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!
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