Suddenly Bush

I spent the past few days mainly on improving and placing vegetation. In short, all the things I left 'for later': fixing textures and making sure all LODs are working correctly.

 I also spent some time on editing normals using SpeedTree script. 

I wouldn't think it'd make a huge difference but it did. It looks much softer in engine and it blends really nicely with terrain. It helps to keep the atmosphere blurry and foggy.

I had no idea how to block out environment so decided to put a nice stone wall. It seems reasonable since this is how people used to establish boundaries between their lands. 

I finally made 2nd level of lods for further background. They're basically two planes intersecting but I put additional edge in the middle to turn the very bottom vertex normals upwards. Again it helps blending with environment. 

I also made cute little mushrooms.

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I'm still trying to make my level more interactive. Therefore I'm going to add so-called boids. 

What could be creepier than a bunch of big fat ravens in a spooky forest. I have never modelled a bird before but it went pretty fast. As long as I got a good reference it was a matter of two hours to have it built and textured. 

Using BoneTool was a bit dodgy because I don't know how, and if it's even possible, to snap bones to the actual mesh while you place them. 

Texture is not perfect but the bird will be barely visible anyway.

I;m trying to skin it properly at the moment.

No title

I haven't posted in a while. I've done quite a lot over that time, although there's still much to be done.

First of all, my character is now fully textured, rigged and skinned.

I think textures are quite nice although I may change the colour scheme or add more detail. If she were to wake up on a muddy lake bank she'd have dirt all over the place as well as some scratches and blood stains. I also need to take time to properly render her.

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Apart from that I've been filling my level with smaller assets. 

Trying to go along with the plot so I made a carriage just to have it scattered on the floor.

Player will start his little journey by this wreck and then enter into the woods following the smoke he sees from the distance.






I spent most of my time on making assets for house interior. I am really happy with how it's turning out. It's not so dark anymore since I finally discovered you can use a regular light entity as an ambient light. I gave it dark blue colour and it emphasizes warmness of the fireplace.

Here is the entrance which I've been dreading to make. It meant rock sculpting.

So much sculpting. Even though it takes me little time, I have to retopologize it later and this I hate the most. And it seems I'll have to make more rocks for the forest.

Although I am really proud of this door it looks awful in engine.

Oh, and it doesn't open. Haha.

Nothing changed in this part of the room. I just used vertex paint to break up wall texture. It seems a bit too red at the moment.

The firefly idea was quite successful. I am happy it worked.

I added some furniture and food. The house needs to feel like a home.

Things

I wonder how long can I work until my body breaks.



Alright.

I've been working on additional vegetation. My level is full of trees and grass but there's nothing in between. Some weeds, bushes, flowers or mushrooms would be fantastic. Therefore I chose to make berries, red cloves, daisies and general unspecified weeds. These are quite common for the Eastern Europe area. I remember trying to eat them when I was a kid.

Now that I look at them, they all seem awfully bright and saturated in comparison to the rest of the vegetation.

There isn't really many daisies in the forest but putting a few won't hurt and they will break the green monotony.

I also just noticed the berries are cut short. I was wondering why they looked so weird. Another annoying thing to fix.

I actually took the trouble of editing normals this time. Obviously there's a huge difference in 3Ds Max but I can't seem to have the same effect in engine.

Setting up vegetation for touch and detail bending suddenly became extremely easy.












There isn't really much movement in my level yet so I decided to spend a day working on pests and sounds. Because who would I be if I didn't fiddle unnecessarily.

I found out I have a bit of a phobia. It pains when I look at these two. I can't believe I actually managed to make this texture. It took a lot of staring and adjusting. Also my body felt itchy for few hours.

The flying pepper caster you see on the left is actually a firefly. I want to put a bunch of those in a jar and use it as a lamp.

At first I wanted to use boids in Cryengine but this wouldn't give me much control over them. I want them to fly within a specified area and boids use more random movements. I'm probably wrong and there's probably a really simple way of doing this but I'm too tired and short on time to look for solution. And research for Cryengine takes ages. Therefore I animated each of these little bugs in 3Ds Max and I made sure they stayed withing the jar. I'll import them tomorrow and hopefully it will be as easy as the tutorial says.