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[UE4] 70's Inspired Sci-Fi

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chrisradsby polycounter lvl 14

LATEST PROGRESS:

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https://youtu.be/4ci3SQDQNnw

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INTRODUCTION:
Kay so I've wanted to do something with 70's sci fi and something different when it comes to the color-palette. Something more vivid so this thread is basically just me exploring shapes, colors, vistas in UE4. The main reason for me doing this I guess is that I do realistic art on a daily basis and during my spare time I like to explore other things just so I'll be more rounded as an artist.

I've already gotten started, but I dug up some older work-in-progress shots that I thought I'd post here for you guys as well. So it started simple, just colors and big shapes.

I've already gotten started, but I dug up some older work-in-progress shots that I thought I'd post here for you guys as well. So it started simple, just colors and big shapes.

Main inspirations from Chris Foss and John Harris

- After that I basically just wanted determine some kind of foreground. I know I want to have something like this in the scene. Whether the foreground is something man-made or something natural I haven't quite decided yet. 

- This is where I'm at currently. I've gone into world-machine and created some landscape vista that I like, it's made the ground and the cliffy bits. I dug up some old spruce/pine trees that I had lying around that was low-poly enough to actually use for vista.

There are lots of things left to do but I'm quite happy that I've established some kind of vista. Now it'll allow me to work more on what's happening in the middle-ground/foreground and I'll still know that I have some kind of kickass vista going on for whatever angle I decide to use later on.

These are the current things I have in my head.
  • Spaceships Vista (flying around either close to the towers or further away)
  • Improve Skybox 
    - More detailed moon (DONE!)
    - Starfalls! (DONE!)
    - Need to blend moon horizon better!
  • Spaceship (foreground, detailed for close up shots, best case scenario something that evokes some emotion) (DONE)
    Just started a foreground space-ship. (DONE)
  • Middle-ground Detail (Improve overall vista look, plenty that could be done here) (WIP)
  • Foreground Detail Decide whether to go natural or man-made and make it more detailed) (WIP)
  • Shader Work (I'm going to make a new 3-way blend shader that'll be the master blend for future projects.) (DONE)
  • Texture work  (I've barely done any texture work for this. I'm going to need more detailed ground textures for the foreground so at least 3 ground textures and some vista noise-textures.)
  • Overall Lighting (Lighting, not sure what to do yet, right now I'm basically just testing stuff out.) (WIP)
  • Improve sense of scale (I need to spend more time messing around with foreground objects and background objects. Space ships moving from foreground into the background might actually help quite a lot here)

Hmm, that seems to be what I have in my mind so far. I'll slowly start getting to these points when I can. But what you can expect to see here in this thread though are just my general thoughts about how to go about this. I'd love some feedback if you have any :)

Replies

  • TheWinterLord
  • TheWinterLord
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    TheWinterLord polycounter lvl 17
    Just kidding, looking good man, this is going to look awesome!
  • chrisradsby
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    chrisradsby polycounter lvl 14
    Just kidding, looking good man, this is going to look awesome!
    Hah man, cried a little bit inside there for a second xD Thanks dude!
  • d1ver
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    d1ver polycounter lvl 14
    The scale feels great on that last shot. Looking forward to more! :)
  • [HP]
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    [HP] polycounter lvl 13
    The scale is looking nuts! Will be keeping an eye out on this thread.

    How did you make the shadows render so far away dude?
  • gsokol
    This is looking really cool, already like the composition.  As others have said, the sense of scale is great!  The huge cable extending from the tower to the foreground does it for me.  

    I'm a little bit unsure of the vista.  While its certainly impressive, I think the familiarity is hurting the idea of a 70s sci fi shot for me.  A lot of the 70s sci fi landscapes that I've seen often have crazy vegetation or trees that look nothing like anything on earth.  For example:





    Even if you stick with the vegetation you have now, tweaking the colors may still give the same effect.  Its pretty common in 70s sci fi landscapes to have orange, purple, teal grounds...they go all over the place.  I think that in terms of going vivid or doing something different it might be worth trying.


  • chrisradsby
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    chrisradsby polycounter lvl 14
    gsokol said:
    I'm a little bit unsure of the vista.  While its certainly impressive, I think the familiarity is hurting the idea of a 70s sci fi shot for me.  A lot of the 70s sci fi landscapes that I've seen often have crazy vegetation or trees that look nothing like anything on earth. 

    I agree with you and I feel you are correct, the things I've been looking at however doesn't really have a lot of funky vegetation. It's totally something that is worth exploring however.  Currently I'm playing with something that feels familiar with alien elements as well.   I've tried also making things more intense but I've felt like it easily becomes overpowering in a "proper"-world. Things don't blend nicely when the colors are super intense.

    Like an overpowering orange sky equals really strong Orange light/ambient light which completely takes over the whole image no matter if you put in a contrast color for like the terrain. Looking at most 70's Sci Fi like that it doesn't make any sort of sense and trying to emulate it in a realistic way it ends up looking weird. 

    That said, I totally agree with you and I want to be able to push in a direction where I feel like I can get more alien things into the scene. That is coming however, I will also try a couple of more variations of the color palette.
  • chrisradsby
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    chrisradsby polycounter lvl 14
    [HP] said:
    The scale is looking nuts! Will be keeping an eye out on this thread.

    How did you make the shadows render so far away dude?
    Well, it's all lightmaps. I tried going for a fully dynamic but honest to god I feel like UE4 has a long way to go to be really good fully dynamic. Using an dynamic lighting engine every day like Snowdrop with all it's volumetric lighting goodness etc I feel pretty stunted in UE4 sometimes haha.

    But yes! Lightmaps, I had an issue before where the shadows didn't wanna render that far away but...it seems to have gone away somehow.

    Things are really frickin far away though. It's actually quite hard to work with haha.
  • ParksMarks
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    ParksMarks polycounter lvl 5
    HI ChrisRadsby,
    as you move forward with lighting, I would suggest you keep colors fairly muted, and just pump up the saturation in your post-processing. this will prevent any unwanted color pollution.


    As for the vista, I see that all those reference landscapes from gsokol keep things pretty geometric- usually there is only one iconic shape that repeats at different scales. You could push your 70's theme by implementing that into your landscape
  • chrisradsby
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    chrisradsby polycounter lvl 14
    HI ChrisRadsby,
    as you move forward with lighting, I would suggest you keep colors fairly muted, and just pump up the saturation in your post-processing. this will prevent any unwanted color pollution.

    As for the vista, I see that all those reference landscapes from gsokol keep things pretty geometric- usually there is only one iconic shape that repeats at different scales. You could push your 70's theme by implementing that into your landscape
    Awesome feedback and yes this is exactly what I thought of doing. I can always push the colors and the mood more in post-process, right now everything is default without any post-processing happening at all. :)
  • chrisradsby
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    chrisradsby polycounter lvl 14
    So I've been doing a couple of different things. Started to  blockout some kind of space-ship to have in the foreground. I've also changed the foreground to be some kind of natural environment. So far I've basically only added grass. Tonight I'll switch over from modeling this to start working on my own "Moon"-texture. I'll probably start seeing what I can do shader-wize for atmospherics for the moon as well.
  • chrisradsby
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    chrisradsby polycounter lvl 14
    So tonight I basically made a simple planet/moon shader with a faked atmosphere and added a starfall FX.  :) I can at least cross that one off the list, next I need to blend it better with the atmosphere, but I'll go back to my main post and change that there. :)


  • chrisradsby
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    chrisradsby polycounter lvl 14
    Today I've been working mostly on getting my grass looking okay. I made some high-poly grass and then rendered them out, then I also set up the grass-foliage shader for the scene. It allows me to hue-shift the grass into whatever color I want it to be. It's also looking as soft and nice, it seems like a good start for getting more plants in :)




  • chrisradsby
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    chrisradsby polycounter lvl 14
    Kay long time since update.  So I've been doing some work since last time.
    - Added a river
    - Made new grass-textures
    - Changed tower shapes
    - I also made a tessellation landscape shader though I'm not sure how much use it'll get in this environment.
    - I also started making a spaceship that will zip past the camera in the flygthrough. It'll actually come out of "lightspeed" or whatever. Which is what're seeing in the last picture.

    I'm getting closer to the finish line. In the end I think I'll remake some trees, they're still just old assets I had lying around it'd be nice to get something else in. I haven't really gotten into any post-processing or luts yet.


  • chrisradsby
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    chrisradsby polycounter lvl 14
    Improved the clouds, they're are huge particles. I might want to look into other solutions however. ^^ We'll see!
  • chrisradsby
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    chrisradsby polycounter lvl 14
    So I've finished off the look of my spaceship, here it is warping into my environment :dizzy:
  • chrisradsby
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    chrisradsby polycounter lvl 14
    So after tonight I'll probably start posting some videos of the environment. Showing some small things and the earliest days of the flythrough. There are some things I have to touch up as well

    Such as
    - Foreground elements (I need to add more variation in the grass, additional plants etc)
    - Remake the trees, either to some other type of tree or just...current gen standard for the ones I've got. The ones in the scene are currently like...4 years old or something.
    - Start marking out timings and Key locations for the flythrough.
  • GragGunslinger
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    GragGunslinger polycounter lvl 7
    Have you read Rendevous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke? It's a great book and your environment reminds me a lot of how that place was depicted. I love the color palette you chose! I can't wait to see the finished flythrough! 
  • chrisradsby
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    chrisradsby polycounter lvl 14
    Have you read Rendevous with Rama by Arthur C Clarke? It's a great book and your environment reminds me a lot of how that place was depicted. I love the color palette you chose! I can't wait to see the finished flythrough! 
    No I haven't but now I might just do that :)  Aw thanks man! Yeah I really tried to do something a little bit different from the rest of the color-palettes you see out there. This is not that common haha :D and I really like it personally :)
  • chrisradsby
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    chrisradsby polycounter lvl 14
    Getting closer to the finish line here I think, I think I'll just touch up the trees and then its good to go. Need to wrap up so I can play Horizon xD
  • Tectonic
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    Tectonic polycounter lvl 10
    imho needs more chrome

  • chrisradsby
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    chrisradsby polycounter lvl 14
    Tectonic said:
    imho needs more chrome

    It fully depends on what ref you use though? I'm looking at Star Wars, Chris Foss and John Harris.
    Syd Mead is cool and all but I'm not super fond over the hyper reflective surfaces =P
  • Tectonic
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    Tectonic polycounter lvl 10
    Tectonic said:
    imho needs more chrome

    It fully depends on what ref you use though? I'm looking at Star Wars, Chris Foss and John Harris.
    Syd Mead is cool and all but I'm not super fond over the hyper reflective surfaces =P
    haha fair enough
  • chrisradsby
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    chrisradsby polycounter lvl 14
    It's finally rendered out and complete. Time to move on to something else O_o


    artstation.com/p/nO80E
  • Martoon
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    Martoon polycounter lvl 2
    The color palette is great, I think that along with the architecture design really nails the 70's Sci-FI feel.
  • rgbeard
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    rgbeard polycounter lvl 4
    Great job! This makes me want to pickup a book with Syd Mead or John Harris and just omnomnomn.
  • chrisradsby
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    chrisradsby polycounter lvl 14
    Thanks guys <3 I'll probably make more like it in the future since I really love working with these types of projects. 
  • CupMcCakers
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    CupMcCakers polycounter lvl 4
    I couldn't tell which was the concept art and which was the scene. In my books that's a success!!
  • bigodon
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    bigodon polycounter lvl 8
    as i said on twitter, i really liked the vintage feel of the scene composition and this remembers me alot the classic halo landscapes

    this ship design fits like a glove, remember a bit the ship design people from hellogames used on NMS, you had the same inspiration than sean murray gang have?
  • chrisradsby
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    chrisradsby polycounter lvl 14
    I would say that we ended up taking inspiration from the same sources yes :) Yeah it's funny how I ended up with a scene that felt like a mix of Halo and No Man's Sky, with a slight touch of Star Wars or something haha. 
  • TorQue[MoD]
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    TorQue[MoD] polycounter lvl 19
    I have to say that I much prefer the look with the thin cable coming down from the second building. It gave your eye something interesting to follow. Looks gorgeous regardless though!
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