Retrogasm: A Study in Life is Strange

Sullum97

Direct Artstation Link: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3BVE2

Portfolio Link: https://www.artstation.com/artist/coreyhill

Hi Guys! I am so so happy to present my latest work to you guys based around Dontnod’s gorgeous and inspiring game Life is Strange. My goal was to both study how they did layout design for their rooms as well as how they handled the fidelity of their spec/roughness, one of my personal weaknesses. So without further ado I am happy to present my study entitled Retrogasm. My goal was to take the personality of Chloe, and tweak it to tell a different story. While keeping the rebellious flair, I also wanted to embrace some of the artistic side in the retro cheesy movie posters era. This presented some design challenges in keeping values in tune with each other but hopefully for the most part I accomplished my goal. Thank you guys so much and I truly hope you enjoy this!

Please feel free to provide me with critiques and comments and have a wonderful rest of your week! Cheers guys!

Sullum97

Update! 

fhurtubise

I definitely like your newer pass. I feel like your initial one was much too dark, and ambient/bounce light adds a lot to that scene, especially since it's an interior environment with few windows.

One piece of criticism I have is on the floorboards - I don't recall exactly how they looked in the game, but their creases are too pronounced here. Looking at your clay renders, it seems to be an occlusion issue, as well as coming from the fact that the spaces between the boards are very wide.

Sullum97

Hey @fhurtubise! Cheers bud! I definitely had been looking at it too long the first time, and was trying to make HDRI work instead of a physically accurate area light with proper bounce on a scientific kelvin scale. All static too now, no movable lights! Yay! Yeah the floorboards were def a point of contention for me, I cranked the ao up as well in the corners, all which your sharp eye pointed out. I thought of it as a personal artistic flair I enjoyed, the floors def need to be scaled down a bit, and roughness values adjusted with less ao. I'm gonna do a night light pass and I'll be sure to fix it then! Cheers and thanks again! Have a lovely week!
-Corey

fhurtubise

 Well, pronounced floorboards aren't necessarily a bad choice. I just feel they're out of place in this scene because they're really cartoony, while the rest of the textures and proportions tend more towards realism. So that's my reason for calling them out, I don't think they're "wrong" as much as out of place.

Something you could do without having to touch the width of the interstices is to give the boards some light edge wear (probably in your diffuse since you don't have a lot of reflections). I believe another reason why they look cartoony is because their color is too uniform - they don't stand out as much in your clay renders.