[CE3] Beach Bar Environment

    Looking better and better... nice work Liam! Looks really inviting.

    Now, how about populating the place with some fine character art inspired by the woman appreciation thread?

    Good going

    Though you might want to enable alpha blending on the grass texture to get rid of the jaggies. But if you end up using a lot of grass it will drag your performance down.

    place your cam at that exact spot of the concept art and make all your textures stylized cartoon textures and so on make every prop fit the picture per pixel perfect if you could pull that off people are gonna be mind blown i promise =)

    That would look nice, but I do stylised textures all day at work so this is just a chance for me to hone my skills in other aspects. The concept art is merely inspiration for an environment, I'm not trying to re-create it 100%.

    I'll try and blow some minds anyway :science:

    Hello again chaps!

    Been chipping away at this scene, even though my life has been taken over by other stuff at the moment. Played through Dear Esther today and my mind was blown, I want to build a really immersive environment like that with this scene...

    Lots of tweaks and updates since the last post, but nowhere near as much as I'd have liked. It's mainly vegetation updates and I tweaked the hut textures slightly. I want to add more landmarks to the scene, it's looking very sandy atm. Might detail the path leading out of this area too, and I need to do something with the damn mountain right next to the Hut.

    [Blocked Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7557268/Beach/Screens/beach_ss_7a.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7557268/Beach/Screens/beach_ss_7b.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7557268/Beach/Screens/beach_ss_7c.jpg]

    I've said it before and I'll say it again, the Cryengine is seriously awesome. It's one of the only engines I've used that gets you the exact results you want without having to mess around for ages. If you have an idea in your head, you can easily get it down in 3D. To all you Crytekkers, bloody good job!!!!

    looks like a good start! I'm sure you'll get to the rockside stuff later but would be nice with some large rock meshes to break that hill like stuff up. Also, I'd probably ease up a bit on the sand stripes as much as possible to get rid of some of the striped feel of the whole beach.

    Would also be cool to get some kind of gradient on the wood from bottom to top. Maybe the wood feels a bit more worn and water damaged at the lower levels or something?

    now that it looks like you're moving out into the environment a little, i'd say that one of the things i like about the concept is that the bar seems half-hidden in the trees, and more importantly, the trees themselves form a room that the bar sits inside.

    Very nice Pogop !! It's true your textures are very noisy (eye catchy) for the moment. For example you could use 2 different type of sand to blend together as a use in your composition :

    The eye catchy one you already have :

    [Blocked Image: http://sophie-g.net/photo/nature/pct/sable1.jpg]

    And a more neutral one like this

    [Blocked Image: http://fionadelalande.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/sand-texture.jpg?w=570]

    Same thing with the wood planks or the rocks for example, that could help you to create "opened" and "closed" spaces for the eye in your composition

    Thanks dude, I'll work on the wood a bit more next. I varied the sand up a little bit today.

    The plan is to work on the beach bar itself now, I've been working on the rest of the island over the past few days, trying to make it feel more like dense jungle. Also updated to the latest version of the SDK which seems to have changed the lighting quite a bit, but I've been tweaking it a fair bit.

    [Blocked Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7557268/Beach/Screens/beach_ss_8a.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7557268/Beach/Screens/beach_ss_8b.jpg]

    Cool man !! What would be super awesome too imo is to have your lighting surexposed like in the concept, i understand you don't want your textures to be burned so they can still be visible, so maybe you could find a way to get a more warm feeling for your scene.

    What's nice in the concept is that the areas in the shadow are ice blue (but not dark) and everything in it seems to be washed out; the sun is burning orange and this is where contrast (detail) is. There is also those areas of pure black to make the house stand out from the environment.

    Everything is complementary colors working together : blue/orange , red/green , yellow/purple. I don't know how the cryengine works, but maybe you could use something like vertex color to help you getting the same feeling !

    Also don't forget the dark line of blue in the horizon to separate the sea from the sky

    Very good job anyhow !

    Yeah I agree man, it's been nagging me for a while now. I'm going to mess around with the ToD settings quite a bit over the next couple of nights, re-do the wood texture, and do some nice clouds/sort out the horizon.

    THEN I will finally finish off the actual bar haha!

    Nice crits dude, thanks a lot <3!

    Yeah the lighting in the concept is really nice, although it's worth noting that the stuff in the foreground is much darker which really helps to add some depth to the scene. If you're planning on releasing this as stills rather than a playable arena I'd definitely look into getting that same kind of effect, where trees really close to the camera are dark. BTW if you do release this as media only, make a HD looping video with lovely ambient sounds, etc so people can absorb the atmosphere.

    Monkey Island 2 actually used a really similar effect for most scenes (Any excuse to bring these classics up, right?!), it's a lovely way of framing a scene:

    [Blocked Image: http://productcatalog.xbox.com/NR/rdonlyres/6EB85CE2-45B0-4DCC-952F-056A267AA7C2/0/simMonkeyIsland217.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://www.dpadmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Monkey-Island-2-Special-Edition-02.jpg]

    I'm going to do a video of the environment in motion, with trees swaying, seagulls flying around, waves lapping etc. But I think Thrik, for my next scene, I want to make something a little more Adventure game-esque, so keep your eyes open

    Looking good dude. If I may weigh in with my 2 pennies worth. Further to Koko's comments on colour/contrast, I think you have too much red/brown going on in your foliage. In your reference the warm tones are mostly left for the bar, everything else is fairly cool in hue.

    Cheers Mark, I took your comments on board.

    Been working on some more atmospheric stuff over the past few days, trying to nail that slightly overexposed, just past midday, feel. Also added in a few blockout surfboard textures for a bit of colour.

    I really need to stop putting off detailing the bar! It's just so much work... I'm almost tempted to just finish off the existing assets and use this scene as it is now for my portfolio. I'm getting a bit tired of opening up this scene (Don't you just hate it when that happens?), so I might put it on the backburner for a bit and focus on other things.

    [Blocked Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7557268/Beach/Screens/beach_ss_9a.jpg]

    [Blocked Image: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7557268/Beach/Screens/beach_ss_9b.jpg]

    Edit - Holy pewp, I've just noticed something. My secondary monitor completely washes out these images, takes out all the contrast... I always view screenshots on my right screen, and use my main monitor for art stuff. Do these images look normal contrast to you guys, or do they look washed out? Hmmmm.

    Look normal to me. I know that when ever I use either the Crysis 2 sandbox or the CDK, I have to re-apply my nvidia monitor settings, otherwise I get a washed out look as well.

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