[UE4] House and Garden Environment
polycounter lvl 12
Hi! I've recently made a greybox for the environment I'm working on. The initial idea was to make a gardener's house, but later I changed my mind and worked around the theme of flowers. On the exterior I've blocked out a large meadow in the front of the house, and a small garden in the back.
I'm using an english house as a reference, "Great Dixter". I decided to use this as a reference because it looked like a gardener's house. reference images
Currently what i have inside the house is a great hall that I was going to decorate around the theme of flowers. There's some greyboxes for paintings and botanical books, but right now i feel like there's just too many books that don't make much sense.
The dressing needs more work in general, but for now I moved on to the materials because I got stuck with the dressing. I've made some materials for the bricks and stone terraces, tiles for the roof, and the interior wooden beams. Going to be updating this thread as I work on this project.
Materials:
I'm using an english house as a reference, "Great Dixter". I decided to use this as a reference because it looked like a gardener's house. reference images
Currently what i have inside the house is a great hall that I was going to decorate around the theme of flowers. There's some greyboxes for paintings and botanical books, but right now i feel like there's just too many books that don't make much sense.
The dressing needs more work in general, but for now I moved on to the materials because I got stuck with the dressing. I've made some materials for the bricks and stone terraces, tiles for the roof, and the interior wooden beams. Going to be updating this thread as I work on this project.
Materials:
Replies
Most often Architects vary the size of window openings from floor to floor and for different purposes. In the interior reference you can see the different heights of the upper and lower windows for instance. I wouldn't have arched heads for all of the windows. It should be a bit more varied like the top middle image in your ref sheet. Probably make the bay windows square at least. Also, the proportions seem just a tad off for the the window openings. They seem a little wide to me, which makes for a fat squatty window which feels a bit more Roman and much older than the era in which these buildings in the references were built. Most of the ref images show buildings emphasizing verticality (especially in the trim boards in the middle of the gables) and have taller windows which feel a little more towards the tudor and english formality.
On the topic of proportions, the hall looks either too wide, or too short. Pulling up the ceiling along with the top and bottom row of windows (top should be taller) would help. The chandeliers are hanging a bit high as well, you can see in the reference that they're maybe 2-ish feet below the bottom of the large beam. The chandeliers are also two-tiered in the image which gives them a bit more visual weight... I'm guessing they will be quite important in the feel of this interior in the end. And the large rafters which form the diagonal repeating pattern on the ceiling seem a bit wide as well. Normally rafters in this orientation would be probably twice as deep (i.e., tall) than wide, but I can see from the reference that the Architect(s) intended for them to mimic the width of the trim boards, so maybe its ok.
One last thing. I see in the garden ref that the exterior stairs towards the fountain open up so that a person can has 90-degrees of movement. It seems to me in an english garden setting, things are SOOO formal and the whole experience is meticulously cultivated, that an option of movement like that wouldn't exist. I think it would feel better to capture and wall off the part of the stairs going directly to the fountain so that someone going from the house to the fountain would walk to the landing, have a pause leaning on a railing or brick wall and view everything, and then turn to go down the stairs before turning again to follow the path out to the fountain.
Cheers, man. I love your references here and your intentions and the work you've done so far. Sorry if this is too much, I just want this to be awesome for you
I've raised the ceiling a bit and made the upper windows taller. For the windows I didn't remove the arch completely but made the mullions much thicker like in the reference so they look square from a distance. From the inside it looks better with the arch imo. Made the rafters thinner, it's a small tweak but it makes the room feel bigger. I agree about the chandelier, didn't really gave it much attention on the blockout but it definitely needs some love once i get to it. I'll try to block the stairs when i start working on the garden, see how it looks.
I've also rebuilt the entire house with modules, the way i had it at first was a mess (entire meshes for timber structure, another for plaster, etc), now its much cleaner than before. For now, I'm working on mapping the materials I have so far on the house. I'm working on a separate file on the house architecture only, that's why there is no dressing anymore. Once i finish, i will bring it back to the main file. Still need to set up transparency on the glass shader.
And a few more materials:
I've mapped the exterior of the house and started working on the terrace. Can't wait to finish mapping the architecture and start working on the foliage and texture variations.
The door header looks a bit odd to me. I think at this time the horizontal 'trim' (or bellyband) running around the center of the building would act as the header. That trim would delineate the bottom and/or tops of the windows as well. With that in mind, I'd pull the wood header you've got in there and extend the doorway up to the trim (just from looking at your last image). Looking at ref photos, a large wood header might make sense in a fully brick wall but I don't think it does in a wood frame/plaster wall.
In the first image, the roof valley (between the dormer and the main roof area) is jumping out to me. I'm not exactly sure but I think in this time period they turned one or more 'columns' of tiles 45-degrees in between the roof areas to form the valley or kind of 'chamfer' around the corner. Ignore everything else in the image below, but the valley on the right side you can kind of see what I'm talking about. You should be able to literally chamfer that edge and just apply the same material across it
Also, the profile of the eave tile should be thinner than the rake (or gable) tiles.
And, last thought, in my mind the brick color seems a little light/orange at the moment for the style, and I might beat them up a little more, add a bit more height variation. At this time, they couldn't make bricks all that uniform to start with, plus the aging should add up to some noisey little guys.
Cheers! Keep at it! And as always, if something 'correct' doesn't look good, massage it to make it look awesome and fudge the accuracy
Since the last post my PC died then rose from the dead, classes started and quite some time has passed but I'm still working on this. (Late)Thanks again for the great feedback @aclund3 .
So far I've finished the garden architecture pass and did lightmapping for all the modules I have so far. Did a test lighting bake with some pretty nice results. Also fixed the eaves tiles thickness and the valley between the roofs. The one-column valley looks much cleaner than the one I had before. Also the tiles profile I had before made the house look really cartoony, now it gives a much nicer scale to the whole house. I've kept the door header to the same height to keep the door scale, but I've removed the horizontal beam on top of it. I think it works better visually because it makes the door stand out a little bit from the rest of the house.
Next up are the bricks textures, I'm going to make some beaten up and mossy variations for blending and the same for the roof tiles+a decal pass. After that I'm going to move on to the terrain and vegetation.
And finally some renders from substance painter of some statues:
The water is from one of the content samples that Epic released, if I remember correctly its under the learn tab, named "Water Planes" or something like that.