Painted Desert - Area Build

I've been working on various iterations of this area design for about six or seven months now as a project with which to learn how to model, texture, animate, edit sound etc.... I am settling at last on this cool/cold desert scene as the one to finish, and will update my progress with it periodically. My intention is to create every asset included here. So far I've only broken that rule on the present skybox, the textures on the cactus tree which I modified from other sources, and the wind clip which I edited for looping. This is definitely a work in progress with plenty of technical problems that still need cleaning up.

Presently I am learning about lightmaps. I decided to really push the colors in the lightmap and started thinking about them as duotones. The colors are definitely unreal at this point, but hopefully not too over the top. I am soliciting the forum for feedback on this. I am curious about what other eyes might see and comments on the aesthetic style. The screen shot below is indicative of the most recent build this morning. I took the shot on my wife's G4 Powerbook.

Here's the web player (keep in mind that I update the webplayer frequently and so it may be quite different in a few days):
Desert Sea - AKA Cool Desert Scene

Also just thrown in for fun is a render in cheetah of a Boat Model I am working on. My intention is to put this in the scene. But I am on the fence about it. It is presently much much heavier than I wanted at 2052 triangles. I am also reconsidering the size of the statement I want to make with the boat and making it a ship instead.

Harsh criticism is welcome, but please keep it constructive.

 

Aaron,

Funny that the skybox is one of the few things you didn't do from scratch, as I find that to be biggest complaint. I understand that, for now, it's just a "stand in", but it, for me, it's kind of a jarring difference from the rest of the scene. Something softer and hand made would do alot (for me) to keep the otherwise very nice vibe intact.

On the "to do" list I might add some visual counterpart to the nice wind sounds. Dust, vegetation swaying.

In my own little "sandbox" game I've suddenly become aware just how much sound adds to a scene. I've been working in my same ho-hum scene for a month now as I learn things, and I found a nice audio clip to play at the start of the scene, and holy cow it's suddenly a AAA gold-box title. Well, at least it suddenly felt like that.

I have no idea what I'm saying from a artistic point of view; I'm jealous to see what other people can put together from scratch, just offering my players perspective.

Charles

 

One more quick note:

I just noticed what you did with the lightmapping. Very, very well done. Especially considering it's a desert scene, it does alot to give it depth which I imagine is hard to do in sparse settings.

Charles

 

The only thing I wasn't fond of was the artificially clean separation between the landscape and the dry lake bed. Looks like you've got a terrain sitting on top of a plane; I think it would look better if the lake bed was part of the terrain.

--Eric

 

Nice little scene; how did you do the trees swaying in the wind? Is it canned animation, or procedural? I guess the flowers on top of the cactoids could use some of the same too.

Other than that, I'd agree with what people wrote before me, especially on the sound effects and accompanying visuals (could be a great way to get into particle systems ).

I was expecting the sound of the wind to change a bit as I left the dry lake bed with all the tall structures around me and got into the open desert. This could possibly be done by simply crossfading two sound streams based on distance. Add to this some smaller localized sounds (like sand shifting, the sound of the plants bending in the wind, maybe some hidden desert animals? Just from time to time, not too crowded) would make it perfect!

Edit: had another look, I guess the plants are lit differently to the environment, right? The shadowy parts of them look very dark, compared to the lighting on the ground; maybe tweaking the ambient light to fake scattered light coming from the environment could make them fit into the environment better.

 

Thanks for the responses folks. And keep them coming. I really appreciate the criticism as I have no training in this stuff and no real world contacts to go over this stuff with. Without your comments to guide me, I'd be wandering in the wilderness.

I am leaving that for later. I have yet to attack sky boxes.

Check. I have now enabled the trees and cacti to sway. And now - curse you - I am obsessed with tweaking this. Dust is a really cool idea. I'd like to try that sometime. Maybe in a project that focuses on particles.

I am still looking for a way to improve this situation, but I am set on bump mapping the lake bed. To me without the bump map it just isn't worth doing cracked mud at all - and unfortunately you can't bump map terrain textures. BUT in defense of what I have done. I have seen these kinds of places in real life where the sand drifts over an old lake bed. And it does look like one thing sitting on another. So while the very clean edge is harsh, it isn't as completely unreal as you might first think.

It is a setting in Unity.

Great idea but well beyond my focus right now. If I delve into sound I'll never get into real stuff like coding behavior.

Great idea. I did not consider messing with ambient light at all until you mentioned it. So I've started tweaking.

 

Unfortunately it has been about 6 months since I touched this area, but this weekend I tried modelling the Parthenon, and dropped it into the scene. I have yet to texture it properly or bake a lightmap. I'll post an update if I get around to it. I also scaled down the Parthenon 60%; The outer columns are 6 meters instead of 10 meters tall.

Web Player: Desert Sea

Screen Shot taken today (4/13/09) in the web player running on a PowerMac G5.