WIP Small Works Art Thread

It might look like shameless self promo but I'm working on the longest picture, the forum could handle

Its my new tumblr page with some unity related stuff as well. The racing game ("Crash Time 5" or "Alarm for Cobra11" for german gamers) used its very very own engine.

Feel free to follow. I will keep it updated with amazing things to come

http://florian-schmoldt-art.tumblr.com/

 

@Florian great stuff. You really make great use of posteffects (car racing game screens). Also did you made those pine trees or are those from Asset store? In case if they are yours could you PM me your wage for making one of those.

Battering ram. Can be burned with flaming arrows and destructable by sword / catapult.

 

...nice. I love the textures. The metal looks a bit too shiny. Do you use a spec ?

about the trees. I did them myself with 3dsMax Particle Flow and a script called normal thief.
Unity supports custom normals so they would probably look the same, except the LOD, which faded into a normal mapped billboard.
Without LOD, the trees would probably be very poly heavy.

 

This is the "Compact Unarmed Battle Bot model 401" for my upcoming game : Escape from Robot Island

 

Actually specular texture isnt too bright (still not final version becouse i dont yet know how it will perform visually under GI), its the lighting that is very strong thats why its so shiny. I am guessing you have used Particle flow to sort branches around bark and normal thief is just decimation script for polygons?
Thanks for pictures i will try my best use them for reference on modeling, i am pretty sure though it wont come anywhere near those.

Thanks for explanation on trees.
Since trees are modeled i am guessing that Lars vegetation shader was used for them right, ?On second thought i think that Lars shaders dont support normal mapped billboards so i could be wrong there.

 

The racing game wasn't done with unity. We had our inhouse engine.
And yes. I've used Pflow to scatter my meshes around the trunk. Nice and easy way to get some variations. Like changing global angle, density, scale etc.
Normal Thief is an awesome script and just perfect for a soft and nicely shaded look of trees. Check this http://wiki.polycount.net/VertexNormal

 

Thanks Florian.

 

Very interesting article!
Also very logical when you think about it.

 

Hi there,
No I don't think so, the weapon sounds come from a paid SFX website so I very much hope are these are completely legal.
Yeah, the GI is only really noticeable in 1080p unfortunately, and even then only for a short moment. Oh well.
Thanks anyway We've got some new stuff coming out soon so be sure to sub on YouTube if you have a spare moment.

 

glad I could help

Here are some closeUps






and without custom normals...

 

Is it possible to somehow do this Normal trick on trees made with the tree creator?

 

The only way to do that, would be to export the tree as obj. I once found a script that could export all unity meshes. Procedural created meshes, Terrain, possibly trees. But if you export it back, it would loose its unity tree gen options, like motion, LODs or mass placement.

LOD would probably be the smallest problem, because in unitys tree gen all the trees are placed facing the same direction to work with the billboard that unity creates automaticly.
Once I created a couple of trees, the texture that was reserved for that distance billboard got too small and it started to look really blurry.
Unitys tree gen has a couple of nice features and its highly optimized but there's no reason using, if you are aiming for something bigger.

 

Third row, third down, is that Hex from Good Game?

 

Nope. Even better. It's Sonja from Germany

 

It does look like her :O

 

Here's another one. No hex at all

 

Thanks for pictures Florian, those trees all look great. I noticed its 3ds max viewport is this AO baked (if so did you use secondary UV chanel?), or is it vertex paint. By the way do you perhaps make tree textures with using high poly mesh first and then base them of normal map or do you paint them? I have found some nice tutorial for UDK vegetation and that is procedure i use, though sadly being advanced on technical side doesnt wield good results for me at all on vegetation.

I will keep you bookmarked if i cant get some decent tree going maybe if you will be free and willing to help i would hire you for few plants. Trees are like rocks in modeling, its not science behind them, but not many modelers can get them right as they should be done.

 

The Viewport AO was just a result of the max skylight but baking it into vertex could be a good idea, if the shader supports it.
It would be something different for a first person game but for racing, back in the days with a few trees in the back, phototextures did the job.
Later I did something more detailed for a fps game and modeled leaves and branches to bake a crispy alpha, normal and spec.
Lots of work but the results are worth it and once, you got a nice high res texture, you could create tons of great looking trees and bushes.
I'm not available right now but if there's something I can help with, just drop me a line.

The lack of LOD makes them mostly usable for smaller scenes..
I just forced them into unity. The trees were already modelled double sided. Unfortunatly the Soft Edge Lit shader gave the best results but for some strange reason, there is no one sided version of it. Just add +10 to the fps
A vertex shader to add a bit of motion would probably help as well

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/36367206/Trees/Trees/Trees.html

 

this...is...beautiful.

 

Impressive!

 

Wow they look really great in Unity. Florian what do you use for skybox, you have such perfect setup of sky with posteffects added. Are you using just a color or is it actual skybox texture?

If you would throw GI in scene i couldnt tell if that was CE3 or Unity for real, you did very good job on atmosphere posteffects. Gona use your scene for inspiration / reference hehe.

 

I'm surprised no one commented on this .

She's beeeeeeautiful!

 

thanks Thunderent! She really is

Feel free to do so

It's unfortunatly pure sky color. Skyboxes doesn't really work with strong fog or the soft edge shader. I know there are some coding tricks to make it work but thats beyond my gfx skillz I also tried SSAO which looks quite nice but doesn't work with fog either. ...There's somewhere here a ssao version around which limits the distance.
The rest is my classic PostFX mayhem. Linear instead of Gamma, Soft Bloom, Strong Vignette, Reinhart Tonemapping, Color Curve, Chromatic Aberration etc...

Thanks for the CE3 compliment. The shaders and geometry is far beyond what CE3 does but Crytek got two "vegetation artist" doing nothing but models and probably their own coder working on a fancy tree shader for a year.
I had to do the trees in a week and the shading doesn't even look much better with the simple Cutout shader. The normal thief does a great job to fake some fluffy light scattering.

 

Hehe yeh PlatinumGold is vegetation modelers nickname on Crydev forums, he answered some of my plant modeling questions 2 years ago.

Yeh Unity has problems with compatibility of posteffects and fog, i dont know if that is in other engines too, but i for sure havent noticed it elsewhere. Basically SSAO is not compatible with few things, i am looking ahead for GI solution on Asset store that does its own realtime SSAO computation.

Ok off to plant modeling now...

 

Decided to do cactus before pine tree. Scrambled everything into 1k texture but i can get it to 512x512 without much loss. Making LOD of this one sure will be a pain heh, for highest version spikes are cross set planes.

 

@Florian, that looks great! It reminds me of the foliage from Assassins Creed 3
@Janpec, great looking cactus!

 

Another one..ok off to pine tree now.

 

I hereby declare the Florian and M. Cunha shall not have a monopoly on hot female characters!

 

I'm doing hawt guys as well !




Nice and very natural looking work janpec ! If your leaves and branches for your trees have that detail, it would make wonderful textures.
Very looking forward to it. Which 3d package are you using ?

 

oh gawd that is attractive Florian. I see you made good use of the unity Logo as well

ahem. Anyway, What does the fox say?



I took this photo from my secret new game about two days ago during one of my late night development sessions. In the picture you see a new character I recently finished and put in game. The Fox. You will see this character from time to time in different levels throughout the entire game. He is not a main character or enemy though and has no storyline purpose. Just a small character that kind of gets in your way.

I will explain in more detail when I get my own wip thread going for my new game, but I won't have that up until I at least have three levels fully complete from my game. Until then I will keep developing it in the shadows and post these preview screenshots in this thread.

Recently finished working on one of the cutscenes from the game and I am almost done working on the first level of the game.

 

Florian that image <3

Snowcone, I think the style you're going for at the moment doesn't look too great. I think handpainted or fully textured game would look 10x better. Just my opinion of course. But you should consider changing it.

 

I'd disagree. The fox could use a little work but I like the look of it.

 

Trying to figure out the best approach for ship/wreck workflow. I've been jamming all the foundation base designs into one element with a single texture for each ship, however i think a universal atlas method similar to buildings would be much more efficient. Hmmm...

 

@Florian - yeah, I'm not opening this thread at work. And, I'll leave judgement to the ladies on that one.

 

Beep Beep malfunction... malfunction...

 

Great bot nipoco !

Nice! And yes. Most parts of a rusted ship are generic enough to re-use them. Especially because the texture you are using now, already works tileable instead of being done for special parts. You could do a variation of your atlas later. Less/more rusted/seaweed overgrown, different hull colors etc. But if there are more of them and memory is a topic, the universal atlas method would probably be the way to go.

I don't disagree but I can understand every small or 1man team, thats trying to find a faster way to create content instead of doing handpainted textures for every object.
But I agree that it doesn't look too good right now. The models are fine but to get something visual appealing, you should follow a color guide and maybe try to avoid pure white. There's nothing wrong with keeping it simple but I miss the one thing thats making it special.
Just look a titles like the Witness, Rime, P.I.D, Journey, Another World.
Before you continue, texturing objects, you should take your time and draw a few colored concepts of your world. It dont need to be perfect artworks but try to find colors, that work nicely together and incorporate them in your textures.

 

Florian would you mind elaborate how do you see atlas being formed as oposite of bens current setup. As far as i can see that is atlas is it not?

 

ah sorry. If you do 1 texture per ship, you could do things like AO for example because you know, how parts are intersecting each other. But that would need a non overlapping UV layout anyway. It's just a bit confusing because many artists call a completly unwrapped layout "Atlas" as well.
That's what I meant with "tileable". The whole texture of course isn't but he got his generic wood parts, generic hull part, rusty metal parts etc.

Its a legit layout for one single ship as well but if that sheet would be used, to create more ships, you would have to make sure that there's enough elements to create variations.

 

Alright so in altas its meant that most of texture chunks are tileable and that whole atlas contains quite a lot of those chunks eg 2048x2048 with 10-20 chunks right?

 

At least how I understand "Atlas" But I wouldn't blame someone if I said he should "Atlas" that ship and he completly unwraps the whole thing.
Just like coders asks for "poly"counts instead of directly blaming me for all the triangles

 

Me after reading feedback


I thought I had finally nailed a good simple appealing graphical style with my new game. At first I was like "Nooo, don't listen to them, this looks great already" but then I look at some of my favorite visually stylized games out there like Gravity Rush, Zelda Skyward sword and so on (Also looked at games Florian mentioned like Rime)

and you guys are right! What am I thinking just using solid colors with toon shading!? This feels cheap! It looks ok but it can look even better if I put more effort into it. Ill even admit, that snow I have in my game (pure white solid color just like Florian said) was bothering me and I didnt like it much. And you know, I really want this new game to be a major step up and very polished compared to my previous ones so I should make it look as best as it could. So Im going to listen to you guys and really try to go for a unique style. Im going to go for a more skyward sword type look. Example:



you see how the characters seem to have like more eye popping colors while the environment had this painted texture look? Thats what I will try to go for and I know how to make similar textures.

So, I am almost finished with the very first level. When I finish it I will upload a webplayer of it with the current style I have for you guys to play. Then I will go back and work on the new look I have in mind and upload a new webplayer with the more polished prettier version of the game.

Shouldn't take so long since I already modeled pretty much all of the assets for that level, so I just need to go back and do some texture work. On some things I will keep the toon shading though because I think some of them look good with toon shading alone. But like the environment and stuff I will completely re-texture.

Anyway, thank you guys for your feedback. I always take your advice usually and its because of this feedback I get on these forums that I continue to improve and have improved over the years I have been here. If I never listened to anyones advice I would probably still be making games that look like this:


(Screenshot from Kokoh Gear Meal, one of my very first games ever released about two years ago)

 

Hey, so this was my first time trying hand painted textures out. It's suposed to be a stone/dirt tiled texture.



- Rafael

 

This looks great Rafael. It's pretty easy to tell that you repeated and rotated though. If you took the shape in the middle out and made the tiles more neutral I think you would get away with the repeat and rotate more easily. I think it's just an easily identified shape in any direction because of its
uniqueness.

 

Hey! Thanks for the feedback, I was actually just testing to see if it actually was seemless, but yeah, I do agree that I should have given them a bit more uniqueness, that would sell the effect a bit better.

- Rafael.

 

Here is more updated screenshots from unity on my progression for the level I’ve been working on.The skybox, is still pretty much a WIP, I have to tighten up the painting and make the sun in the image glow/be brighter.Also I have allot more Assets to make:

which include:

village houses

different kinds of trees

variety of alien vegetation.

a few species of wildlife.

bridges.

and the enemy bugs.

…finally is likely I will think of more to add !

 

@clearrose , Pretty cool grass you got there!

@Bridin , Do you think this is better?

 

Thats excellent man! nice job!

 

So I'm trying to teach myself how to use colours in a painting and how to mix them. I found I love using on-screen mixing- so here's my latest mouse-drawn result. I realised just after i started that it was a tiny resolution, but decided just carry on anyway. It's limiting, but hey.