Side project: mountains

Some work for a small side project I've been working on at home.

Worldmachine, UDK and Photoshop.

FuturePoly course 2

While teaching the last FuturePoly class on sky textures, I made the above sky swatch. 

Terrain, World Machine, Sky

Experiments in creating landscapes.

So, for a while now I've been wanting to create interesting landscapes to go along with my skybox/dome textures. I have experience in Terragen 2 but I dont particularly like it much. I checked out World Machine a while back but didnt really have the PC nor the time to really devote to it.  Now with this 12 thread 32gig system...I feel more adequately equipped :)

I checked out Choco's tutorials over at Polycount and liked what I saw.  I decided I would give the whole process a go. I ended up changing some things up to get a little more detail in my mesh... I think there is something wrong with my copy of mudbox... I need more investigation.

My intention is to eventually use these terrain in my paintings/concepts/mattes.   Here is some rough work from the evening. Sky is a default unreal sky texture. You just have to hunt for it. (It is actually pretty good!...kudos!)

I am a little backlogged on blog posts. I have 2 or 3 I need to get out... including some more HDR sky painting experiments and one on physical based lighting.

HDR sky painting

HDR Sky Painting

Video link below

When creating a skybox I always strive for interesting painted realism look rather than simply photoreal.  If you simply want photoreal, there are many different ways to capture or buy skybox textures.  I'm focused on creating UNIQUE sun breaks and storms in the sky.

When working in an HDR engine it really complicates things. The normal process of painting in ldr / 8bit simply isnt good enough. If your engine has eye adaptation... it will be really hard for you to get your ldr/8bit texture looking right in the hdr engine. Now, I'm sure you could probably make it work... but why not try and make it better than that? Thats my goal here.  To get a normal brushed/matte painted sky and paint exposure levels into it.

Now, there are many options to make hdr skies. Maya, Ozone/Vue, Terragen to name a few. I'm specifically talking about using photoshop as your main tool.

I'm going to be continuing exploration of how I'd get the exact look I want, but for now here is a quick sample texture I painted originally in 8bit and then converted to 32bit in photoshop and started painting exposure adjustment layers on top of it.  The video below shows exposure steps pretty well...but I think it can get a lot better. More testing!

Link to video:  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2171307/hdr_sky.wmv

The next step will be to create the entire sky from scratch in 32 bit and paint these layers at the correct exposure levels to begin with.

Gir!

Gir!

A gift from my friend Eva!

The Last Friendship - MolyJam 2012 Screenshot

Hi-res screenshot requested by a few folks.

The Last Friendship - MolyJam 2012

In game. No painting.  Getting close to done.