For some crits I’d say that perhaps the floor tiles is a bit too repetitive and I think that you could have squeezed a lot more geometry into the scene, especially for the walls since the normal maps don’t really display the depth too well.
But it is a great level, it is among the highest quality work I have seen posted here in a long time.
Oh and also don’t mind the people who tell you to port it to BGE / render it with Cycles etc, etc. Us Blender users tend to forget that other software can co-exist with Blender and that people might actually like to work with other software AS WELL as with Blender
As I said I assembled the objects in CE3.
What I did in Blender is model the highpolys, bake them in xnormal then model the lowpolys
and then export them to CE3.
Surely you did not speak literally about this but I must ask just in case, did you really model the low-poly model after baking the textures?
As previously stated I think you could’ve used a lot more geometry in the walls, for big details such as the larger plates you could have added the geometry for the plate itself and let the normal map handle the beveling and bolts.
That’s correct. You make hipoly models of surface detail without context really, you bake normals/AO/displacement/whatever from them and turn them into texture sheets (you can also use parts that are from photographs, painted, etc, as long as you generate all the appropriate passes). Then you model the lowpolys to fit the textures by continually unwrapping as you model. You get very clean lowpolys that way with no artifacts, but you have to be pretty inventive with the UV maps and shaders to prevent making the scene too repetitive. Also, the low poly meshes will be a bit heavier because since you can’t rely on normal maps for normals, you have to make sure the lowpoly models’ smoothed normals are nice and clean. Because you make multiple different objects with the same texture this way, it’s a great way to save memory on textures - so it’s a very common technique on console games, especially for environment stuff of lesser importance. Pretty much only distinct ‘hero assets’ get the full hipoly->retopo->bake treatment nowadays.
Ok, you’re right I see what I wrote might be a bit misleading.
For the walls I made the highpoly for the texture, baked the texture (to a plane) then modeled the actual walls with the textures applied.
The same goes for the branches.
I thinks MadMinstrel explained it in a better way.
Obiously in other cases I had to have the lowpoly (model that goes into the level) to bake the highpoly to.
Actually, I disagree with this statement. You could make a scene as good looking as this in the BGE. The difference is that the work you’d input to do so would be inevitably greater to overcome certain limitations. This said, you shouldn’t be comparing commercial dedicated engines to an in-house one. BGE is a great engine, what defines great is not the gloss on your paint.
On a lighter note, I always perk up a little when seeing this thread. The quality of your artwork is equal to that of rendered scenes.
If you didn’t label your title with ‘CryEngine’, I would’ve been tricked to perceiving this as a still render. Heck, this even stands out among the other stills I’ve seen.
Awesome work! I’m really hoping to see more stuff you create with these genres.
Amazing detail. I do find some of the textures a bit harsh. Then again since this is sci-fi it could well be lit with out the light passing through a planets atmosphere. In which case the harshness would be appropriate.
Good distribution of vertical and horizontal lines to give a very constructivist/sci-fi feel. I’m impressed by the art direction on the artificial surfaces. =D
As for the trees, they’re pretty convincing, especially if this is real time, but the strength that stands out the most is the high quality of the technical details on the machined surfaces. Very nice. =)
