The Monolith

[Dneproman]

Oh guys, many thanks
for such a great interest in our humble content!
Frankly nice and unexpected!:eek:
We sincerely hope that you find useful and will use it in your project!

We have prepared a lot of things and more interesting.
But I will say so, not all at once

[Dneproman]

And I’m sorry for,
I promised that he will be released on monday-tuesday, but a really went out on thursday.
I have had a temporary problems with uploading…

Fortunately, everything was settled and I hope that in the future, we will be releasing a clearly stated term.

Best wishes!

[Ravneson]

Oh wow is awesome! Thanks ever so much!

[anonymous_user_a8165be9]

Thank you!

[Vormulac]

Many thanks to you and yours Dneproman!

[Wowthever]

Many, many thanks. is really helpful, not only to make it easier for us to develop our projects, but to be able to learn from these textures, to understand PBR texturing and therefore to improve our own skills.

[Monokkel]

is incredibly useful, and also incredibly generous. Thank you!

[Osok]

Wonderful, thank you for your generosity.

[Steve_T]

wow is great Thanks!!

[Xerithas]

Nice dude, thanks so much =]

[Luos (Luos_83)]

First of all, I would really like to thank everyone who worked on package!
Its a good first step and I really hope that you all will continue to contribute big packages like !

That said, I have spend some time looking at the package and feel the need to write down some thoughts and basically review the package.
(I am not the best reviewer, but I think I know enough to at least give a honest opinion on what I see in front of me)

The quantity!
The package has an abundant amount of textures, materials and instances to play with. (awesome!)
I counted 38 different () materials, most of them used for the shrubs and water that has been placed around the level.
There are actually 91 material instances in the package, sure some are used for decals, water and some other but its def. more than the 60 promoted.
There are also 28 static meshes, I am guessing most of them are used for the scene but since they are part of the package I wanted to add them to list.
But before I will go deeper into the aforementioned lets pick some of the other files since there are also a few sounds and .

The 2 sounds (ambient music) adds to the overall feel of the environment and sets a nice mysterious mood.
The particle are more interesting as they are water related, drips, splashes, mist and ripples and I find those a nice addition to whats already available for free and anybody who is working with water could use or learn from them.

When checking out these files however, I was a bit bothered by the way all the folders where set up:

Its very chaotic, multiple material, texture and mesh folders as well as multiple folders that are water related and so on.
I would highly suggest you guys that next time you release a package to keep the folder structure more organized.
In case there are two packages in one project ofcourse. So starting with a main folder for the texture/material package and one for the Monolith showcase would have been a good start.

There is also the fact that inside a mesh folder there was a material folder but both the ECO and MATs folder also contained textures, and decal stuff. (very chaotic)

Next I wanted to look at my favorite thing: meshes.
There arent many meshes, but a few stood out.
Lets pick one of the rock meshes:

As you can see the texture is very stretched on various places, pixelated even.
goes for all of the cave/rock related meshes so next time I would highly suggest to improve the unwrapping of the mesh so you wont see these stretched materials.
The shape of the meshes itself could also use some work, they feel very un-organic and that in combination with the very stretched material make it very hard to work with and get a decent result.
some of the meshes even had holes in them, resulting in not always being able to use them in a variety of ways:

http://i.gyazo.com/d3bbf46be5cb8457833a4d5ab95a1d4f.gif

There are also some shrub/plant related meshes and as someone who likes both caves and plants, I was very interested in them.
Overall taken they look nice!

(Next two might be my fav. of the package)

especially the shrub one seems to be of a higher standard than all the other meshes in the package combined.
Even the texture up close looks great!

That other shrub though had some issues when getting up close:

And that is actually quite sad, the texture itself looks good but the way its cut off by the uv-map really takes away from realism and quality.

Then I went to take a look at the majority of the package and the reason most people will download it, the textures and materials.
I will just look at the material (instances) used for the texture package in case.

All the instances start out black untill the user manually enables “TransitionFX” and sets it to 1.
I find rather annoying, I dont mind the option itself but at least make it inverted so one can see the material in the content browser and doesnt need to tweak it if a user wants to use them.
The Materials also dont have a unique roughness and rely on using a specular texture. (which is a rather different thing)
Why would you make a specular texture and use it for roughness?
The specular input is actually not connected to the specular texture but uses two parameter value’s which makes me wonder if either the specular textures should be renamed to roughness, or something weird is going on.
(btw: one of the materials is called Beton instead of Concrete, so im guessing someone is dutch :p)

Also, the material is named: M_Stone_PBR but almost none of the textures are actually PBR-ready.
There might not be too much shadow going on in the textures, but the amount of black lines and other weird oddities wouldnt do well for actual bpr-based materials. (They can offcourse, but I personally find it an odd thing).

then onto the textures itself, and after looking at the quality of the texture of that shrub I mentioned before… I had rather high hopes!
But…, and to be honest… I am having a hard time finding something really possitive to say about them.
Most of them look like a random rock-related image with a load of photoshop filters applied to them.
some examples:

Most of the textures look like some motion blur filter have been added and tweaked:

Closeup:

Too much shadow/highlight in to be PBR as well:

Loads of red pixels everywhere which make the brick look rather odd.

Other variation of previous texture, looks like a lot of blurring/vertical motion blurring has been going on:

Some of them look like parts are copy pasted over and over in an odd way:

Those black/white lines will look very odd, especially when normal map etc are applied.

Then there are also textures where well… I dont know what they should be:

Some of the textures look very blurry but have patches that are so contrasted/sharped that the result looks very odd.
Actually moving texture gives a very strange flickering-ish result on my screen:

And some of the textures are odd all over:

Actually for me, only one texture of the package really stood out and imho looks really nice:

sure, it would still need some work to get rid of the odd black and white dots/stripes but it actually has loads of potential!
Especially for a more toon-ish environment.

Speaking of toonish environments, stuff like :

http://i.gyazo.com/e8881998108c017cd730e57e64038adc.gif

Would also look nice in a simmiliar environment.

And last, as I mentioned before… the specular/roughness stuff in the material looks rather odd…
and when looking around in the cave-scene it def. shows because almost looked like a disco for me:

http://i.gyazo.com/a0507b1c13669a9509a08324df28fee5.gif

Phew…
Now I know most of what I said was negative: I didnt like the rock meshes and I didnt have anything good to say about the textures.
But dont take it as a “Please never ever make another package!” because thats not my intention.
You guys put a lot of efford into , and that def. counts for something.
I really hope you all keep putting efford into any upcoming packages and keep improving yourselves and the content you all create.
Those shrubs looked really awesome! as well as the dead tree, and swamp material/decal was also one of the cooler things I have found in package:

http://i.gyazo.com/addc1dff3c86f052c597c10ff4940911.gif

So keep up the work, do better next time, keep learning and practicing with the software packages you are using and make us both proud and happy with all the future content!

Edit: I just learned that the shrubs are from SpeedTree, so I am not sure how much credit I should give the authors for that… but at least it could be a target level of quality they should/could aim for.

[Dneproman]

Ok thanks, our next package, there will be much better quality!

[anonymous_user_8d09ebd2]

Concerning your Caustic Instance, you use a Panner on your Caustic texture then overlay a different Panner + Caustic texture with Texture Coordinates so that the sizes can be different as well as having them in different directions, yes?

Also Dneproman I do not believe you should take that large post up there as being negative. Someone does not put in all that effort to say “you suck.” He was merely trying to help your team improve by pointing out things that you might have missed.

[Luos (Luos_83)]

Also Dneproman I do not believe you should take that large post up there as being negative. Someone does not put in all that effort to say “you suck.” He was merely trying to help your team improve by pointing out things that you might have missed.

Exactly, I hope that each new package or other content you and your team creates becomes better and better

[Fezvez]

Thank you for providing rather awesome package. I didn’t go as in depth as, but I agree that while overall the quality is great, some parts could be improved to be put at the same level.

Still, it’s quite awesome! Thanks!

[anonymous_user_8d4f3e21]

Thanks for providing that awesome overview Luos, it was really helpful to me,
I’m sure most people here can look through and pick and choose some choice assets out of that package,
but to me I’d get lost in the folder structure, then use a few assets and not be happy with the quality, due to the issues you highlighted.

I kinda wish it was just a really small amount of assets, set up right and easy to use.
When I get more familiar with I’ll dig through and grab a few of the nice, useful ones, and for that I thank Dneproman and hope he releases more.

(If anyone wants to point me to a list of the quality or interesting filenames, that I can just search for, move into another folder, then delete the rest of the package, to save space I’d be grateful)

[cadviz]

Seems to be really a great Free Helpful Stuff…
But; I’m sad I can’t download 3.85 GB from Mega.co.nz in one session (bad connection here)… Moreover; Mega website does not support Internet Download Manager (IDM) Pause/Resume
Hope someone Re upload it on other website…
Best Regards

[Xhyko]

Thx, that awesome

[Staruwos2]

Thanks to share

[Luftbauch]

Woot.
Thank you for your work.