My first attempt at area graphics, what shall I do with them? Options

[Yacomo]

Hi,

This is my first 'finished' attempt at an area graphic: 'ye abandoned forest road'.

Tell me what you think! If you are a mod maker and want to use this in your mod, please contact me. I am also offering my work for inclusion in the WtP project and / or your community downloads.

So here it is: One scaled down version of the whole area and two detail shots.

This post has been edited by Yacomo: Apr 18 2005, 06:18 PM

Attached File(s)

 ye_abandoned_forest_road_640.jpg ( 50.29k ) Number of downloads: 34

 

[Yacomo]

Detail shot 1:

This post has been edited by Yacomo: Apr 18 2005, 06:18 PM

Attached File(s)

 ye_abandoned_forest_road_detail1.jpg ( 121.83k ) Number of downloads: 14

 

[Yacomo]

Detail shot 2:

This post has been edited by Yacomo: Apr 18 2005, 06:19 PM

Attached File(s)

 ye_abandoned_forest_road_detail2.jpg ( 59.27k ) Number of downloads: 22

 

[Baronius]

Gigantic, and very nice!
How large is it in full (original) size?

[Sir-Kill]

the trees are realy nice! where did you get them?

the rocks seem to be a little 'placed' as in someone put them there, not so natural.

all in all it is a vary good job espcialy for your first atempt

[Sir Kalthorine]

the rocks seem to be a little 'placed' as in someone put them there, not so natural.

As the area is meant to be a "forest road", I assume the rocks are meant to be placed, as in marking out the road boundaries.

But yes, excellent work

[Yacomo]

the rocks seem to be a little 'placed' as in someone put them there, not so natural.

As the area is meant to be a "forest road", I assume the rocks are meant to be placed, as in marking out the road boundaries.

But yes, excellent work

Thanks for the nice words Sir Kalthorine is right, the stones were meant to look placed - was thinking of this to be some long forgotten track. Who knows, which adventures might wait here

The original image is 3020 x 1924 pixels - 12006kb when archived using WinRAR.

[Galactygon]

It's a pretty good area there, Yacomo, but I am afraid you are in for suggestions to improve it.

However, I think it's slightly out of place if you compare it with other areas. The greenery is extremely bright and vibrant when compared to the other BG1 areas, so the area could be dulled a bit.

So, are those the actual size of the trees (in the close-up screenshot)? They must be inhabited by giants if that's true.

-Galactygon

[Yacomo]

It's a pretty good area there, Yacomo, but I am afraid you are in for suggestions to improve it.

However, I think it's slightly out of place if you compare it with other areas. The greenery is extremely bright and vibrant when compared to the other BG1 areas, so the area could be dulled a bit.

So, are those the actual size of the trees (in the close-up screenshot)? They must be inhabited by giants if that's true.

-Galactygon

Thanks for the suggestions - constructive criticism is always a good thing and ultimately yields to better results

This keeps me motivated to give it another revision - maybe next weekend

[Baronius]

Big size, would make a huge area in the game. Which is good. I love huge areas, especially forest roads! BG1-style forever!

Indeed, it needs to be improved but don't listen to Galactygon! Maybe the light is too bright but the gigantic sizes are good! Be original, be innovative -- don't necessarily try to make your area look similar/identical to others' areas. (However, much can be learned from those.)

[Sir-Kill]

um this is what I was kind of talking about when I said 'placed', not placed by people that lived in bg or amn, I meant 'placed' by Yacomo; the shadowing needs to be tweeked, the boulder in this shot looks like it is floating a small shadow under it may help. I see that it is in the shadow of the tree, but a line of some sort would be good

a couple of things the area size was not a multiple of 64 ithis is a must.
and a CH. (human) is 50 pixels in hight just thought you might want to know

This post has been edited by Sir-Kill: Apr 10 2005, 10:27 PM

[Yacomo]

Indeed, it needs to be improved but don't listen to Galactygon! Maybe the light is too bright but the gigantic sizes are good! Be original, be innovative -- don't necessarily try to make your area look similar/identical to others' areas. (However, much can be learned from those.)

Thanks for all the comments. Don't worry, I am here to listen, not to obey

I'll play around a bit with the texturing and size, just to see if I like the results better, some post-processing may be useful as well.
Of course I know that the final graphics used in-game have to be a multiple of 64 and maybe the graphics are too large, but I would rather make the source material for the modder too large and ask him to shrink it down to his needs than the other way round and have him get blurry results by scaling it up

[Baronius]

Balance is important, but I don't mind large sizes themselves, i.e. when a tree is 30-50m high (so it looks huge when characters are standing next to it). They were much bigger trees in BG2 in the forests around Suldanesselar. I'd prefer big trees, although not so big ones that don't fit the screen (as in the mentioned areas of BG2 -- I liked them there though).

[Windwalker]

Looks excellent Yacomo!

[Yacomo]

Bump Thanks for all the comments! Tweaked the textures and rerendered at 2/3 the size, preview images updated - maybe you want to have a second look

I'll pass the complete image to Sir Kill for posting it on the WtP community assets page,

[SimDing0]

I'd suggest taking another look at the tree bark texturing-- it looks very plasticy right now. Also, while the overall lighting is excellent, I don't think it's working so well on the crystals. I don't know how lighting works in Bryce, so I can't make any technical suggestions, but it appears to be lighting the tree extremely brightly, then little of the ground around it, which looks strange.

Obviously I'm missing out with Bryce though, because it's doing foliage way better than 3dsmax/SpeedTree does. (Either that, or you're just that much better at it than me-- equally likely, I suspect.)

This post has been edited by SimDing0: Apr 18 2005, 06:37 PM

[Sir-Kill]

Yacomo I got the map and sent you a pm. I'll get it on the web as soon as possible. good job.

[Yacomo]

I'd suggest taking another look at the tree bark texturing-- it looks very plasticy right now. Also, while the overall lighting is excellent, I don't think it's working so well on the crystals. I don't know how lighting works in Bryce, so I can't make any technical suggestions, but it appears to be lighting the tree extremely brightly, then little of the ground around it, which looks strange.

Obviously I'm missing out with Bryce though, because it's doing foliage way better than 3dsmax/SpeedTree does. (Either that, or you're just that much better at it than me-- equally likely, I suspect.)

Thanks for the suggestions Sim. Unfortunately at the moment I am done with this piece. I will check out how to do architecture next. You are right however, so if I'll ever revise this piece again, I'll try to cover your two points.

As for Bryce vs. 3dsmax vs. Vue vs. whatever. I am not so positive that Bryce is so much 'better' than any of the other tools available. As with every 'powerful' tool you'll have to learn how to use it properly (I am still at the very beginning) and the interface of Bryce is very 'different' from that of a typical windows application. I have mainly chosen Bryce because it is so much cheaper than any of the other tools

[SimDing0]

Bryce is a landscaping tool primarily, but I'd hazard a guess that it'll lose out to 3dsmax's modelling capability. And I'm sure I've used it at some stage or other and noticed that the interface was pretty strange.