For the past few weeks I've been making a few changes to the environment and lightening the scene up. Furthermore I also had to go back to a lot of my assets and change their style so here are just two images of what the environment looks like at the moment although a lot of changes are still to come
Christoph Lehmann MA in Games Design
Friday 11 April 2014
Monday 24 February 2014
The new Style of Solaris
Since we decided, that the realistic style was very time consuming I set myself on the task to come up with a new style for Solaris, that would be simple, efficient but most importantly would still look good and here is what I came up with
Wednesday 27 November 2013
Some more Landscape and Cliffs
As I was writing in my last post I needed to fix a lot of things in my landscape first of the fluid actors would leak into areas where it shouldn't be. I first tried simply moving the fluid actors down but unfortunatly the rivers would get to small so I had to go back and forth between mudbox and udk to bring the affected areas up. This was a fairly long process since I also found some of the rivers to thin as is and rendering out the height map to make it usable in udk made it pretty much a waiting game.
Additionaly I hated the transition between the different textures. As a response to that I created a shader, that would assign a texture depending on the angle of the area this was the result:
Furthermore I have been working on cliffs to flesh the map out.
Thanks for reading and have a good day.
Tuesday 19 November 2013
Trees and Landscape
It has been quite a while since my last post so I have a lot to say at this point.
for the past few weeks I've been working on several thing that being trees, cliffs and landscapes. First of trees. after doing a few attempts at the way that James Burton made the trees for Ether (http://www.jhburtonma.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-trees-of-ether.html) I realized that kind of simply assembling trees quickly doesn't work very well for the style of our game so I had to come up with a new way of making it work. My solution was creating a set of tree trunks and branches following that I would take them into Autodesk Mudbox and sculpt each piece individually making sure I sculpt a smooth transition between trunk and branch so at a later point I can simply mix and match trunks and branches to get variation.
Here is a tree that I have created in that way:
Secondly I have been working on Landscapes.
The Process I went through was a fairly simple one I just created a plane in Autodesk Mudbox and from there started sculpting with the specifications our level designer gave me. Following that I generated a height map with which I created the Landscape in UDK.
For one I need to go back into the sculpt and fix some of the height information, so I don't have puddles in some areas where there shouldn't be. Secondly I'm not happy at all with the blending of the textures for the landscape so I need to do more research into that. A second solution for the bad blending would be to use a mesh with vertex painting rather then a landscape.
Thanks for reading and have a good day.
for the past few weeks I've been working on several thing that being trees, cliffs and landscapes. First of trees. after doing a few attempts at the way that James Burton made the trees for Ether (http://www.jhburtonma.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-trees-of-ether.html) I realized that kind of simply assembling trees quickly doesn't work very well for the style of our game so I had to come up with a new way of making it work. My solution was creating a set of tree trunks and branches following that I would take them into Autodesk Mudbox and sculpt each piece individually making sure I sculpt a smooth transition between trunk and branch so at a later point I can simply mix and match trunks and branches to get variation.
Here is a tree that I have created in that way:
Secondly I have been working on Landscapes.
The Process I went through was a fairly simple one I just created a plane in Autodesk Mudbox and from there started sculpting with the specifications our level designer gave me. Following that I generated a height map with which I created the Landscape in UDK.
For one I need to go back into the sculpt and fix some of the height information, so I don't have puddles in some areas where there shouldn't be. Secondly I'm not happy at all with the blending of the textures for the landscape so I need to do more research into that. A second solution for the bad blending would be to use a mesh with vertex painting rather then a landscape.
Thanks for reading and have a good day.
Tuesday 29 October 2013
changing gears
So while I was working on my skydome I got a bit sidetracked by snow and moss shaders on trees and rocks. I started with the moss and since moss mostly grows on the north side of the of objects in the northern hemisphere I wanted the shader to be able to only be active on one side of the mesh that being the side I specified as north.
The second thing I wanted to be able to do is control the growth of the moss.
Moving on from that I wanted to be able to quickly add snow but I also wanted to be able to show a slow build of snow.
Lastly I wanted to be able to show a slight build up of snow when there was a lot of wind so I created a shader in which i can determine where wind is coming from and that is the direction that the snow will build up on.
Thanks for reading and have a good day.
The second thing I wanted to be able to do is control the growth of the moss.
Moving on from that I wanted to be able to quickly add snow but I also wanted to be able to show a slow build of snow.
Lastly I wanted to be able to show a slight build up of snow when there was a lot of wind so I created a shader in which i can determine where wind is coming from and that is the direction that the snow will build up on.
Thanks for reading and have a good day.
Thursday 17 October 2013
More Skydomes
In the Past few days, that I've been working on my sky dome I've run into a number of problems. First of all the simple rotating sky dome didn't quite look right
I then showed this to Josh Taylor my MA tutor and he suggested going back to basics and also using panning rather then rotating clouds which might give a more natural feel to it. He also suggested I use two sky domes the outer one being to show the moon,stars and higher clouds and then a second one slightly lower to show more clouds and get a good variation by slightly altering the direction. I first decided to see if I can make the clouds work with a panner since the stretching on the outer edges would be quite significant. I also tried to use two sky domes which did improve the clouds when looking straight up. The initial result was this:
After thinking about the dome a bit more and literally going back to the basics that being the shape of the dome I decided to try a disk similar to a saucer. The initial result looks promising so far but needs a lot of work.
Thanks for reading and have a good day.
I then showed this to Josh Taylor my MA tutor and he suggested going back to basics and also using panning rather then rotating clouds which might give a more natural feel to it. He also suggested I use two sky domes the outer one being to show the moon,stars and higher clouds and then a second one slightly lower to show more clouds and get a good variation by slightly altering the direction. I first decided to see if I can make the clouds work with a panner since the stretching on the outer edges would be quite significant. I also tried to use two sky domes which did improve the clouds when looking straight up. The initial result was this:
After thinking about the dome a bit more and literally going back to the basics that being the shape of the dome I decided to try a disk similar to a saucer. The initial result looks promising so far but needs a lot of work.
Thanks for reading and have a good day.
Tuesday 8 October 2013
Dynamic Clouds
So I've been working on the Skydome for a about a week now and have been stuck on the dynamic clouds for most of it. The reason for this is, that I need varying kinds of clouds to really get a dynamic feel to the scene. I will need normal puffy clouds on a sunny day, light cloud cover, full cloud cover and storm clouds and getting that is quite difficult. I've been trying to analyze the procedural Skydome in the Unreal Engine 3 which has been difficult at best. I think the best way to go about it is to create a simplistic Skydome that works and then slowly build on it with what I know works with my limited knowledge.
As a final thought I want the Skydome to have the possibility of working on an Alien planet so I'll start with a realistic and then build on top with alien aspects.
As a final thought I want the Skydome to have the possibility of working on an Alien planet so I'll start with a realistic and then build on top with alien aspects.
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