[UDK] The Demon Hunter's Study

[marks]

So, I'm starting work on an environment scene for my portfolio. I'm trying to get good feedback early so that I don't have to correct too much stuff later! On to the gubbins:

The idea is that its going to be the library / study of a 19th century Demon Hunter so there's going to be a lot of tables and books/tomes scattered around the central area, and ceiling-high bookcases all around the walls. The composition of the scene is based pretty closely on one of the sets from the movie Wanted, as you can see from my main reference sheet:


The top 4 screengrabs is what I'm mostly aiming for, the rest of the shots are for props / mood / lighting reference.

So far I've got most of the primary assets blocked out, as you can see. I've got placeholders in max for the 4 different bookcase props I'll need, probably 2 variations of each. I've also got most of the llarge architectural forms done here to get a feel for what it'll look like in 3d.


After that, I took the placeholder props into UDK to block out my greybox pass, and do the first lighting pass to establish a focal point (via the moonlight), mood and to make sure that the basic composition looks 'right'.


I tried to create a focal point in the centre of the room under the moonlight - this is where the Demon Hunter's main desk is going to be with all his crap on / around it. There will be misc other stuff scattered around the rest of the room in a messy fashion. The orange lighting is going to be from lanterns and candles to break up all the blue and create some contrast in the intensity of lighting.

At this stage, I'm pretty happy with this. The focal point is fairly well defined, there's enough interest in the rest of the scene that it won't look too bland and the lighting is varied enough not to look monotone. I'm going to mess with the ceiling architecture a bit tomorrow to get some more height variation in there, but afterwards I'll be calling this done for now (the blockout + initial lighting pass) and I'm gonna move on to starting making the primary assets (the bookcases, pillars, railing for the upper walkway).

And here is a scale reference:


and the lighting-only:

[Habboi]

Keep pushing on. It only gets harder as you start to work on main assets and find the blockout doesn't suit them. Nothing is ever perfect. Good luck and carry on.

[marks]

Today I learned not to think youre smart and mess with the lightmap UVs on static meshes D: that and got the first bookcases ingame, with one of the tiling wood textures. Books are gonna go on a separate texture sheet on mat ID 2, I'll just add them to the mesh and re-export when I do them.

[marks]

Finished sculpting the tiles for the floor of the main area, its gonna be texture blended with sand all in the cracks and piling up around the edges of the room. The texture needs work obviously but I just finished baking and I'm pretty happy as hell - first texture I've done through the ZBrush method.

[Smurftyours]

Could you possibly show me the UV on the bookcases? I always wanted to learn how to make tiling textures on models.

[marks]

tested the tiles ingame with parallax:


and the large bookcase uv's:

[marks]

Today I'm working on the master vertex blend material for the floor, it seems to be coming along pretty well.

(its basically vertex blending 2 textures together, but using a mask (heightmap) to weight the blend atm, pretty basic)

[Habboi]

Interesting, so you dont bother fitting it all into the UV box for UV 1. Did you flatten map UV 2? Just be careful, you get surprisingly better results when done by hand. Be sure to raise lightmap resolution to a reasonable number as well. You're one step ahead of me in terms of vertex blending. I'm actually trying to see if speedtree has an option for vines or plain old generic greenary.

[marks]

Well no, the whole point of using a tiling texture for the bookcases was so I could tile the texture on sections of the model itself. For example the tall sides have the texture tiling vertically 2 or 3 times at least over that surface - if it causes problems I'll probably go back and change it. I didnt flatten map UV2, I just took UV1 and used the "Sort" and then "Pack" tools in TexTools, because I had a lot of overlapping shells (which in retrospect is totally unnecessary for UV1). I have the lightmap resolution on 128 for most of the bookcases, 256 for a couple of the ones closer to lightsources.

[marks]

Okay so, I need to work on the textures more but the vertex blend material is done !

Essentially you just paint on the mesh using vertex paint in UDK tools, the material starts just being plain old tiles, then I can paint on where I want the sand, paint on where I want a softer transition between the 2 textures, paint on where I want the wavy normalmap effect on the sand, and lastly I can paint onto large areas of sand and it will displace the vertices of the mesh vertically upwards, simulating mounds of sand.
I used this tutorial to build the material, only took a few hours and it works like a charm! I also learned a lot about UDK materials in the process.

Red Channel = blend to sand texture
Green Channel = intensity of falloff on texture blend
Blue Channel = normalmap intensity on the sand
Alpha Channel = displace the mesh on the world Z axis (vertical)

[marks]

textures finished, and a close-up of the tile texture:

[cheesemoo0]

I had no idea that you could blend textures like that. The heightmap as a mask and the ability to displace the mesh promises a very awesome looking floor.

[marks]

[Smurftyours]

I'd be more tempted to try the tutorial if it didn't cost $40. Looks good, I am gonna start my own udk project since everyone is starting to lean that way.

[marks]

started modelling the pillars