Well my last final exam was this morning. I thought I would procrastinate longer for sure, but here I was working on it already today. Chapter 3 is removed from all the areas I've been working on for 2 years so it has an element of freshness to it. Here are some shots of the mountainous isle, the last area of the campaign. Above is the shore. I kind of stole it off the vault and modified it without too much butchering of the higher quality art. As always, click the images to see a full size version. Sorry but I was lazy and these are just toolset shots, lacking the fine settings. It's conceptual though.
This next area is scary... I'm attempting to build a whole exterior myself and I gotta say its not my forte. This is an early shot, with much left to do but I would welcome any advice to make it look more like the linked pics, of Lake Louise, near Calgary.
I'm hoping for the treed in like crazy effect:
SAMPLE IMAGES
However I see how this might be unrealistic since trees that heavy will slow things down and there are no individual tree cut out 2d placeables, whose low overhead would make this possible. So in lieu of that I'd just like advice on making this look more convincing.
I'm in touch with voice actors and Im racing to finish so they have something to read and we can cut this diseased limb off by new years. :) But man it's really hard forcing myself to do it right now but maybe having nothing to do for 2 weeks will improve my motivation.
LATE EDIT: I did happen to find relatively cardboard cutout trees by accident in the RWS cliff pack so yay for that. Still looking for general tips now to "reality"-ize the area or at least improve it.
just an idea: the cliff texture unfortunately is not beautiful on extremely vertical heights. at least, all my efforts at creating a dramatic landscape failed miserably beacuse of that. what works rather well though is to stick the "stone face" (I don't remember the exact name) placeable, even scaled to fit very big surfaces, in the most vertical slopes, to hide complitely or at least break the texture.
ReplyDeletealso, if you want to match that marvellous lake (I didn't know it! how beautiful!) you must dare more with color. perhaps you may export then import the water you used in the beach area, that turquise hue is rather similar!
heh. I recognize that shore.... it's a required area in my campaign. I think someone's using it in the SoZ holiday project as well.
ReplyDeleteI've been to Lake Loius. Thinking back, the hardest thing from a recreating in NWN2 perspective would be to get that water right.
The water is a sinch. It's two seconds work to tint it blue green and set reflective to high. I think everybody is missing my problem: I was talking about the treed in effect. They literally cover the mountains but that would drop the game to unplayable if using real trees. Luckily I found the cut outs :)
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