Brightwall - Animations

Here are the two animations I am submitting for SS2.

One serves as a teaser/presentation video for the level, the other one showcases the player moving around the village.

Brightwall - Final look

After many many weeks of trial and error, of working toward bringing this level to life, I've finally achieved an outcome that I feel happy with. When I decided on learning and creating game art in December, I knew I was facing a very steep learning curve because of the time that was available to me.

The transition from pre-rendered CGI to computer game art, if given enough time can be less of a hassle. Although, given 5 months to learn the technical elements, plus focus your art in a slightly different direction due to the limitations of games was not easy. I am still learning and will be learning for quite a while after SS2, but what I feel very confident about is the fact that I have given myself a chance to get my foot in the door.
A very good way to measure my progress is to think back and look back at my work before December. I was using a completely different approach, way less efficient and more time consuming.

My SS2 final project, Brightwall pulls all of the knowledge I have gathered into one final piece of work. Even though, everything can be improved and one can work on a project for many many months, I need to sit back, look at what I was able to pull off, learn from it and move on to new projects.

That said, here are some images from the final scene. The upcoming post will feature two videos of the level.

Brightwall - Some textures applied

First, I've began applying the textures to the big castle at the very peak of the village and the terrain. I wanted to wait with the smaller buildings as they mostly populate the entire scene. The goal was to first set down the base textures for the ground, see what works, move on to the castle and then texture the remaining buildings.

I wanted to spend a bit more time testing out what texture and color combinations work best, but I felt that if I spend even more time on this phase, I might run out of time. I'm delighted enough to move on and finish texturing the rest of the houses and animate one or two videos.

Brightwall - Textures

Textures play a crucial role. They have to be dealt with precaution artistically and technically as well. I am trying to stay true to the concept to a certain degree, but the goal is to add a bit of my own taste to the final outcome.

After examining a handful of real life terrains and how grass grows on them, I've learn that a terrain is composed of different types of grasses. You have freshly grown, young grass, but in some areas you have older which is slightly darker. In some areas, where the sun shines a lot terrains tend to have dead or yellowish/burnt grass.
It became obvious that I need to combine several types of textures and paint them logically over my terrain.

Same attention went to all the other textures, here are some of them:

Brightwall - Architecture reference

There was one issue with the concept I have chosen. The village buildings that can be seen on it don't really hold enough details to make them look interesting enough. They are very simple houses with just a few intriguing details, like the curved and exaggerated roofs.

Because of this, I went ahead and looked up what fantasy/medieval type of building concepts I could find that match the style I'm aiming for.
Interestingly enough, what I was looking for did not come from CG concept artists, rather real life model makers.

Here are the references:

3D blockout:

The final picture shows all of the modular elements that can be re-used to create different, unique houses.
I have also added the necessary details to achieve a more "Warcraft look". The aim was to remove straight lines from wherever it was relevant. Silhouettes need to be exaggerated a bit to make the building look different, interesting.

The next step involves a lot of technical elements, like unwrapping each of the modular pieces for texturing and importing them into the UDK engine.

Brightwall - Importing the first assets into UDK

I've set up a basic lighting environment inside UDK, so I can have a good representation on how my models and terrain feel like.

There were some issues with the Height Map, but eventually things fell into place and this is what I've ended up with:

In order for the play not to fall through the terrain model, the model has to have collision. If I would have imported the land from 3DSMax, I would have had to set up a collision mesh as well, which is extra work. The "Landscape" tool creates amazing collision when you generate a terrain through it via a HeightMap. As seen in the video, the player doesn't bump into invisible walls nor does he/she fall through the model.
The only collision issues are with the placeholder houses, but that's all right for now.

Everything seems to be in order for me to move on with the modeling stage and start looking at some architectural reference.

Brightwall - Blocking in the terrain

I've spent several days examining all the details of the terrain withing the walls of the village. As a first step, I began drawing over it, looking at how the curves behave and what direction they are going in. I've did this a couple of times, redrawing and getting familiar until I could imagine it in my head. It was important because I only had this concept image, which is quite hard to read. This is because the sizes and the ratios change as things are further from the viewer. Distortion had to be taken into consideration.

After a couple of failed attempts, I've began producing terrains that resembled the one in the concept.

Here is the final blockout, along with placeholders for the buildings:

The terrain was taken into ZBrush to go over it by hand and adjust the details according to what felt right. After it was polished up, I had to go into a very technical phase of the work, which involved creating a HeightMap. Why is this needed and what is in the first place?
The answer lies in how the UDK game engine handles terrains: UDK has an in-built "Landscape" tool, which generates landscapes. These landscapes are extremely well optimized and have a very important characteristic. As the player moves further from the terrain, the distant parts begin to use less polygons, less resource. The program takes away detail from the distant areas, but since the player is so far away, it will be completely unnoticeable. This saves a large amount of resource.

The "Landscape" tool also has sculpting features, similar to that of ZBrush, so if I place an asset on the terrain, but the ground is not flat enough to sustain it, then I just go in and sculpt away. This, again saves a huge amount of time, so I don't have to jump back to ZBrush all the time.

That said, I had to create a Height Map which is a 2D image using only grayscale values. These values contain height information. Black pixels are the lowest points of a terrain, whereas the white ones are the highest. The inbetween values generate the desired landscape.

The next step is to take all this into UDK to see whether it's going in the direction I want it to.