I’ve finished the UDK graveyard scene I was working on and started another :) This scene was fun to work on and it gave me a better understanding of the Unreal Engine as a whole. The most interesting part of the entire process was learning the UDK lighting system and how it handles (or doesn’t) BDRF in materials. For my next project I’m starting with a physically based shader that should make more sense coming from Maya. Putting together all the wind related meshes also taught me how far you can push cloth objects with simple skeletons and there will be more of that in my next piece.
Just before I left for Montreal I was able to snap some pics of my graveyard scene. I’ve got most of the modeling done, as well as the sky and rain systems. The Ivy on the foreground grave still needs to be skin weighted for wind movement, whereas the Ivy on the background grave is using a vertex offset to animate the ivy.
I’m quite happy with the look of my high detail tree, but I still have to tweak the leaf cards a little as some of them don’t line up with the branches I’ve painted on the branch cards. Speaking of vertex weights the trees also need this. I’m going to use the same material wind network the grass uses so they move together. Painting up the trunk and branches in Zbrush was fun and eventually I saved out a surface noise setting for the bark so that I could apply the same look across the entire tree without having to sculpt each notch in the bark. This setting can also be loaded up for any other trees I might create to help things look consistent from tree to tree.
(http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/skysetup NULL.jpg) (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ivySetup NULL.jpg) (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/vertexIvy NULL.jpg) (http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/paintover NULL.jpg)The material networks are purposefully obscured as they aren’t final and I wouldn’t want anyone to follow them as they are not yet complete. When I’m done I’ll post a better breakdown of the these. I’ve also included a quick Maya shot of the foreground tomb’s ivy and it’s vertex weighting. The base of the leaves are black to keep them from shifting and the weight falls off to red towards the edges of the leaves. You don’t have to be too meticulous with the weights as you can manipulate them in the UDK treating them just like any other RGB value.
After all is said and done I think I’m the most excited about implementing torches on the fence in the background. I apologize for the crushed levels in the video. When I get back to Winnipeg I’ll re-compress it with adjusted settings. If you visit my Youtube (http://www NULL.youtube NULL.com/user/DelightningVFX/videos) channel you’ll see the pyre tests (http://www NULL.youtube NULL.com/watch?v=w2k-J_Bhme4) I’ve made in the past and I’m going to turn these into “flipbook textures” (video game GIFs) to be used in conjunction with particles to make a really believable torch. I’ll post more towards the end of next week.
Wish me luck fellas, I’m really happy with how everything is coming together and I can’t wait to show everyone the scene when it’s complete.
(http://www NULL.terrymatthes NULL.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/trees1 NULL.jpg)I’ve been watching people model trees all at work over the past few days and it’s driving me crazy. I must make a tree! So in keeping with my current project I’m going to sculpt an evergreen tree in the with snow on it for import into the Unreal Development Kit. The first thing I wanted to get done was the base mesh. I with the Speed Tree program that comes with the UDK. You can’t export from here but it does create the geometry in a pretty efficient way. After tooling around with settings for about an hour I was able to get a look I liked. Next I needed to recreate the same style of geometry in Maya. To get things started I began with the trunk. The trunk is pretty straight forward. It’s just a cylinder extruded along an ever-so crooked EP Curve. The next thing to do was create the branches. To save time you can model one branch and use Duplicate Special(Edit > Duplicate Special) to space a bunch of them along the +Y axis. This will not work properly unless your branch is pointing outwards from the center of your trunk with its pivot point also at that center of the trunk.
Use the Distance Tool (Create > Measurement Tool > Distance Tool) to get the height of your tree. Divide your height by how many branches you want. Add that value to the Translate Y Offset. And don’t forget to also offset the Y rotation so the branches don’t space out in a straight row. Record (write down) your offset values as you’ll be using the same values to duplicate and space your “Fronds” or leaf cards. Your cards can be as simple or as complex as you want. Since I am just using this mesh as a guide in Zbrush I will keep my cards simple. I used a BendDeformer ([Animation]Create Deformer > Non Linear > Bend) to curve a plane with 5 divisions in the height and only one in depth. I then tapered the sheet by selecting all the vertices at the end and scaling them together. You could stop modeling here and start texturing, but I want the poly count a lot lower. A Single tree as it stands is around 5000 vertices and unless you’re in a cinematic situation where you can control the poly count that’s just way to high for a tree. I think by taking this into Zbrush we can achieve a similar look at no more than 25% of the vertices. As added punishment I’m also going to push myself to use poly paint on this sculpt X_X
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