[CE3] Sci-Fi Server Room
polycounter lvl 7
Hi everyone,
I thought I’d start a thread for a project I’ve recently started. The environment is based on a couple of pieces of concept art by RAZOR B. I’ve seen a few people tackle these environments but hopefully I can push some of my own personal touches into the mix. Unfortunatly I’m not able to work on it constantly as work work takes priority but I try to work on it during my lunch hour and a little bit at home when I get chance. I'll try to keep the thread as up to date as possible.
Goals of the project:
- Improve at asset creation and texture work in general (Unfortunatly Eutechnyx is a very outsource heavy studio so I don’t get to work on assets as much as I’d like)
- Tackle a style I’ve never tried before (As common as Sci-Fi stuff is here on polycount, I’ve never created anything Sci-Fi before ^_^)
- Post on polycount more
- Take on feedback and suggestions earlier rather than waiting till I’m 90% finished
- Further improve on my CryEngine knowledge
As always feedback and crit is welcome and thank you for your time
Current Progress:
Concept Art By RAZOR B
High Poly Models
I thought I’d start a thread for a project I’ve recently started. The environment is based on a couple of pieces of concept art by RAZOR B. I’ve seen a few people tackle these environments but hopefully I can push some of my own personal touches into the mix. Unfortunatly I’m not able to work on it constantly as work work takes priority but I try to work on it during my lunch hour and a little bit at home when I get chance. I'll try to keep the thread as up to date as possible.
Goals of the project:
- Improve at asset creation and texture work in general (Unfortunatly Eutechnyx is a very outsource heavy studio so I don’t get to work on assets as much as I’d like)
- Tackle a style I’ve never tried before (As common as Sci-Fi stuff is here on polycount, I’ve never created anything Sci-Fi before ^_^)
- Post on polycount more
- Take on feedback and suggestions earlier rather than waiting till I’m 90% finished
- Further improve on my CryEngine knowledge
As always feedback and crit is welcome and thank you for your time
Current Progress:
Concept Art By RAZOR B
High Poly Models
Replies
Im looking forward to seeing where this goes!
The doors are too small which means the servers are too short which means ceiling is not high enough.
@aajohnny &Low - Totally agree with the point about the door and the scale issues, thanks for pointing that out.
@Neoncypher - Cheers mate, when are you going to start posting your Fifth Element scene?
Quite a small update but I've been playing around with the proportion issues as well as some tweaks to the models. Also I've lightened up the scene as my setup at home versus my setup at work doesn't match calibration wise, therefore the images were coming out darker than intended.
- Block out looks fine so far.
- High poly models look sweet!
- I'm looking forward to seeing more
Are you going to be doing the hologram style signs too?
@JackyBoy - Yeah I'll be doing the hologram style display but its likely to be a while away yet as I tend to work on the larger details first and work down to the smaller details. Therefore I'll be doing the walls, floor etc first
Been doing a bit more work over lunch, mainly doing a little bit of texture work on the wall and getting the basic floor in place (its untextured at the moment, just flat colour with OCC, Cavity Map and Normal Map)
Looking great though mate! Keep it up!
Another small update, currently I'm just blocking out all of the normal maps for the main interior shell and working out what resolution to make the textures. I'm creating the normal maps using NDO.
Currently all the diffuse textures consist of is a flat grey colour, with an ambient occlusion map and cavity map. One I've got the textures blocked out I'll start working on the diffuse and spec maps and introduce all of the appropriate colours from the concept art
Another quick update, from my dinnertime work:
Baked out the low poly version of the roof tile:
Also been playing around with POM (Parallax Occlusion Mapping):
I'm going to be using this method for all the walls and floor. I do however need to rework this one as I'd prefer the results to go outward instead of inward
Look really nice, looking forward for an update
@sltrOlsson Thanks, yeah found the height bias setting shortly after posting last time. doh
Slow progress this week as I've been on holiday but I'm just starting to working on the height map for the middle floor tile as well as tweaking the POM settings:
@Razorb Thanks mate, means alot coming from you, your concepts are awesome and I hope that I do them justice
More lunchtime tweaking, I've put the finishing touches to the floor tile height map as well as add some base colour tones. I'll do renders of the high poly model whenever I go on my home computer next
Are you just doing the server room or that little corridor as well?
I'm either going to finish up blocking out the rest of the room textures or I might just jump straight into some diffuse textures
Here's a similar floor texture we made that may be of some use for reference!
Keep going!
try those settings they are increasing the tex res to 4k. r_ShadowJittering is the blur amount for the shadows.
e_ShadowsMaxTexRes = 4096
r_ShadowJittering = 6
e_ShadowsConstBias = 1
e_ShadowsCastViewDistRatio = 1.5
Look forward to seeing more.
that texture is yummy! :poly121:
One thing that's bugging me at the moment is that alot of the elements don't feel like they fit together, not in terms of style but literally "fit" into place. The whole scene is build up from interlocking panels, whereas the servers and the table etc are just placed on top of the panels. I think to make everything look alot more grounded and believable it would be great to see everything lock together, the servers fit into a specific panel and the table and chairs lock into a specific place, rather than just sitting on tom.
If you look at this reference, all of the servers "fit" into the floor with the panels around them lining up perfectly with the edge of the server.
Great work!
@ae. Thanks mate, your texture looks great, I've added it to the reference folder
@Coridium Cheers Chris. Hows it going anyway, working on anything at the moment? I miss seeing you always working on something cool
@scotthomer Thanks Scott, really appreciate the feedback. I was thinking the same thing about grounding in the servers, it especially became apparent to me when I added POM to the floor, it stood out like a sore thumb. I'll definatly be doing something but I have yet to figure out a design for them. Btw keep up the awesome work on your Bioshock scene, its very inspiring and I can't wait to see what you move onto next
As always any feedback is very more appreciated
@maxivz - Hey mate sorry for not getting back to you sooner, basically all you have to do to turn a point light into a spot light in CryEngine is to add a texture in the light projector properties. I'm using a very simple gradient but you could add more detail to create torch lights etc. Hope that helps
Unfortunatly I don't have much to update in the thread but I have been working on the scene quite abit. I have multiple assets in the works but there not quite ready to show yet. I've have created a few presentations boards showing a couple of the textures that have been done for the scene:
the textures are looking great so keep at it!
I didn't seem to be getting the results I wanted so I setup a little test consisting of a highly glossy floor and positioned 3 bright primary coloured balls above and then generated the cube map and this is the result I get. (I would have expected to be able to clearly see the reflections in the floor but all I seem to get reflected is the main room lights)
When I preview the environment probe I get this almost pitch black sphere but I'd expect it too almost match the room that its rendering in terms of ambient colour.
Below are some of the things I've tried in order to improve the cube map but none of these have made much impact:
Deleted the light box
Deleted the light propogation volume
Increased the radius of the environment probe
Increased the size of the cube map
Lowered / Increased the current config of the engine
Linked the environment probe to the light box
Tried applying the cubemap manually
Made the primary balls emmisive
Moved the primary balls around the environment
Played around with all the environment probe settings
I'm running out of ideas now so I'm really hoping someone has some advice on what it might be
Thanks in advance
Basically I'm abit stumped at whats causing the problem, the images above were taken on my home PC but when I came into work today I opened the scene and the reflections were working fine.
I have a few theories
I have CryEngine running off Dropbox so maybes its causing problems if the file paths are different between the two computers I use?
My home computer is average at best so maybes its a performance issue?
Does anyone have any other ideas what it might be?
I'm not sure if this is what you're after, but it may help.