Friday 24 April 2015

Mud/ Glass Table/ Gunnera: Off the Map



I was really happy with this day, all my texturing development and new engine knowledge all came to fruition.



Within not much time I created this cracked/ dried out mud texture. 



Here I have two tiles, one which is the correct tile for the Albedo and another which is much larger. This creates large inconsistencies across the surface of the texture and greater tonal contrast due to large area in shadow. This breaks up the texture and offsets the tillable nature of it.

I have also used Macro variation which also helps in the exact same way as above. Also here I have used a higher tile than the Albedo to improve textures quality when under closer scrutiny.

Rabbit Hole Texture

I then also created a more gravelly/dusty mud texture. This is for the rabbit hole, embankments and basically anywhere where there would be mud, but where it wouldn’t or couldn’t bake flat.




Again I was happy with this texture.


The Glass Table

I made the glass table to look like a draping fabric. I thought It would be nice as the rest of this Puzzle Room will be extremely angular.


I did spend ages trying to make a good glass texture, but this is seemingly impossible. At some point the texture would make sense, but often if you looked at other table legs through a table leg, this is when it would start to look off. So if this was simply a plain, or simply a less complex shape, I think it would be possible to do a good glass texture.

So instead I went for the current iteration of the design. Here I have tried to capture frosted glass.

Gunnera


Here I have modelled and textured a Large Gunnera plant and its flowers. These are amazing plants so I thought they would make a nice point of interest for this start environment.

Also In the forest part of our game I thought they would make a nice/dynamic change in environment. At this point in the level Alice will be 3 inches tall. This means when putting her in a traditional forest, she is dwarfed and the landscape is extremely restricted, as you can’t get too close to a tree because it will dominate so much of the environment.  So if part of the forest were actually within a Gunnera forest, this will be closer in scale to normal scale people in a traditional forest.  This means that she could be walking in and amongst the trunks of these plants. Also the shapes and lighting caused by the Gunnera flowers and also always being under these large translucent leaves could be very interesting.



I used a scatter function in 3DS-Max to scatter the thorns across the surface of the trunks. 













Physical Bricks: Off the Map



I've started experimenting with making and adding physical bricks to the mesh. I’m using this as a replacement for Tessellation. The Tri count was simply far too high to justify. 



First I started adding the bricks in 3DS-Max. And then started using Unreal instead so that I could see the result immediately. 


I really liked the result of this. In allot less tries I’ve managed to give some textual variation to this wall, and more believability. I’m simply trying to hide the fact that this is a flat plane. Tessellation was good but expensive, this is a more efficient alternative.


I’m also going to use these bricks on the Boat Shed. Here I’m going to use them to try and hide the way the tilling runs round a corner. I got this method by looking at Textures in “Blood Born”, all their walls and floors, when they are not tessellated are crammed with geometry.

 I made these bricks using the same methods I have already been using to make all my rock assets.


Decals: Off the Map


I then created some moss decals for this bridge in order to break up the texture and give it some age. But I quickly found that Decals aren’t currently working in Unreal. So I’m not really shore what I’m going to do here. The texture I’m currently using without Decals is far to clean, I can’t add dirt to this tillable because I want the dirt to Fade as it gets further from the ground.  Also for the level I’m currently working towards I need a large amount of variation.



The off white smudge in the centre of this white wall is my Decal, I’ve changed the wall to white to make it visible.

 I quickly experimented with Adding the decal texture to the brick texture this was just a punt, I was pretty shore that it wasn’t going to work.



Here I’ve used Lerps to mask off the layers from each other before multiplying and or adding them together.

Due to the tilling’s of these textures although they were different I could actually make them line up. But the tilling was instantly noticeable.


Although this wasn’t the desired effect, it’s nice to see that I’m starting to get a hand of Engine. I wanted to merge these two textures together and I quickly managed it.


This is this texture with the correct Brick diffuse. As you can see they do line up perfectly. However the colour of the moss is being affected by the bricks texture. I don’t know why this is happening it should be masked off from it, but this isn’t the method I’m going to be using, so it’s alright.

I am going to have to get decals working, hopefully an update will clear this, otherwise I don’t really know how I’m going to get this done right now.






Bridge: Off the Map


Tesselated Bridge 



Not Tessellated Bridge


Comparing these two I can see that the tessellated texture is slightly better. There is more definition in the shadows and they continue all across the bridge. The untessilated bridge is noticeably flat in comparison. But here there is a huge jump in geometry, about 800 tries to about 40,000, this cannot be ignored.

This beginning part is actually going to be quite demanding on the engine, this means that saving tries here is going to be important. So is tessellating this going to be worth it.



 Here I have Z brushed the brick work using the methods I learnt earlier whilst making the rock tests.


This is what I initially tried to do with this part of the bridge. I quickly worked out that Joining up these brick textures over a seam would be extremely difficult. 

So I repeated the process I used for the Brick areas I had already done. This turned out really well.

A have also finished texturing the inside of the bridge.




Friday 17 April 2015

Tree: Off the Map

Making trees is horrible. With most assets you can call yourself happy when your asset looks accurately like what it’s going to be. With trees you can’t model every single leaf and every branch, instead you’re trying to create a random shape that will read as a tree. Obviously you try and keep to reference as close as possible and nail the basic skeleton. This in its self is quite difficult, trees are huge complex forms, and are extremely difficult to get good ref for, especially from multiple angles.


Here I have the Skeleton of my tree. I thing I have managed to achieve quite an interesting silhouette. I’ve also made all the branches from different shaped N-Gons, none of them are uniformly round. The base its self is actually really quite a complex shape as it will be possible to get close to it.


The complexity of the branches changes drastically with the distance they will be from the character. On the main trunk there are several steps at which I cut many tries out, the top of the tree is extremely low poly.

As you can see I have achieved a high texture quality. This is mostly due to a better understanding in Unreal than the actual Texture Maps themselves. With this tree I wanted to multiply two Albedos as I’ve seen some great result by doing this.

The Two Albedos I was going to use were going to be one main large albedo that uses the unwrap for the tree. On this Texture all the surface area will be unique, for example patches of moss and cracks will be textured onto certain parts of the tree. On such a large asset like a tree only having this texture sheet could result in a relatively low texture density for the asset. So to counter this a second tiled texture would be Multiplied to this first texture. If the tree only had the tiled texture it could be bland as it would have the exact same surface quality throughout. Using the method I have used the surface of the tree is varied and also maintains a high res when viewed close up. I have also included all the corresponding maps for both textures. When it comes to multiplying Normals you strangely have to first multiply one of you normal maps by yellow and then you “add” it to the other.  I have also used macro variation on this texture.


When I first tested this texturing set up, I used an extremely poor Z-Brush poly paint, a tiling texture that barely tiled and included large shadows. Even though the maps themselves were poor the texture still looked really good, my poly paint even included large areas that were untextured but the tile just filled these in. The poor tiling was fixed due to there being features from both textures on the finale surface, the Macro variation would also have helped. I’ve found that using these methods poor texture sheets can now still make a good finale texture.

Obviously I then re-did all of these maps. Re-poly painted and re made the tillable map to a much higher standard.


Two finished trees

The tree on the right is to be used when you can actually get close to it. Here I have also added Clematis Vines to hide a large joint between two branches, it also adds to the visual complexity of the tree.

The tree on the left is the same model but I haven’t included the Clematis. Also the branches have been moved around. This is so that when you’re looking at many of these trees you don’t see the repetition as there are two different trees.

Strangely although creating two trees for a forest doesn’t actual seem like allot, I have come to find out that this is actually more than is often currently being used. With a group of mates we have been playing through Blood Born it’s a PS4 exclusive, what we call a “next Gen” Title. Blood Born is truly an amazing looking game, all the textures are amazing, and at some points every surface that you can look at is tessellated. When a surface isn’t tessellated they are crowded with physical geometry. Yet in this game when you’re in a court yard with a dozen trees in it they are all the same exact tree. Not only are the trees the same but this tree has an extremely recognise able feature (an area of peeling bark) which I personally immediately noticed.  This is either a slip up by the artist that made this game or I am one of only a few that would notice this. I personally believe that this isn’t a mistake, your average gamer would not have noticed, I only noticed because of the course I’m doing.

So back to our project, I think at some points we are to judgemental of our work. We are viewing our own work as game artists. The audience for our game are members of the public who will likely not notice faults that we would make a big deal out of. Sadly though this is also a project that we will be graded on soooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, yea we do actually have to make extremely high-quality work and decisions. 

Although I have been given the OK from my group with these trees I personally am not happy with them. I’m still not happy with the arrangement of the alphas and altering them is a tedious and time consuming task riddled with trial and error. Also I would like to make another tree a Maple of some sort. But for now it’s going to be nice to go back to some more traditional modelling and texturing. my text two assets are a Boat Shed and a Bridge.






Foliage: Off the Map


This is actually after many, many changes with this grass but this is where I am at right now. It’s definitely a lot better.


I have also been working on allot of new plants as well.



Nettles

A clematis

These will be quite handy as these can grow across the ground, so can be used to add density to the ground and to populate any bare ground area. Also Clematis are climbers, so given the opportunity they will climb up walls and trees. So we can use these to hide seams and also generally add interest and visual complexity where ever we want.

Lillies and Lilly Pods for the canal

I’ve made these extremely high res so that they can be used in the forest level. These could be huge on screen and they will still look good. I have actually textured all my plants on 2048 texture sheets and also then cut them right down to 512s which is the size they will actually be used at. I’ve created the 2048 versions so that all these props can be reused elsewhere in the game. Alice when she is 4 inches tall could be walking in amongst all of these, climbing on them for example and they shouldn’t look out of place. 

Irises


Bracken

Long Reeds 


Short Grass with Daises and Butter cups


I used Slide Normal Thief on every single of these.












Unreal 4.7 Updates: Off the Map


As you can see here there is a subsurface slot in the material. This Material also has a new setting on it; with Unreal 4.7 we now can set Unreal to give an object the physical light properties of Foliage.


This is done by simply under “Detail” and under “Material” on the left of the Material Editor changing the “Shading Model” to “Two Sided Foliage”. Then you plug your Albedo into Subsurface Colour. This makes foliage semi-transparent, when light hits a leaf texture set up like this when viewed from the underside it will appear to glow, as the light passes through and bounces round the inside of the leaf. The side being hit though will only light normally.

As you can see above I’ve removed the complex wind system from this texture sheets which now only hold the flowers. Hopefully this won’t be noticeable. The grass will still move with a complex pattern but the flowers amongst it will move a constant amount.

I’ve been looking at foliage in a hand full of new games and it’s extremely common to have lots of completely dead unmoving foliage right by foliage that is moving.  I don’t think having foliage that moves differently right by each other in game is a problem. This would have been a major concern for me though prior to spotting it in some of the best looking games out right now.




Grass Ground Texture: Off the Map



Here I have been messing around with Macro Variation. This is basically a way of getting more out of your texture. Macro variation will improve the texture up close if you put a higher tile on it than standard maps, and if you put a lower tile then it will reduce the amount that the texture appears to tile as well as adding contrast across the area you texturing.

During this project due to all the engine experimentation I now understand why those who have chosen do to large amounts of engine work often appear to have mental break downs. It’s very easy to spend an entire day just experimenting, to simply tamper with some numbers and nodes, and not actually improve anything.  This can leave you feeling like you’re wasting your time and need to get back to some 3D modelling and or Photoshop texturing. When doing these other tasks your progress and work can be easily seen by your group members and measured. Engine work could consist of several hours of for example deciding that your grass would look better with slightly more vigorous wind, then after fine tuning this new wind, deciding that it was better before.

I allot of my time recently as you have and will see has been spent like this.


Here I have tested how multiplying in several Normals effect the texture.







Wind: Off the Map


Here I have added the simple grass wind Node. This is a simple way of adding a constant level of movement to foliage. Although this could have been sufficient it does give some odd results, the grass does kind of bob around unnaturally. This can be slightly improved by adding a mask before the world position offset node and unticking movement on the up and down axis.

I then looked into making a more natural and random wind affect. This was when I was introduced to the following method of creating wind.


There are some unnecessary nodes here but the new method is basically the Lerps and everything left of them. What I have done here is created a Texture Object, in this case in the form of a normal map. This huge object moves on the horizontal Axis’s around the unreal level. The amount and speed that it moves is determined by the Panner Node, the size of the Texture by the Texture Size Node that sits below the Texture Object.  Then you can alter the strength of this wind by multiplying the output before finally plugging it into the material.  

As the Texture Object moves around using this method it changes the world position offset of the material, using the information that the Texture object is casting onto the affected material and its geometries position in the world at that point in time.

…………………………………? I think I may have explained this, assuming I get it myself.

The result of this is foliage that appears to move in a random more blustery fashion.

The unnecessary nodes being used above are attempts at fixing the problems that I uncounted as a result of using this new method. This new method worked fine for the grass, but it was strangely flattening the flowers and they were also sitting dead still. Above I have tried to mask off the flowers. I have also masked off the base of the geometry so that only the tops are affected by the wind. I have then tried to use a simple grass node to give life to the flowers. 

This wasn’t successful. What I eventually had to do was remove the grass from material and have the Flowers and Grass on different Material IDs.


Here is the finale Material for the grass. Here I have also made my own Normal for the Texture Object. Up to this point I had just borrowed a random normal from the content folders in Unreal.



Improving Grass: Off the Map


First Grass models


As you can see the grass in the above image is much improved from the first image, I’ve managed to hide the edges of the alphas better. Also the alphas that stand out the most in the first image are the ones I’m using to try and hide the most difficult perspective to get right; this is the straight down view. Here I have included alphas that are at a harsh angle so that when looking down you still sea grass, in the second image I have added more geometry to these planes and then bent them. 



Asset Creation: Off the Map

It’s time to finally get our teeth into this project and start making assets. As I have been pushing the first person canal bit of our game I am going to be responsible for creating the assets for this area.


I decided to start with grass, and generally making some flowers. I decided to go with a field of Poppies and Daisies. I made shore to pick plants that could grow together, also judging by the amount of ref available for fields of Poppies and Daisies they are also a favourite.


I made my Grass and flowers by creating high poly versions of every individual part I would need, so pettles, grass, bulbs, stalks Etc. I then Projection mapped the normal information and Albedo information onto a single plain. I could then put this texture map on to a Square plain, and cut the individual pieces out and then re build the flowers from these extremely low poly pieces.

Allot of the high poly meshes were textured using Gradients in 3DS-Max and colour picking from my ref.  The leaves and poppy petals were individually modelled, unwrapped and textured prior to then being projection mapped.  This is the process I used to make the vast majority of the foliage.

This process once you have learnt it is extremely efficient. It’s also really quite fun as it’s in complete contrast with the normal modelling process. Using this method you are first modelling with only creating a projection map as your finale output. This means you don’t have to worry about tri counts and generally inefficient modelling techniques, this makes a nice change. This is all going toward making your texture, so you’re actually making your texture first and then you’re creating your 3D assets. This is reverse to the normal process, also often with this process there is need for unwrapping.


First version of the grass

Here I also had to learn about the asset painting tools in Unreal.

After creating this I could see that each individual alpha I had created was too dense. I need to create grass that doesn’t have a defined edge; it should just become lost in amongst the rest of the grass. This is the main challenge with creating foliage, its hiding the fact that these assets are made up of relatively large alpha planes. These assets will also take up a huge proportion of the screen and can be looked at from most angles. I’ve still got allot of experimenting to do here with this grass.


I’ve added my flowers and created various different types of grass. First an FBX that consists of just grass, another of just grass and daisies, Grass and Poppies and finally grass daisies and poppies.  This means that I can now make a varied field of foliage instead of a field with the same consistency throughout.