Further Updates on the Environment Art

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.