I'm A Photographic Genius, If I Do Say So Myself.

Greetings! This happened quite quickly, but texturing is complete! It seems that the only good thing this ridiculously cold weather has brought me is more time to stay inside and work on this stuff. I even got a three day weekend to burn through it since it was far too cold to go in to work. And here it is:

Everything here was pretty straightforward for the most part. The concrete got a little extra loving through the use of a node in its material called "World Position Offset". What it basically does is take the details (grunge, grime, etc) and changes them around based on where the object is in the world. It has a multitude of uses with other things. But in this case, it helped offset the dirt details on the concrete pillars so they didn't end up looking the same right next to each other. Adding piled up snow to the roof and gate pillars was a no-brainer. Not sure why I didn't catch it before. It doesn't look very believable when certain objects have a ton of snow and others don't, so fixing it was essential. The icicles were a last minute idea, as I wasn't sure how they would look. But the shader I threw together for them worked perfectly. I made three different types of icicle "cluster" meshes. One with barely any at all, and two others with icicles of varying lengths. It isn't in the original game, but I think it adds something that was missing after translating it to 3D.  

The shop had its challenges. Getting the subtle grit on the bricks to look good was tricky. I was going to use vertex painting to achieve it, but for reasons I still can't understand, UDK wouldn't let me paint on the mesh. It does this crap sometimes. Just comes with using Unreal. :/ So I used a plane with translucency on it, and overlayed the dirt that way. The windows have reflections as well as parallax (the illusion that makes it look like there's shifting space behind the window frames.) Getting both to work well together is a but tricky and requires a lot of parameter tweaking. Also, I included a subtle reference to one of the game's characters for fun. I'll buy a drink for the first one to guess it. :P

Not a whole lot to talk about here. Just some tents. I added in a more subtle snow piling effect to them. As if they were just set up a day or so ago, and only have caught snow drifting in the air so far. The normal bake I did for them didn't get me the best results, so I had to do a lot of fixing to get it to not look weird. It's always good practice though, as manipulating normal maps takes a bit of skill.

EB fans will like this (I hope). Brick Road always seems to be a favorite among us, so I really worked hard on the entrance to make it look cool. The original sprite doesn't give you a lot to work with, so I had to make up the idea of using nailed together boards as a makeshift sign. That, combined with the sloppily painted letters sells the "hastily thrown together" look. It was especially tricky to make the wood pieces look different enough, but not too different as to look funny. The other sign to the right of it has the same feel, with it basically being a markered piece of paper that was taped on top of a pre-existing billboard. And of course, who can forget the pencil statue? Such a weird prop to make, but fairly easy enough. Just a metal base with reflection thrown in for good measure. Fun!

Stonehenge wasn't tough at all. Luckily, the ambient occlusion on the rocks from the high res sculpt and piled up snow does most of the work. I just added in some color variation on top of that and it looked quite nice. The ladder was another last minute ordeal that added a nice touch. I wasn't entirely sure what to do with the entrance to the underground base for awhile, originally thinking it would be this hole in the ground that glows the same shifting colors that the interior has. But the fact that the characters use a ladder to ascend down made more sense. You don't see it in the original level's exterior, but I'm thinking it was probably due to graphical limitations on the SNES or something.  

And finally, we have Dr. Andonuts' lab. This ended up being harder than I anticipated. The main trouble was figuring out what to do with the main green metal. Having it be flat like in the original seemed too boring. So I ended up adding in a tiling sheet metal design to break it up a bit. Which makes sense in the real world, because that's how it would be built. Not that this project is about realism, but it helps to make sense of things when you need it. The roof needed something as well, as it is also just a flat green in the original EarthBound sprite. And so it got a proper corrugated metal design. The sign display above the door is essentially an effect, so it isn't in there yet. I added in some vents to the sides of the roof just to give more visual interest. They'll shoot out steam as well as the rest of the building having a more subtle rising steam effect. Which would explain why there isn't piled snow anywhere to be found. A creative choice I made to have it stick out from the dorm and shop, which are both plastered with it. The idea is that the lab is brimming with so much energy inside that it heats up the exterior as well.  Lastly, the Skyrunner. I wanted it to have the same clean feel that the pencil statue had, so it was just a matter of using the same reflective metal.

So that's that. I'm really feeling like this project's end is within reach. Such a nice feeling. Hopefully, I'll have it done within a month. Updated progress list:

1) Do a night lighting pass
2) Effects (steam for lab building and lake, rain, lab sign display, skyrunner rocket flames and antenna signal, and leaves blowing in the wind)
3) Camera and kismet setup
4) Taking screenshots
5)Video editing and screenshot fixing up

Oh, what a life.

The Fuzzy Pickles Post

I have no idea why it's called that. Well, it's an Earthbound reference.

Greetings, and most importantly, Happy New Year! I'm posting because I just hit a pretty special milestone on the Earthbound(EB)Winters project. Which is, having all of the "natural" elements completed. All of the things found in nature, nothing man made. This also excludes effects, such as smoke, rain, etc. Of course nothing is truly finished until it's in the can and ready to go, as always. Incidentally, I glanced at the last post I made and realized it's been since October, and I literally had NO texturing on this bad boy. So seeing the progress on it makes me happy. I'm proud that I was able to get so much done considering the holidays just happened, especially with me being home in Wooster for a week, not working on anything. Being lazy. Which is what we all need sometimes, right? Hell, NetherRealm gave us TWO WEEKS off. TWO. Which seems like overkill to me, but hey. Most normal, well adjusted people would think "Oh goody! I can you know, NOT work for awhile. Sit on my ass and watch tv or something." Or whatever it is that they do. I have no idea. Me? I use the opportunity to work some more. In all fairness though, about half of the time it doesn't seem like work. That's a luxury I'm afforded with my profession. Anyway, on to the stuff.

First thing is, trees. The trees were quite a bit of work. I ended up not putting as much time into the actual trunk as I thought I would. With the way the shadows fall off of the leaves, you just don't see it well enough. All the detail is ZBrushed in, which I wouldn't even begin to know how to get otherwise. The style I chose is pretty unique, so even if I resorted to using CGTextures on this project, it wouldn't look right. The big struggle was mainly in making sure that the leaves (or fronds, or whatever you would call them) look believable, but don't have too much high frequency detail. I also found that having too many holes where the pine needles show through gave it too much of a uniform spotted feel. So I steered away from that and added more general piled snow.    

The amount of snow itself was something I came more and more to grips with as I went along. At first, I wanted some large patches of grass to show through, giving the environment sort of a "It just snowed a bunch, but now it's thawing out a bit" feel. But even with a UDK terrain that has such high tessellation like mine, painting the grass in still didn't give me enough resolution to look good. So I stuck with just having some blades sticking out here and there. It's actually more true to the original EB art, and I don't think it would be possible to get the terrain to a higher resolution if I tried (and get it to actually run in real-time). Plus, it would negate a month's worth of work. All in all, I'm happy with the overall look.  

It was a pretty big challenge to get enough bushes, trees, tall grass, etc. to make it look believable. In the original sprites, there's not much to be had. That doesn't translate well to 3D, so I took more creative liberty with that than probably anything else. I started with the tall grass, bushes, and small grass blades. Once I had those, it seemed like something was missing. So I added in a "trail" of footsteps mimicking the player's path. It's the sort of detail that only EB fans could appreciate, I'm sure. ;) Finally, it started to seem weird to me that the only kinds of trees in the level were pines. Which is accurate to EB, but again, didn't look good in my case. And so I duplicated and scaled up some of the bushes, which surprisingly made really nice looking trees. It's great when you can get such mileage out of your assets. I was debating making full 3D trees, but the polygon hit I would take from it would be too great in order to get something decent looking. And it's pretty hard to tell except at a very close distance that they're just intersecting geometry cards anyway.  

The water wasn't too hard. I used the same setup I had in the desert project I did awhile back, and tweaked it. I changed the image used for the reflection to match this project's skydome, and manipulated the size and speed of the waves. The only real challenge was making it look good where the water meets the shoreline. I adjusted the depth biased alpha node to make it so the water fades out near it, and you start to see the details beneath.

Lighting was a B-I-T-C-H. Well, at least for the foliage. I messed with a lot of lightmass values, and tweaked the intensity of the light. Which doesn't sound like much to a non-lighting artist, but one could tell you that it's a long, drawn out process. Sometimes you have to do a full lighting bake after messing with just one setting, and there are literally hundreds of them. And when your baking time takes at least twenty minutes, it adds up. If I were still using my old machine, it would take at least forty five to an hour. So then, with the foliage. I. Hate. Lighting. Foliage. In UDK. Really, it's the worst. I kept getting that problem when some of your geo planes look dark and some light. I messed with tons of settings, journeyed through message boards, banging my head against my desk only to find that my problem was really simple and completely unnecessary. I had to make my plants NOT be two-sided materials. Yup. The main thing you have to do to make vegetation look good in games. I had to settle for making more geo planes facing in all directions to still maintain that full, lush feel. It increased my poly count quite a bit, but I had to do it to make it look good. Also, I'm not crazy with the shadows they cast. They aren't how real plants shadows look, as real ones are more defined, and not so blurry. This is due to having such a huge terrain, and upping the shadow map resolution for it would crash my lighting builds. So I'm stuck with having it the way it is or having no shadows at all, which looks even weirder. Lastly, I've decided to do a nighttime lighting pass as well. It's fairly easy to set up daytime exterior lighting, and I have always done it that way. So having to add in additional lights to make the scene have visual interest at night would be a good exercise. Not to mention that in EB, you start out at night and see the environment change to day. Another potential cool reference.          

The skydome was pretty straightforward to make. I have one 1024x2048 texture. In the RGB channels lies the background with the main blue hues, and smaller, more subtle clouds. In the alpha of that texture are more pronounced cumulus clouds that sit on top of the background. Then I plug it all into a shader that pans both the background and clouds at different speeds. It's a simple, but spiffy effect. And oh yeah, the sky is completely hand-painted just as everything else is. I'm really proud of that fact, knowing how much I've improved with my painting skills over the past year. That's the one moment in this post I'm taking to gloat. :P

And by far the most time-consuming of all things, the terrain. I did more iterations on this than anything else. The mountains started out looking too flat, so I added in those rock meshes that I originally thought didn't fit. Turns out that when scaled up a bit, and with different texture scaling, they added an extra umph to the cliffs that I needed. The piled up snow effect got some more tweaking as well. I was able to get more detail out of the piled snow by using the height map of the rocks instead of the vertices to determine how it piles on. For the smaller "mini" cliffs in the walk-able area, I had to take a different approach. No matter how much I messed with the settings, I couldn't get the amount of snow to allow for just a little bit of exposed rock at the bottom, due to the scale compared to the cliffs. The rocks would always look completely snow covered. So the solution was to instead paint on the snow manually with vertex colors. Using the height map once again for the mask allowed for enough control to get what I needed. Making the caves look right was also tricky. They're unique meshes on their own and required that I do a lot of trickery with hiding parts of the terrain and adding in some meshes to cover it up.

So yay! That's what I got. Still a pretty decent amount of stuff to do left. I'm gonna try to make as much use of my last 3 days off as I can to chip away at some of it. I just bought a crap ton of games during the Steam Holiday Sale, which attempts to distract me, but I think I'll hold out just fine. As it stands, this is what I got:

1) Texturing man-made assets
2) Effects (Rain, steam, leaves, flames)
3) Nighttime lighting pass
4) Animation
5) Camera setup and recording
6) Taking screenshots
7) Post production (making final images, fly-through movie)

As always, stay classy!