UE4 - Bomb shelter - Designer to artist
polycounter lvl 8
Hello everyone
My name is Frank "Hurtcules" Rell and this is my first environment for UE4 made completely with my own artwork.
My background is in design, but as my level design and mapping skills have improved over the years I now find myself wanting to do more of the art work myself, or at the very least understand the process so I can talk to artists properly, so over the last year or so I've been mostly committed to learning 3DS max and additional texturing software.
As for this project I know I should post my work as it's developed to minimize mistakes, but I felt It was more important to post what I considered complete to make any issues really stand out to me.
It's been a little difficult for me to understand the pipeline for environmental prop modeling and texturing because of how many different software packages there are now, but for this I used 3DS Max 2014, Quixel Suit 2, Photoshop and UE4
I've seen a lot of environments that have made materials for each element of their meshes with substance designer, but for almost all of this all the work was done with color maps in Ddo for the basic textures over the uv's and then I baked AO and normal maps and then put it together in ue4s material editor with metallic and roughness settings, but nothing really more than that.
Really the question I have is that is this work flow something acceptable in Triple A games? I know the models and textures themselves could be better and the scene could use some more props to give it a more lived in look, but should I have tried to do something differently for this type of environment?
My name is Frank "Hurtcules" Rell and this is my first environment for UE4 made completely with my own artwork.
My background is in design, but as my level design and mapping skills have improved over the years I now find myself wanting to do more of the art work myself, or at the very least understand the process so I can talk to artists properly, so over the last year or so I've been mostly committed to learning 3DS max and additional texturing software.
As for this project I know I should post my work as it's developed to minimize mistakes, but I felt It was more important to post what I considered complete to make any issues really stand out to me.
It's been a little difficult for me to understand the pipeline for environmental prop modeling and texturing because of how many different software packages there are now, but for this I used 3DS Max 2014, Quixel Suit 2, Photoshop and UE4
I've seen a lot of environments that have made materials for each element of their meshes with substance designer, but for almost all of this all the work was done with color maps in Ddo for the basic textures over the uv's and then I baked AO and normal maps and then put it together in ue4s material editor with metallic and roughness settings, but nothing really more than that.
Really the question I have is that is this work flow something acceptable in Triple A games? I know the models and textures themselves could be better and the scene could use some more props to give it a more lived in look, but should I have tried to do something differently for this type of environment?
Replies
As for the scene, I think the presentation should be flipped from where you have it now like in the second image. The ladder is simply obscuring most of the scene and there is no direction in where you would like people to look. I would try standing on the other side of the room and maybe add a light at the top of the ladder so it looks like natural light is pouring in from above-ground.
here are a few tutorials that would help you out
https://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-practice
https://gumroad.com/timb - grenade texturing tutorial (free)
http://www.thiagoklafke.com/modularenvironments.html
Updated my original post to include this because I did make additional maps and use ue4's material editor I just wasn't very clear on what I was trying to say.
For this one though, my color map was giving me some trouble because the handle wasn't metal so I just exported this mesh out with two material elements and just changed the properties, but doing this I felt like it wasn't very efficient.
I do agree with you though on the composition, I didn't really care for the ladder in the way of the scene so I wont present it like that in my portfolio.