Posts by PhilipK

  • Arbor Vitae - UDK Scene [WIP]

    Super dirty lighting update. There are a few things wrong with this shot - too dark in the back and the sun is a little weak and pale and the ambient is a bit weak as well. Those issues have been fixed now just don't have a proper shot of it. Also started doing some selective diffuse boosts on colored surfaces. Will probably do on one or two bright floors too.


    Also temporarily pretty much all diffuses are single colors now, so they will start popping in with some more stuff soon. But it will be a gradual addition and we will try to focus some more on material definition and trying to vary that up a bit more. The test here has more broad variation than before making the whole object bright or dark/colorful rather than having a lot of variation within each piece. But do remember it's just colors now so this is the extreme case in the other direction really


    [Blocked Image: http://philipk.net/other/hpk_scene_WIP08.jpg]

  • Arbor Vitae - UDK Scene [WIP]

    Awesome feedback! Thanks it seems they extended the deadline so should give some time tweaking stuff. Agree with readability which I think will come from both lighting and even out some diffuses (also brighten them up generally). I think we can probably get more of the variation out of simpler colormaps but keep some of the variation between different textures instead of within themselves.

  • Help needed, AGAIN lol

    I saved out a colorwheel with normal colors. This is a 16 sided flat shaded wheel for 45, 90 and 135 degree hard edges (creates a 22.5, 45 or 90 degree "bevel" between the two faces).


    As you can see in the maya viewport shot it's not absolutely perfect, and it really never will be, you should tweak the wheel to be as close as possible in your engine (easy to test, just make a hard edged 90 degree object and map the right bevel color to each edge and check when the seam is as close to invisible as possible).


    [Blocked Image: http://philipk.net/other/colorwheel_normalmap_shot.jpg]


    Regular version:

    http://philipk.net/other/colorwheel_normalmap.tga


    nDo version:

    http://philipk.net/other/colorwheel_normalmap_ndo.tga


    I didn't bother to save out the swatch palette as I think this will be easier for you to pick the colors you wanna use and tweak so it works with your engine's tangents beforehand.

  • Help needed, AGAIN lol

    Hey sure thing I'll share the palette I should add a few colors that aren't nDo-specific tho (grey blue channel). Also, I need to caution you that the values will appear a little different depending on the engine you use so a (near) perfect hard edge 90 degree bevel with this palette may produce some inaccuarcy as mine is tweaked for the bitsquid engine really currently (seems to work fine with UDK too and their lightmaps will fck that up anyhow so don't care too much )

    A color wheel like in that vid is really cool too, I'd recommend a faceted one tho with common angles (90, 45, 22.5, 11.25 and so on) as you'll def want to easily find 90deg easily) used something like that a ton on graw 1 and 2

  • Help needed, AGAIN lol

    Ah sweet you solved it, yeh the shading of the HP is also important, thought the issue would be with the HP in this case tho .

    As for personal workflow, yes I don't really bake out stuff anymore, only in rare cases. Mostly stuff is broken down to fairly primitive shapes in the end and can easily be unwrapped to simple reusable UVs.

    Even when more unique shapes are necessary I mostly just save out the uv snapshot and nDo or hand paint the normalmap using a small normalmap palette where I got some common angles for 90deg, 45 and so on (hard edges that is).

    Even if you do hard edge something and its not exactly 90 or 45 degrees between the faces a lot of times it's close enough to where you can force your normals to be either manually.

    And yes, tricounts are rarely the bottleneck anymore (texture memory is still an issue a lot of times however). Which is exactly why I see even less use for HP in my workflow, I'm not going to add a shit ton of stuff in my models that will only be there in the HP but not the LP. And if the primary goal of the HP to LP is to add some nice bevels to your edges it's waaay faster to nDo that stuff IMO.

  • Help needed, AGAIN lol

    ok you definitely got something going on in the normal map there as koko pointed out.

    I would actually point all of those faces on the problem area straight up (x,y,z: 0,0,1) and rebake. that should mean this surface should read as completely flat in your lowpoly, not sure if that's what you've done now, or if they are pointing slightly off or in their corresponding face normal direction.


    If that doesn't work, you could try just having those as hard edges and split the UVs, but I wouldn't really recommend that either.


    BUT remember transferring anything from a highpoly to a lowpoly will always result in tiny inaccuracies no matter what you do really, it's just the nature of it. Some problems are actually easier to just fix by hand afterwards - or not bake at all... I've essentially completely removed the highpoly to lowpoly stage from my workflow nowadays. In this case it'd actually be easy to just color pick those areas and bucketfill/paint in a selection with the avg normal color.

  • Arbor Vitae - UDK Scene [WIP]

    Quote from FMPONE

    I would say I'm not totally vibing on the traditional philK orange/blue or the seriously halo4 vibes in either shot. I don't think the right balance has been struck yet, personally. Mirrors edge didn't do sort of generic blorange too much, at least not in that sort of a straightforward manner, and I think the halo4 style of geometry is so hard to do without seeming cluttered and messy and reinforcing the lack of purpose. I think the answer really does go back to asking yourselves, "when people sit around and talk about this scene, what actually are they going to refer to this scene AS?" If you say "generic pretty sci-fi area" that impresses way less than "hi-tech laser drill in a mountainous area"... stating the obvious of course, but my point is really that this decision will aid you in your visual design which seems a tad discombobulated for my eyes.


    Thanks, that's some great feedback really! Definitely spawns some more ideas in my head for how to clarify some of this stuff

    As for the orange, I think we'll need to iterate on color choices a bit, but I do think the orange specifically is getting pretty damn worn out (even if I do like the warmth of it).


    I do think the work to the background will help this a bit, as you'll see the range of this facility and that it kinda creates greenery around the "pumps" in anotherwise dead desert landscape.


    An idea we were talking about was to show that you're actually in one of these main "oxygen" spewer towers and you can see more ones in the distance just like the one you're in. If we manage to sell that it's just of course halfway there as it still remains to make some sense of the actual machinery, I think some effects together with some more relatable details on those will help as well.