76 replies to this topic

[Sanctifer]

Or High Hold

[Yovaneth]

It must be Winter's Edge.

I think I agree.

 

-Y-

[Corby]

Kulyok wins.

Winter's Edge:     

 

Big Preview HERE (4.5MB) 

 

Not very "wintery", but I guess it's the warm season.

 

 

The Trader's exterior:

[The Imp]

Erhm well, your first attempt, is an instant succees.

[Kulyok]

Oh, that's so lovely! I want to journey here. 

[Yovaneth]

+1

 

-Y-

[Daulmakan]

I want to play this.

[Kaeloree]

This is gorgeous.

[Cuv]

I love it!!!!

[Corby]

Thanks for a nice comments. Can you guess who's shrine that is? (might have to refresh the big image for new details)

 

Working on another nice woodsy area (where the questing part occurs). I guess the rest is now secret...

[Kulyok]

EDIT: It's Chauntea!

 

Aww, maybe some smallish spoilers? You know, one or two.

Edited by Kulyok, 15 August 2013 - 04:07 AM.

[Corby]

It's Chauntea!

 

Two wins in a row!

Edited by Corby, 15 August 2013 - 04:14 AM.

[Tzarnal]

Tell us your Secrets! No seriously, I'd love to know what tools/resources/process you use to make these.

[Corby]

Sure! I'll get something together later. Anything in particular?

[Mike1072]

Do you have screenshots of the different stages (modelling/lighting/texturing/painting over) you go through for a single area?  I always find those interesting.

[Corby]

Concerning the Winter's Edge background,
 
Phase 1: Terrain
 
Earthsculptor:  (there's a version that's not for iClone.)
 
You can create some very lovely terrains, but the output alone isn't good enough. I used "procedural mapping" in 3DS Max, to make the terrain look a lot more detailed. Later on, I also did touchups and color corrections in Photoshop.

 

This isn't a great example. I didn't choose my colors/textures that well, so I ended up having to do a lot of photoshop work later. With practice, you can get things right the first time.

 

 

Phase 2: Modelling

 

The homes, when you look very carefully, everything is essentially either a box, or a cylinder:

 

 

Applying textures, and some good lighting, and the collection of boxes and cylinders magically look quite nice.

 

Things I didn't model:

 

-boats

-barrels/wagon/crates/fencing - came from here: https://www.facebook.../fatBOXSoftware

-Chantea's statue/offerings

-outhouse/well

-trees (most of them free Xfrog models)

-tree stumps/firewood

 

These came mostly from Turbosquid's free section, and shaved a few hours off modelling.

 

Rocks: 

 

Textures:

-All textures are mostly from [CG Textures]

-Used a lot of bump mapping of course.

-Reduced the "blur" on most textures (The default is 1.0)

 

Lighting:

 

-Using 2 standard directional lights (one for the main light, and one to brighten shadows on the opposing side)

-Shadows are "Area Shadows"

 

Rendering:

 

-Using the Default Scanline renderer, since I have an ancient Pentium 4.

 

 

 

The original render:

 

 

-My PC isn't good enough to render conifers very well, so I had to make a second render with different levels, then overlay the new tree renders over the old. To do that, I switched my shadow parameters to a "simple" shape, and turned on "translucent shadows".

 

Photoshop phase:

-Used the brush tool, set on "color" at 30% opacity to color in the green grass areas. (since I didn't choose my textures well enough in the first step)

-Added things like the fishing nets, water, etc... 

-Blended rocks and other objects into the ground using the clone tool (with opacity).

-Did lots of color corrections, desaturations, minor touchups, reduced the hard shadows. All in all, took several hours of touchups.

 

And that's that, hopefully that's somewhat helpful.

Edited by Corby, 17 August 2013 - 03:16 AM.

[Kulyok]

A huge "Wow!" from me right here. Compared to that, adding some creatures and writing a bit of dialogue sounds downright easy! 

 

Lots of time and effort, and it all paid off.

[Goran]

Hi, where do you get the height map to create a landscape for Earthsculptor?
 

[Corby]

Hi there. In Earthsculptor, you're essentially making your own height map as soon as you start a new map. To export that, just go to Export - Height Map.

Compared to that, adding some creatures and writing a bit of dialogue sounds downright easy! 

 

That sounds challenging to me. I always assumed that the scripting was the hardest part of modding?

Edited by Corby, 17 August 2013 - 12:58 PM.

[Kulyok]

It probably is if you're doing some really complicated things to the original game content. Just adding stuff like dialogue is downright easy.