HL2 Ravenholm remaster - student project

bsichterman

Hi all!

Me (Boy Sichterman), Arthur Abeen, Bert Ruiter and Timo van Hugten are currently rebuilding half life 2 - Ravenholm in Unreal Engine 4. This is part of our specialization for school.

I will be responsible for most hard surface props, Arthur vegetation and ground materials/meshes, Timo architecture and Bert more props and storytelling.

For texturing we will be using Substance designer/painter and Photoshop. Modeling/sculpting will be done with Maya, Zbrush and I personally will be using Modo as part of my research.

Because of heavy time constraints we've chosen to focus on a small recognizable part of the level as seen in the following pic:



Hope you enjoy it

bsichterman

First assets from me:

Bedrock

I feel like the cylinder part of the gas canister has waay too many quads. 40~ sides on something like that is a little overkill, especially since it's not a big asset and you will probably have quite a few of it thrown around.

On the other hand the top bit of the water tank has some pretty obvious stepping. Would probably sacrifice 2-4 extra loops to make it look smoother.

Overall the quality is really good, especially on the texturing. I see you have four people working on this scene, how much time do you have?

bsichterman

You're definitely right, I went a little nuts on the gas cylinder. Gonna get rid of some loops there if time allows for it.
Right now we only got about 2 weeks left so we started crunching already.

St4lis

Looks good. I'd go for a blend shader for the rust and metal; it would be easier to LOD and more reuseable.

Shrike

Gas thing is fine, in a real production environment you would do LODs, also the scale of this scene will never push hardware to its limits, visual quality is their most important goal


looks pretty good so far, the edge definition of the electricity rock pillars on bottom look very strange however

bsichterman

@ St4lis
Thnx! Working on a generic blend shader right now

@ Shrike
Thnx for the feedback, I'll jump back in substance and see if I can polish it a little more.

Bedrock

Hmm two weeks is not a long time! I hope you won't just take the existing scene and replace assets with more up-to-date ones. That scene will need a lot of extra love!

Shame you guys won't have burning zombies and Gregori standing in the doorway, they really made that scene.

bsichterman

@Bedrock
I'm definitely planning to continue working on this scene in my free time after the deadline and put that extra love in it Maybe even give myself a Zbrush refresh course and sculpt the almighty father Grigori.

bsichterman

Never enough gas cylinders!

Not too happy about the sprayed text, probably gonna revisit it and make it a bit more interesting but first gotta move on and create more key assets.
Also the first asset where I fully relied on the round edge shader in Modo so I didn't actually create a high poly mesh for the bake.

Demeter

Great work! I once saw a remake of the HL2 trainstation from Logithx, not sure if he continued to work on it. At least I hope so.

If more people decide to work on HL content, maybe a complete remake is possible! I would love to explore the world of City 17 again with a new pbr crowbar.

Keep up the great work and take a look at the Ravenholm concept art for inspiration

http://i.imgur.com/LahDdqJ.jpg

ps. I would remove the burn writing^^

Bedrock

I think it's supposed to be Gregori's anti-zombie trap, so the writing has some narrative reasoning. Although I can see how people would find it a bit tacky who don't know what the scene is about (or even if they do heh).

The model is well done but I was wondering, what's that texture in the top left in the second image?

bsichterman

@Demeter
Thnx! I saw the train station before, very nicely done by Logithx. As Bedrock just pointed out, the gas cylinder is part of a trap to burn zombies but I can see how the text feels cheesy. Maybe removing it is the best option so we can re-use the asset and make a decal for the text.

@Bedrock
Indeed its part of the trap
That upper-left texture is the metallic and roughness combined, I'll make it clearer with text or separate them because I can see how this is unclear.

BertR

Hello!

First, sorry for the lack of updates.
Secondly, the deadline has passed, so I'm posting some screens of the result we have so far.

We're aware there's a lot that can be improved, which we also might do when there's time available.
Same goes for changes in the level layout.

Ofcourse, feedback is still appreciated!

Shrike

looks nice, lighting and post pretty good too
the grass is a little lackluster, some smaller bushes to break the transition would do a lot, maybe some color changes based on UE4 world position would help too, same for the ivy, some more yellow-ish spots would make it more grungy. The grass is like all brown while the ivy is all green currently

Jerc

It looks pretty solid but you should really get rid of the chromatic aberration. It eats up all the details in your textures and make everything look blurry. Maybe just have it as a vignette effect on the sides.

Demeter

The chromatic aberration looks too strong but the architecture and props look extremly good. Can't wait to see more

BertR

Thanks for the replies guys!

Yeah the chromatic aberration is a bit too much, I think the effect is even more striking because the high resolution (big images / big chromatic aberration). We'll look into that, same goes for the vegetation.

juniez

the assets look good i think but that fire is throwing almost no light at all compared to the original image

Demeter

I hope the project isn't dead.

bsichterman

We all just moved abroad for our internships to different countries etc so we are very busy working all day now and getting used to everything new. Not sure if we have the time to continue this unfortunately, maybe later this year.