculpt and texture manually.

My workflow was to create a quick sculpt in Zbrush that has main features, maybe even some of the smaller ones, render out heightmap, plug in into world machine and let it work with it. I much prefer manually sculpting the terrain rather than using tools or noise inside WM, because you have so much more control in Zbrush and it’s also very quick and easy to get heightmap out of ZB and into WM.

Here is a link to Unreal WIP forums:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?119339-Background-mountains&p=576398

Rooftops up in the Marketplace!

A bit late but you can get Futuristic top-down rooftop pack in Unreal Marketplace now:

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/futuristic-modular-top-down-rooftop

If you like what you see, grab it!

Rooftops are finished!

So we expanded the area quite a bit, added some extra assets, created additional bridges/platforms, added background city. While I created most of the playable stuff, Tomas did the background city. Looks great, very modular, can be used by variety of different projects, not only top-downs.

Quite happy how it all turned out. Nice approach for modeling the assets and overall visual style, will use it for future projects. Current scene relies very heavily on post processing to get that distinct look going, but that’s hardly a downside. Scene is fairly low on clutter but still has that dirty, grimy look and that was pretty much the goal. Most of the details are on the background, not to clutter up the playable space and not to obstruct navigation.

This asset pack should be hitting Unreal Marketplace soon, I’ll post a link once it’s up. Here are some new screenshots:

Some shiny rooftops

Been working on these assets that we intend to sell on Unreal Markeplace as an asset pack. This is essentially a more or less finished short map for a project that quickly hit the dirt and was scrapped, though stuff that was done for it was fairly good quality.

It has been gathering dust in HDD for quite some time, so not wanting it to go to waste decided to polish it up, add some extra assets and put it on marketplace thinking that maybe some other people can find use for it. It's for a top-down game so intended to be viewed Diablo style.

Gotta say, I’m quite liking what we ended up with. We are using modular approach to asset creation, similar to what games like Mass Effect and Deus Ex were doing. Almost all the assets are using same textures, there is an atlas that has defining features, like lines, grates etc. (I’m sure if you’ve researched similar art style you’ve seen this stuff before) and on top it, projected on lightmap UV, there is some kind of unifying noise like dents and dirt for concrete (from tiling normal map), scratches for metal and so on (from tiling roughness).

And of course to bring this all together is strong lighting. There are a lot of color correction happening in post processing to make the scene look pretty stylized and dark and then using strong lighting to light up areas that would be important for gameplay. Almost all of the lights are static (and therefore prebaked), couple of them are stationary.

This is still WIP and there is extended area and background city that Tomas Narbutaitis is making so there is still quite a bit of room for improvement.

Statues up and running!

So the pack got submitted and went online with latest marketplace update. You can check it out here:

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/greek-statue-pack-vol

And the statues are finished

So the statues are finished and submitted to marketplace, they should go online in couple of weeks. Overall I’m happy how they turned to be and I think they are looking pretty good while staying in acceptable polycount and using acceptable texture sizes. Each statue has baked out, unique normal and cavity maps and also use tiling detail normal and tiling diffuse. Inverted cavity map is used in shader as a mask to give color variation in, well, cavities. I reckoned using tillable diffuse would get the job done and it seems it does in this case. I tried making a dedicated texture map but it I don’t think it was worth it in the long run because it wasn’t that much of an improvement upon tillable texture and even at 4k resolution it just doesn’t hold up to the texture crispiness you can get from tillable one.

On a side note, seems like lots of tech talk for something that is supposed to represent pure art but the tech side I think is rather important for marketplace items, because as I have faced myself you can really get bogged down in technical difficulties when you are working on project that is using large number of pre bought assets. So in this case we wanted to make sure all the problems are solved and assets are as “drag and drop” friendly.