Escape Challenge - Vietnam - Team Piranha Bytes

hi there.
some of my colleagues and me got an entry in the current polycount escape challenge
see all the details in the thread.
here is a collage of the scene we want to make

[update]
screenz of the textures i will use for the environments

[update]
some realtime material tests in our engine

i tried to sculpt the bulges of the rock in mudbox and overlay the rest with a diffuse extracted normal. came out waaaaaay to hard though..but i did it in a rush. it needs more love, then it will turn out ok

here is the offset map of the ground. it works best, when it is very blurry

[update 21.3.13]
i finally set up the engine scene with the landscape, new materials and started a weather
also i tried a first brush.
the ground materials all have a full parallax shader and the rocks are blended box mapped

[update]

yay, here is a first tree of the rainforest.
it's a speedtree with a bit higher poly and texture counts than in current games.
would be not difficult to reduce the polycount though.
the shots are out of speedtree. the tree is not implemented into the engine yet.
all textures and speedtree geo is from scratch. the raw texture material is from teh internets though.
i used the bark detailmap even on the palm fronds, which blend them nicely into the bark.

[upd]
i just brought the tree and 9 derivates of bend and small variations into the engine.
i also made a huge..well..giant bush, as a fill object. i will present this speedtree seperately when i made custom textures for it. currently i used the standard speedtree textures for it to have a quick peek, how it could look in the end.
the terrain makes some trouble currently, since i cannot color it with vertexcolors. therefore it is too bright. this will be fixed later.

[upd]
from paul.
he's working on the m16

BIG TIME UPDATE!!!

here is a roundup of all things i done in the last week. some new speedtrees. a new and better weather setting, some motionblur debris, and a dirty dummy helicopter from victor, with a dummy texture on it, place into a reworked environment.

but first things first. here you see the current outcome in two perspectives.

i tried to match the colorscheme from old original photos from back in the day.
i overused the filmic tonemapping from our engine here and gave it a heavier toe. so that the blacks are really saturated. then i tried to use mood colors and other stuff our weather editor comes with. pretty complicated to set a good weather. there are about ~90 setting to take care of ;)
i'm still not there. the greens are too yellow. but i'll take care of it later.

then i'll show you the compile speedtree altlases with all textures i made for this scene.
now all leaf material is 100% from me and brandnew. only the frondstwigs need to be exchanged later. they are still from the speedtree library.

since we have to submit stills, i made motionblurred decals that are floating midair in the scene, all around the helicopter.

here are all brandnew barks and the floaters.

finally a small update on the grounds. i tried to make them a bit darker. and with more variety.

this is a groundtexture with flattened grass. very good to use around the helicopter. i set up a parallax shader for all grounds, and when the sun shines in a low angle to it. it turns out to work well enough.

here the best bark i made for this scene in action.

here are all new speedtrees. a liana, the palm versions, and a new bambus plant

the liana in action. it has a pixelstrechy bark currently. needs to be fixed.

here are new broadleaf trees, with new leaf textures and barks.

see the bambus bark in action. this bark has a detail texture at ground level.

here some other angles

[update]

some new grassclumps to get the rotor winds in the grass

[update]

some update on a dead branch

[update]

also rushed through a treestump..was done in actually 3 hours from base mesh.

[update]

here some pics from pauls m16

i post them here to get links for the polycount postings since paul is not willing to post in forums..lol

anyway good progress!

and also an update on the branch. here the baked and mapped lowpoly

it still has 1600 tris though.

this is the uv layout for the lowpoly branch

[update]
M16 in engine

yeah, the last crunch update.
still some hours to go
here the new AK47 and the poses of the fully baked an textured vietcong
also a small scene update

and another one. see our small vietcong in action!

AAAAAANNNNNND FINAAAAAAAAAAAL