Portfolio showpiece

[Piranhi]

I've decided to try and push myself to the limit in the next couple of months as I won't be at uni much longer and I want a reasonably sized portfolio when I leave. I also wanted to try and push the engine to the limit and see how much I could get out of it. As it stands now, the map is around 60-70% complete, and it has over 12,000 assets, just under 6 millions triangles but only 170,000 of those are unique, which shows how many different objects I've used. I've also implemented some unrealscript so that I have fish and birds circling the sky. I had to take the speedtree's out of this build as they were causing me problems, although I did a fresh reinstall of UDK so it might be fixed now.

I'm hoping to have it finished in the next month but I am quite enjoying unrealscript now and I know if I leave it, I'll just forget it :rolleyes:

Anyway, here are a couple of screenshots, you can find more, and my blog here: http://project-artus.blogspot.com/

Cheers

http://img683.imageshack.us/img683/9544/ld1h.jpghttp://img641.imageshack.us/img641/1073/ld2b.jpghttp://img651.imageshack.us/img651/2708/ld3m.jpghttp://img193.imageshack.us/img193/2125/ld4xp.jpghttp://img3.imageshack.us/img3/3018/ld5g.jpghttp://img716.imageshack.us/img716/248/ld6.jpghttp://img716.imageshack.us/img716/4754/ld7.jpghttp://img694.imageshack.us/img694/4168/ld8.jpghttp://img693.imageshack.us/img693/5460/ld9.jpghttp://img687.imageshack.us/img687/5764/ld10.jpg

[DELTATHUND3R]

looks great...nice lighting..Looking forward too seeing more.

[LeECO]

love the lighting and sky :X

[prophet64]

Pretty damn amazing, that first structure looks crazy! Bloom might be a bit excessive but it might mellow out when you've populated the entire level. It's huge as well, any chance of a video?

[Piranhi]

Cheers, I'll get a video uploaded when it's near completion, it's still pretty bare and unfinished atm.

Changed the lighting to come from the front of the building, knocked all my lightmaps down while I'm building because it was crashing :(

http://img202.imageshack.us/img202/3690/ld3q.jpghttp://img535.imageshack.us/img535/174/ld2.jpghttp://img25.imageshack.us/img25/8306/ld1l.jpg

[SageHunter]

Everything looks awesome. The one thing that bugs me is the very flat ground, but I suppose that will be fixed later on

[McTavish]

Everything looks awesome. The one thing that bugs me is the very flat ground, but I suppose that will be fixed later on

I like the flat ground, gives the scene more Scale i think

[SageHunter]

Well I like it being flat. But it's too flat. Like a solid ground plane. I mean sand can't possibly be perfectly flat

[Brokenteddy]

Beautiful work, interesting perspective as it seems you've gone all the way on the environmental work and the level design. Is this part of a larger game or a multiplayer map?

Anyways, lovely stuff and keep it up!

[Piranhi]

The ground, /facepalm. I split it into levels before I rebuilt it and it must have reset all the vertex painting lol. Oh well, I'll have that in my next screenshot, it's meant to be a tiled sandy floor.

@Brokenteddy, I built it solely for my portfolio although I would love to make a level out of it one day.

And thanks for the comments :)

[Drevlin]

Looks good man, nice stuff. Only crit is that I am missing smaller props. You got some really nice base geometry in there (and with base, i dont mean basic. Again, really nice stuff) but it feels a bit empty.

[Piranhi]

Cheers bud. Yeah I usually put down the large stuff, get the initial layout, then the smaller stuff, then assets like foliage, volumetrics, then lights and finish off with sounds and volumes. I'm a about 60-70% of the way through getting the initial layout sorted at the moment.

[Drevlin]

Interesting!
I usually do a lighting pass as soon as i possibly can, i find that it helps set the mood. :)

[Piranhi]

Yeah I definitely agree with you there, plus it can give you a big moral boost, especially when you come from unlit to lit and the detail pops out.

I did an initial lighting pass in the beginning, but I've left it since then. So I pretty much have the global lighting setup, I just mean lights from other sources around the scene.

[Piranhi]

Quick update. I think I'm actually going to have to get rid of some of the level. It's just crashing after every build, just after the lightmass has finished calculating. I can only stop it by bringing down the lightmaps which makes it really dark in some places, maybe I pushed the engine, more likely my computer a little too far. I thought 8 gb of ram would have been fine :(

I'm pretty much done with the big stuff, now I can add the layers of detail because as it stands it's still pretty bland and there's not a tree in sight!

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_sVR-706LXoo/S6vjHYChO_I/AAAAAAAAA10/hq-VEXnm3DE/s1600/ld5.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_sVR-706LXoo/S6vjFExzRlI/AAAAAAAAA1s/WDq2ncFFaD0/s1600/ld4.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_sVR-706LXoo/S6vjCW3CeNI/AAAAAAAAA1k/6he4Lgbmc8w/s1600/ld3.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_sVR-706LXoo/S6vi-GDjmAI/AAAAAAAAA1U/4RFsM5yza-A/s1600/ld1.jpg
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_sVR-706LXoo/S6vjJw-aRSI/AAAAAAAAA18/goajoL5kyM4/s1600/LD6.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_sVR-706LXoo/S6vi_4aQqqI/AAAAAAAAA1c/RjhEGVd2SXo/s1600/ld2.jpg

[prophet64]

It's really starting to come along! You should make this into a VCTF or something, it would be amazing to play..

[unreal_polyneutron]

man, your stuff is great! and DOF effect is really cool!

[Piranhi]

Cheers guys. Yeah the DOF might seem a bit excessive in a still screenshot, even though you complimented it, but actually playing the map it looks just right.

[micahpharoh]

I just wanted to throw in there that the more unique objects you have the more RAM you use, but duplicating objects uses a lot less per object. That may be why it's crashing so much. Or maybe it's just this version of the UDK that's giving you problems.

Make sure you get the April version next month.

[Piranhi]

Yeah, I'm trying to instance as much as I can, I think have around 50, maybe 60 unique objects in the whole thing. I'm hoping the April edition is better, I've also had problems with the groups tab grinding UDK to a halt when it's open, doesn't happen straight away, but about 20-30 minutes into working.

If it doesn't fix it, then I'll be forced to make my map smaller :(

[Piranhi]

I've been pretty busy working on other projects so this has taken a back seat, also, as it still crashes when bringing the lighting information back to UDK from Swarm, I've been forced to get rid of around 1/8th of my level. If I want to add the level of detail in I had planned in the beginning then I may have to reduce the size by 1/2. I'm just hoping the next UDK build sorts it out.

Anyway, here's a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgtOYC2HZqA

It's about 60-70% finished now.

[danimal']

I like it a lot, but if I can make one tiny crit, and this isn't unique to you, it's sort of an issue I have with most Unreal stuff that people make. Although I like the idea of "stylish" lighting, it combined with heavy post effects makes everything pretty monotone. Look at the screens on the front page, they're largely all one color with little or no contrast. Your work is actually fairly consistent with how a lot of people do it, so at some level, maybe I'm the weirdo :) But I personally find it to be way too much sparkle and dazzle, draining the scene of any contrast. Oddly, if your scene were Brown instead of more Orange, I bet more people would notice/complain since id did that for years. To me its a similar thing I see with heavy post use. Just my 2 cents, it really is cool though! :)

[Piranhi]

Cheers, yeah I agree with you. The next piece I do I'm going to create myself from scratch including all the assets so I'll have a lot more control of how the level will pan out. I've had a lot of sources of inspiration over the last couple of months which have changed my perspective on how levels should look, the latest being the temple scene by Baolong.

[danimal']

Slightly random, but I was just reading pixologic's interview with the Mass Effect 2 art team, and it pretty much nails my point on the head:

"Lighting was one of the big jumps we made in ME 2. If you look back at the first game you‘ll see how washed out everything looked compared to ME 2. We needed to bring back the contrast and saturation in the game." http://www.pixologic.com/interview/mass-effect2/3/

They also really toned down the use of several post effects since they discovered that it really washed out a number of effects (specularity, normal maps, etc). Anyways, they say it better than I can so... what they said :) Anyways, it's just a tiny crit, the overall design and look is georgeous, somewhere between Sandstorm and Necropolis.