[WIP] Autopsy Theater Environment

Lucas Annunziata

The autopsy theatre I wish to create will be in the present day, although it will have been abandoned for about 10 years. This is a long enough time for there to be interesting decay with little to no actual structural damage to model in.
The focal point of the scene is the autopsy table, as that is what the entire room is built around. I will also create some jointed lights that will create arm-like shapes that will have an overbearing presence.

So I've got some concepts and a quick mock up, so any critiques/comments/tips would be greatly appreciated since this is rather new to me.



quick paintover



table concept


reference




Layout



theater chair, will be composed of wood.



the base of the autopsy table. Still really rough


Normal mapped sink, I put the AO into the diffuse just for kicks.






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madmuffin

Working now, cool. What time period/theme are you going for here? Like, current realistic or back during the wars or even steam punk or whatever?

Good start though, just curious about that.

SnakeDoctor

Cool idea

UNCCheezy

darbeenbo wrote: »

The autopsy theatre I wish to create will be in the present day

Lucas Annunziata

So this is what I've got done on the autopsy table thus far. I guess it's more of a medium poly object, and I'll just sub-divide it a bit to make the hi-poly and remove as many edge loops as I can to make the low poly. It's at 3421 tris right now.

I decided to remove the light attached to the table from the concept, as I will have the 2 overhanging arm-like lights anyway. I also added a drainage pipe to the bottom that I saw from another reference. Now I will have to make a little trench or something else to catch the liquid on the ground.










Oh and yes it will be present day. I'm going for a survival horror type environment. No steampunk, sci-fi, and/or fantasy in this.

Lucas Annunziata

So I'm pretty much done with the high poly for the table and I'm liking it so far. We'll see how the baking turns out, as this will be my first time trying out floating geometry. So here are some quick renders of the highpoly:















And then the updated low poly:





I really should remove some of those edge loops around the vice-like crank, since I'm hitting 4745 triangles, and I feel I can clean it up a little without losing much quality. If anything stands out to be cleaned up, let me know.

ajr2764

Good work so far, interesting concept. As far as the modeling goes yes there is still alot of room to optimize that low poly mesh. If certain edges aren't doing anything for the shape then it can be removed, you have alot of edges that are running along flat parts of the model. Your round parts can be reduced to likely 8 sided, it appears your using 12 sided cylinders in most cases. You can also remove those bevels on those small knobs/parts. This model could be around 2000 or less tris, almost 5000 is alot for such a piece.

Jonathan Marshall

Yeah, you could optimize the polys a lot I think. I really like it so far though. I want to see more progress.

Lucas Annunziata

Alright, I knocked it down to 3.2k I don't really know what the standard is in games for cylinders, but I'm using either 6 or 8 sides depending on the area.

I really don't know how I could get this down to 2000 without losing a decent amount of quality with it. And since it is the main of focus of the scene I really want it to look all pretty.

So I unwrapped the uvs, and baked the normals. I was having a real pain with baking, since the bolts on the feet of the table kept kind of smearing inward and just not looking right at all, So I figure I'll just try baking a few different bolt shapes to a flat plain, then merging them in in photoshop. Another problem area was the little indentations on the circular handle near the belt straps.







I also re-worked the shape of the chair a bit:

Lucas Annunziata

Just a quick update on what I'm doing. I started modeling an x-ray machine that will be attached to the ceiling based upon these 2 references:



a few screen grabs. It's at about 2.2k polys now, but I'm sure I can optimize it a bit.

Alberto Rdrgz

I really like this idea, darbeenbo, i wish i would've thought of this lol

good luck its looking great!

Lucas Annunziata

Not much to report here. I fixed up the chair a bit, unwrapped and baked the normals. Low poly on the left, mapped in the middle, hip poly on the right.

There's a few errors I need to fix, but I'll do that tomorrow. I changed up the spokes to make to make it a bit more interesting. I also separated the pieces out, so that I can mirror the table part, remove spokes, or even have the seat part of the chair snapped off.

pyromania

Why would a autopsy table have straps? Dead people aren't going to get away from you.

Unless,... you are doing zombie autopsies!

Lucas Annunziata

Well, either for zombies, or the the people at the hospital were experimenting on live patients perhaps?

Lucas Annunziata

Hooray update! I forgot to mention in any of these posts that this scene is in be in udk. I may go back and re-model the bit where the lamp attaches to the wall, but everything else seems pretty solid.

I've got some textures on a few things, but they still need plenty of tweaking. I've also been looking into key things people do to maximize texture space with environments. Pretty much it just seems that you want to have as few unique textures in a scene while still having the scene look interesting. That coupled with trim textures seem to get the job done.













to do list:

learn cool stuff in the material editor (flickering lights?)
texture. A lot.
Watch lighting tutorials.

ErichWK

Your walls are very noticeably tiled. I'd work on that. Floor doesn't look too bad... Though gets monotonous. Then again, you are in the beginning stages of texturing, so I can't say too much. Continue forth

Lucas Annunziata

So, it's been a while since I've updated this. I've just got the x-ray machine left to unwrap, so other than that everything that's in the scene is just waiting for me to make it look nice. Some of the textures (well, lets face it, MOST of the textures) still need work, and most don't even have normals or spec on 'em.







I'm looking into vertex painting to break up the monotony of the wall texture, so any tips concerning that would be cool.


On a side note, I've got to create a character for my animation class, so I want to tie it into this scene. This is the first idea I came up with based off of a sketch, although it may be a little too ambitious considering I've just barely gotten finished with our first biped assignment, and I haven't done much organic modeling.

gsokol

Really cool idea with the autopsy theater. What is going on with the texture on the handrails?

I think some more interesting lighting would benefit this a bit. Have some light shining in from the windows maybe.

Lucas Annunziata

I've worked on the lighting, but still haven't played with light coming in the the windows. I'm also thinking about blasting some light in from the cracks underneath the doors.

I still haven't textured the x-ray machine, and the sinks. I also need to make the walls more interesting with some grunge decals and such. I'm still tooling around with some vertex painting as well. All in all, I feel it is coming together, albeit slowly.







Any suggestions are welcome.

buddikaman

I like it

jordan.kocon

Hey man, looking great, I really like the feeling! I'm just learning UDK right now and was wondering what you meant by everything is 'be in UDK'. Is 'be' different from a static mesh? And what kind of lights are you using? I cant get my lights to cast shadows when I build them (like the shadow under your table).

Lucas Annunziata

Sorry Jordan, that was a typo. I meant to say that everything is in udk. They are all static meshes imported from maya. As far as lights go, I've got two spot lights beaming down onto the table, then all the lights on the ceiling are point lights.

If you are having trouble with lighting make sure that you have 'build with lightmass' checked under the build lighting tab. Also, make sure that you have a second set of UVs on the objects. To do that, right-click the object in the content browser, 'edit using static mesh editor', click mesh in the top left, 'generate unique UVs', then click apply in the bottom right.

Dim

Seems as though the X-ray machines should cast light onto the environment, since they are lightboxes. If it's an emissive texture, then you can just turn it into a lightsorce, as long as it doesn't need to be dynamic.

jordan.kocon

Ok thanks for the reply darbeenbo! Im just trying to rebuild lighting with unique uv's on my static mesh's. Does having unique uv's cause lighting to take MUCH MUCH MUCH longer to build?

Lucas Annunziata

Thanks, dim-bo! Doing that as we speak.

And yes, jordan, depending on the settings, how many lights, and size of the light maps, it does take much longer to build

jordan.kocon

Ok, final update. I did't have a lightmass importance volume which is why lighting was literally taking forever to build. A final thank you dareenbo, been pulling my hair out all day trying to get this working. I wish you much luck on this scene!

raul

cool stuff!

Captain Narway

Post some updates dbeebs! I'm really liking how this is coming along. How's the big X-ray machine coming along?

Lucas Annunziata

Allrighty, so I'm working on the x-ray last night and everything seemed fine and dandy. I open up the scene today, and for some reason, once I get to a certain distance, the texture on the xray gets all blurry. Its only that object, so I don't know what the deal is. I thought it may have been depth of field, but that isn't turned on, so I'm at a loss. Any ideas?

Lucas Annunziata

Shameless bump. I still don't know what is causing the blurring of the texture. I tried re-importing the mesh and the textures associated with it and still nothing.

martov

udk autoresizes textures depending on the group they belong, your texture may have changed it's group for some reason.

check this link.
http://eat3d.com/forum/general-discussion/udk-textures-look-strange-0

Lucas Annunziata

Alright, so I found out it had something to do with the mip-map of the texture. i'm not even really sure what that is, but I opened the texture in unreal and set it to sharpen 3, and now it looks good (or at least not blurry).

So I Set up my vertex painting tool and chipped away at the large walls a bit, made the smaller walls a bit more interesting, and worked on the x-ray a bit more. I'm not too pleased with it at the moment, but thought I'd post before beginning my Christmas break.

Phil101

Its looking great. I like the rust you have added to the centre assets.

Maybe some missing ceiling tiles might be a good addition? or ring scratches to the railings?

Lucas Annunziata

So I took a little break from this project, but now I'm fixing up a few things and putting the finishing touches on it. I've added a few decals to break up the scene a bit and have been tweaking spec maps. I've been having trouble getting reflection of the glass looking good on the windows.

If there is anything that you think could use some work, please don't hesitate to tell me. I need a new set of eyes on these.

WillMac

:thumbup: Really good work on this. Textures and lighting look rad.

Crit: Perhaps push the seats back on their walkways... there is a gap behind them that is not so useful game play wise, and the gap in front, the walkways, seem narrow and could do with a bit more girth...

XRevan23

this is looking really good reminds me of left4dead, the only thing i think would be better if the chairs were more broken up, like some turned in different directions or a couple of broken ones. But over all its looking killer.

tda

I think the lighting could be a lot more creepy, if that's the vibe you're going for. Right now there's a lot of ambient light with no focal point, and the lights in the scene don't suggest that they'd produce that much. With tighter lighting this scene will really pop.

There's so much bounce that the celing is actually brighter than the floor which is pretty distracting. The yellow lights around the table at the bottom also kinda don't make sense, they are just there but without any source. If the source is the cool looking movable spotlight/lamp it's not reading all too well. It just seems kinda ambient and there's no focal point right now.

I think if you broke one or two of the celing lights, gave them a quicker falloff and let some areas fall to almost complete darkness it'd definitely look a lot more ominous. You could also let the entire area with the table be almost completely black and then light up a streak across it with a bright spotlight coming from that adjustable lamp, maybe with it flickering on and off for extra sweetness. This will also make a really nice focal point for you.

edit: i did a quickie paintover to illustrate

Lucas Annunziata

-WillMac: Thanks for the praise. I played with adding a bit more room into the walkways, but the scale of it looked really wonky. It just looked really elongated, but I appreciate the comment

-Gmax5: Well, the idea was that people were experimenting on either living people, zombies,, or some kind of creature in this building hence the straps...although I'm sure there was some anal probing

-XRevan23: I've done gone brokeded up some chairs for ya.

-tda: I really appreciate that you took the time to do a paintover. I think it kicked my ass in the right direction. I had set out with the intention of making some sort of conical light, but didn't really know a good way to go about it. I tried using the light shafts option on the spot light, but it only showed up in the preview and wasn't really what I was looking for anyway. I ended up making a new light material, and just applying it to a cone shaped piece of geometry, and I'm really liking the effect.

Anyway, here's what I got. Any more critique/comments very much welcome. I want to make this thing rock solid.

bgoodsell

I'd include some decals of dirt under the chairs and more of a visible wear along the walls behind them to breakup the consistency of that grey texture. Also, your ceiling looks like its gotten a fair amount of water damage and is crumbling, yet your floor looks much cleaner then it ought to if this was the case. Add that plus a little bit of atmospheric dust from a particle effect and you'll have yourself a really solid piece here.

ParoXum

There's a couple of things that dont work for IMHO:

- It's really hard to get to know what the yellow stuff on the ground is, metal, organic? Some letters maybe but it's really weird.

- The overall scene textures are too noisy, especially on the walls, like said above, cracks and decals hardly make sense the way they are right now

- everything is super old and damaged thought the xray screens still work perfectly.

- the railing texture doesnt really look like metal and has a serious pattern issue, removing the pattern might fix it all in fact.

There's more but if you fix those I belive it'll improve greatly