[UDK] Avatar - Link Room and Clean Room (Environment)
polycounter lvl 9
Hey all,
For my final project at University, I choose to make the Link Room from Avatar. My skills with UDK were very basic when I started this project so it was a massive leap.
I've finished it now but am not really happy with it at all and hoping that this community can help me get it to the place where it needs to be. So I am deciding to start from almost scratch and rebuild things how they should be.
The style I am deciding to take it towards would be a more of a dirty science-fiction environment, much like Mass Effect and Thiago Klafke's Zest Foundation on this forum.
Please feel free to criticize everything and offer any tips if you know anything that can be done.
For now, here is the list of improvements I think need to be made:
-Improve textures (Diffuse, Specular, Normal) - Make things more metalic and warn.
-Create interiors to the Link Beds
-Add animated screens with variations
-Make the circular air conditioner a little more chunky and add reflections
-Improve lighting
-Make the clean room walls more plastic like and work, with reflections.
- Add more assets/props such medical equipment, chairs and small things like stacks of paper, coffee mugs.
I'm a little weak with creating materials in UDK so I might be looking for some hints and tips!
Thanks all!
For my final project at University, I choose to make the Link Room from Avatar. My skills with UDK were very basic when I started this project so it was a massive leap.
I've finished it now but am not really happy with it at all and hoping that this community can help me get it to the place where it needs to be. So I am deciding to start from almost scratch and rebuild things how they should be.
The style I am deciding to take it towards would be a more of a dirty science-fiction environment, much like Mass Effect and Thiago Klafke's Zest Foundation on this forum.
Please feel free to criticize everything and offer any tips if you know anything that can be done.
For now, here is the list of improvements I think need to be made:
-Improve textures (Diffuse, Specular, Normal) - Make things more metalic and warn.
-Create interiors to the Link Beds
-Add animated screens with variations
-Make the circular air conditioner a little more chunky and add reflections
-Improve lighting
-Make the clean room walls more plastic like and work, with reflections.
- Add more assets/props such medical equipment, chairs and small things like stacks of paper, coffee mugs.
I'm a little weak with creating materials in UDK so I might be looking for some hints and tips!
Thanks all!
Replies
I am baking all high-poly stuff out through either Maya or xNormal and then inverting the green channel if needs be but it keeps seeming not to look right.
Basically when I try and some reflection and even without the normal map distorts around the edge flow, making it all look really bad!
What am I doing wrong?
Also, are you using smoothing groups?
As for your bake issues..could be a number of things but likely has to do with your smooth groups...post a pic of your normal map.
I'm using Maya and have attached an image of my test asset (in High Quality Mode) to this post. As you can see it appears with no issues at all...
As for smoothing groups, I'm not entirely sure what these are as only heard it referred to with Max models. I think its about soft/hard edges and most of the mesh is smoothed with a few edges about 90 degrees left hard. So the normal map is doing most of the work...
I've inverted the green channel so in UDK it should appear correctly but still no luck.
Thank you for your other comments too guys! Its a good start I know too but really want to get it looking mean!!
I'd say try taking your envelope down to 0.1 - 0.5%, if that doesn't work play with the smoothing groups.
Hope it helps man.
I tried making the asset all hard and baking it that way but still had the same problem in unreal.. without the gradients on the map. My search envelope was set at 0.2 when I baked so it can't be that.
When you say smoothing groups, what do you mean exactly? Harden the edges where the UV seams are? I'm not as clued up in 3DS Max...
Don't make the asset all hard. Just use hard/soft edges as you will with the final model...changing those edges after baking messes stuff up.
Your bake shows the nasty crease. It looks to me like you had baked there with the low poly having some oddness in that location as far as hard/soft edges go. The map has that crease because its correcting the angle caused by that and offsetting to make it look flat.
I see that it appears fine in High Quality mode in Maya...I suspect that your problem in UDK is resulting from incorrect smoothing of the mesh on import. Take a look at the mesh in UDK without the normal map and see if the smoothing looks different than in Maya.
As to DOG-GY, I don't use the cage in xNormal... should I? I don't triangulate it before importing as I thought Unreal does this for you? I'll have a check on that last one...
I've spent a while figuring out reflections and sorting out the normal map errors I was getting on my meshes.
So far I have figured it all out and know what I am doing right and wrong and have got things working. I've added a bit of relection to the metal to give it that more sci-fi feel.
Heres a little update but hopefully now I have a work flow I can press on and get the rest of the room done!
Re-did the canopy in the middle to be a lot more efficiently so instead of it being in quarters, its in 8th's and rotated around in UDK. Turned off AO in UDK and also tried to give it some atmosphere with different colour lighting to the assets to give some contrast. Also reusing textures on other assets now too to conserve momeory space.
Tried to get this reflection shizzle working with the new DX11 but haven't quite worked it out yet but I feel it would look good on the floor.
Comparing it even now to what it use to look like, I see a huge difference.
Anyway, some screen grabs of where it is at the minute...
Basically I have been working on getting the main room and making a start on the clean room and bio-lab.
I shall let the pictures do the talking!
ANY crit more than welcome, trying to efficient with texture usage too...
Your new lighting scheme makes the scene depressing and empty.
Maybe its just me though.
Good job so far!
I think he's trying to mimic the lighting in the film for that set, which wasn't quite as bright and saturated.
Keep up the good work!
Well its come on a long way!
Here is a flythrough of where its all currently at, a few things in here aren't finished bear in mind!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia-JVqYLDNQ&feature=youtu.be
I made a few observations that I thought I'd raise though.
Firstly, your have some nice curved glass around the centre consoles, yet it doesn't seem to refract light in a believable manner. At the angle that the camera views it there should be at least a bit of distortion.
Secondly, the main room of your scene is looking fairly low-contrast and samey. While it is a natural result of the texturing style, it just means that variation has to be made up for in lighting. Maybe you could try pushing the brightness of the centre area and consoles up and driving the shadows in the room darker. (You can do this by upping your Light Intensity in its properties and lowering the Emissive Boost in World Properties.)
Lastly is more of an idea than a critique. Maybe you could have a go at making the screens seem 3D like in the film? Perhaps putting a Bump Offset to the material for a nice subtle effect.
Thank you the feedback, I missed the ones before my last post as I think it was really late... So very sorry!
SirCalalot: Thank you very much for those points. I agree with you on the glass and I need to make it a little more reflective and noticeable. I've not been able to crack a really good glass shader yet but maybe a nudge in the right direction might help! :P
I've had many people say that about the contrast of the main room. I'll play around with the lighting and get it looking as interesting as possible! I've altered the world properties for emmisive boost and increased the values on the objects themselves.
As for the screens, I have tried doing that however the higher the bump offset is set, it starts to repeat/tile the image as you look around it? Not sure how to counter that?
Thought I would upload some stills of the Environment here now!
Regarding the glass material, a great tutorial has been done by @bukkit on the UDK forums:
Realistic Glass Materials in UDK.
If that's a bit too complex for what you're trying to, try plugging a Fresnel into your glass material's Distortion channel. If you multiply said Fresnel by about '5' then that should look good I think.
The lighting will seriously make this scene if you do it right. I hope you can find the right settings.
I have an animation for the Link beds where the machinery inside starts to whirl around and the bed closes and slides in.... Now, I can animate this fine in Maya by just directly animating the mesh. Though I have no idea how to get this to work in UDK. I'm not sure if I have to create some joints/bones for it to work? I've tried having a crack at it already but when I export it, its alters the axis and only exports what the joint is connected to and nothing else...
Its annoying as I really want to create some movement in here!
Could you give us an insight into how you created the holographics and those awesome futuristic screens? I'm after a similar result for my current project
It basically consists of using all the 3 channels of a texture for different parts of the screen. You can use parameters in UDK to set the colours and bump offsets to give the screens a bit of depth. All this feeds in to the emmisive in UDK and the material is set to additive!
I can post up a material shot if you like?
Over the weekend I've decided to wrap up and a polish off the Avatar scene that I've been doing in dribs and drabs over the past few months.
Here is a film to show it orfs!
BE SURE TO WATCH IN HD!
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Thanks!
Especially coming from the creator of one of my favourite portfolio pieces (Zest Foundation)
You deserve it for the hard work you put in, and the scene looks great
I have to say I've been following your underwater scene and its really amazing. I adore it when people go outside the box and create really 'out of this world' environments.... Reminds me when I was diving in Eygpt many years ago!
Congrats on the job!
I just thought I would post up some screens of the finished version of this project. I was having some trouble with the colours so hopefully they came out alright! Otherwise I'll have to tackle it all when I'm not quite as tired!
Anyways I hope you all like! Thats a wrap!!
The colours are really nice, yet subtle.