Tips and tricks for avoiding repetition in CryEngine landscapes

By no means should you have to do all of these. Just pick and choose from this list to make your level look more realistic. - Smother the landscape with vegetation (ensure random rotation and random size are ticked in the vegetation options).
- Ensure you control where vegetation objects can be placed by setting the maximum and minimum angles of land they can be placed on, as well as what elevation they can appear on.
- Put a 100% opacity material as a "base" for your landscape, then draw over it with low-opacity materials until you end up with a mottled colour. The aim is to avoid having a landscape that has large areas that look exactly the same colour.
- Avoid overly vibrant colours everywhere (ie, high saturation); repetition shows up more easily in things that have high saturation since it ramps up contrast a bit.
- Use several different vegetation groups (eg, one that's got lots of small bushes, one that's got grasses, one that's got dense trees, one that's got rocks... then use these in different parts of the level to make a mixture of plains, forests, clearings, valleys, shorelines, etc)
- Fiddle with fog and lighting settings to change how far you can see
- Add details to your landscape so your screenshots don't have any blank landscape in it. When you're taking screenshots, look at everything that's on screen and make sure it looks realistic by touching up your level before committing to the screenshot.
- Add roads.
- Add rivers (they can only go horizontal, so if you want one going down a hill, you need to break it into horizontal runs joined by waterfalls (ie, water particle effects / waterfall-shaped meshes with the waterfall material applied to it).
- Add decals (google "CryEngine decal tutorial") to break up repeating textures in places where the player will be walking around (eg paths, areas around your architecture).
- Carefully manually place a few important features (eg a big tree or rock or whatever) as Geometric Entities, so they can be an interesting unique part of your landscape. Consider framing your views to look onto features like this.
This is by no means an exhaustive list. Experiment with other stuff outside of this and you can get something pretty cool.

Some Examples of Past Student Work

Hey guys, here's some stuff students have done for other courses in CryEngine. Hopefully it'll give some good inspiration for the kinds of things you can do to make a hyper-realistic, immersive, captivating environment for your architecture to sit within. Note the ambience they create just by tweaking some of the environmental effects (fog, lighting colours and brightness, time of day, depth of field, carefully selected textures to fit the mood they're going for), and the hyper-realism they create by carefully ensuring you never see tessellating textures, repetitive-looking objects, objects not aligning properly with the ground (eg half-floating trees on cliffs).

Video 1
Video 2
Video 3
Video 4
Video 5
Video 6

Their aim was to create an ambience or mood to the environment they designed, while also creating a building themselves, so it's very similar to what we're asking you to do. Go for individuality, uniquity, and showing off your ability to make something captivating.

EXP3 Architectural Concepts

Hey guys, here's the concepts you compiled in groups today:



STEVEN HOLL:

Building One: Linked Hybrid

1. “City within a city” –
a. Micro-urbanism
2. Programmatically semi-lattice like, rather than simplistically linear –
a. Hybrid
3. Based on the naked dancing people artwork, utilizing it as a metaphor to design his building in a similar way -
a. Unity
b. Solidarity

Building Two: Horizontal Skyscraper – Vanke Centre

1. Architecture is designed for the surrounding environment and is designed for the future
a. Prospective
b. Forward-thinking
2. He sees all the problems all at once, i.e. beginning of the design project, and attempts to solve all these problems with one solution
a. Holistic Pragmatism



LOUIS KHAN:

1. Internal - Building from the inside
2. Intruding light - Elaborated use of light and materials.
3. Monolithic - Khan does very solid looking buildings with a monumental mood to it.
4. Symmetry - Very balanced shapes layout.
5. Ancient - Form influenced by great ancient ruins.
In addition, Khans quote: "Honour the materials that you use".



TOYO ITO:

1. Organic/Nature forms
2. Multi-valued design, in terms of structure, circulation, ventilation etc.
3. Transparency
4. Fluidity of plan/Free plan
5. Subtle Design regarding to materiality, lighting, building envelope

Buildings:
1. Tod's Omotesando
2. Sendai Mediatheque



ADOLF LOOS:
1. Modular design - design spaces first, then put them together to form a building.
2. Criminal ornamentation - there is a difference between organic and natural decoration (which higher thinkers use) and superfluous decoration (which criminals and barbarians use).
3. Raumplan - design spaces as volumes and push and cut them together to make them fit snugly.
4. Rational design - design for functionality instead of for emotion.
5. Internal focus - the interior is where the people are, so the focus should be on the internal spaces.

Welcome to ARCH1101!

Hey guys, this'll be my blog for ARCH1101 for the semester. I'll be using this blog mostly as a quick reference to get to your blogs, and perhaps to post some pointers for assignments or weekly work.

Some handy URLs:

Course website: Russell Lowe's ARCH1101 website

Course forum: Google Groups ARCH1101-2013

Sketchup + quick rendering + Photoshop: Alex Hogrefe

Please make sure you've got everything from the Week 1 requirements uploaded to your blog by the weekend so I can check it before our next class. If you have any questions or anything you're unsure about that you don't want to post directly to the forum, feel free to email me at stephen.b.davey@gmail.com - I'll put your question up on the forum (anonymously! :) ) and answer it there for everyone.