University FYP looking into environmental effects

[Parralax]

Hi all,

I am doing my final year project for university and just wondered if I could get any feedback on it from the community,

The pictures below show my thunderstorm and winter scenes (I would post videos but I'm on my laptop at the minute and the frame rate cannot keep up),

RAIN;





SNOW;





Any critiques on either of the effects or the city in general would be appreciated.

[Yourname942]

I would add an exponential height fog for both the rain and the snow environments (but a separate one for each)

Also:
-For the rain environment I would try to make it a bit more reflective to further create the illusion of wet textures + reflectiveness of lights off from the water soaked environment.
-For the snow environment, there is too much of a blue tint imo (or rather, it shouldn't be equally tinted everywhere). If you do want to keep that level of saturation, maybe make the fog start-distance a bit further away (to increase the effect of atmospheric perspective)

Otherwise, nice job,

[joebrammer]

Nice work on some parts, but for the rain you really need to put something on the ground. Use some reference for rain! I've posted a video below of rain in NYC. Puddles and reflective floors. How have you done your rain have you used rain planes? If so use more planes and more rain!

Snow, nice job, looks like you paid a bit more attention to detail on this one and its paid off. There is room for improvement as there always is such as those snow flakes look like massive floating circles! Snow also reflects UV Light very well so I'd take a look at snow at night!

Finally, it looks like a nice project but if you don't mind me asking why is your texture resolution so low and your buildings such low detail? UDK can handle a lot higher than this, has your lecturer set a really low triangle count for the brief?

Nice work with some of the emissive lighting though! Hope my feedback doesn't pinch too much! Keep up the good work!

Joe

[Parralax]

Thanks for the feedback guys, The reflections on the street have been a constant issue which I am still trying to solve.

Is there any way to render an image of the scene from the street to use for the reflections? I have tried using the screen capture actors (both 2d and cube) but the 2d one gives a fish-eye effect to the image and although the cube one gives the right result the reflections follow the player instead of being fixed to a certain location.

Is there any way to stop the reflections following the player?

Joe - The project is about effects so the scene will not be marked which is why I kept it simple.

[nabiul]

Directx 11 mate, you need to use the image based reflections:

http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/Image...flections.html

We need to get over this collective fear of dx11 and forget about people that are stuck in 2001 with their radeon 9200's.

[joebrammer]

The project is about effects so the scene will not be marked which is why I kept it simple.

Yeh I figured it was a weird brief or something. Yeh not bad but you should really look at cube maps and making a good one, also at night snow reflects light well so maybe look at emissive maps