[UE4] Modular Garage
Hello,
I've been doing landscape work for sometime now and I think it's time I revive my modeling skills. I've decided on creating something I haven't done before, a modular garage.
My goals are:
A) Learning modularity - Creating modular pieces and UVs is something I've never had the opportunity to do before.
B] Learning lightmass - In all my works I've always used dynamic lighting but here the realism I want can be achieved with baked lighting only.
C) Learning custom vertex normals - So I can avoid hard edges as much as possible.
Without any further essay I'm going to ask my question.
Q1: I did a bit of experimenting with difference chamfer distances, I'm currently settled at 3cm. It looks fine tome but I'd like to know if there are any universal chamfer distances people often use so soften wall corners?
Thanks in advance.
Replies
I'm doing something very similar except an apartment instead of a garage, and I want to learn pretty much the exact same stuff as you.
I think your 3cm example is actually working quite well, ultimately I think it depends on the material. Bricks, Stone and Wood are going to have a slight chamfer due to erosion. The older the material the greater the chamfer will be.
This timber piece actually has a chamfer cut into it, so it would be accurate to not even smooth it. Glass is another material that is often chamfered on purpose.
with age the timber chamfer becomes larger.
Plastics always have soft chamfers due to the injection molding process. The only item I can think of that essentially doesn't have a chamfer is steel, which is usually hidden or capped.
I'm interested to see how you will handle seems in between modular pieces as my experience has shown that the light map will create visible artifacts in those areas.
Here's a door textured in SP rendered with Iray. It's been a very long time since I textured anything like this. How's it looking?
I will be especially pedantic and critique your door despite it being more or less spot on.
The only improvement I can see is the directionality of your wear and tear as it tends to be more linear:
Maybe it's just because I'm used too it but the grunge map used on the roughness just feels too familiar and seems to be sitting on top of the asset rather than apart of it.
Also the normal map on the door is throwing me off a bit. The edge is metal but the door itself has a normal map that suggests it's a softer material.
hardly noticeable though.
I've reworked the normal, roughness, sharpened the dirt a bit, added slight bump to the notice sign, slightly enlarged the key holes, added very thin black line at bottom and top of the door to make it feel like there's a gap between the pieces.
I think both brown and dark dirt need to be sharpened more, they look more blurry than I wanted.
I think roughness ended up being too grainy.
My eye sees things better after I post an image.
I started on my door but I have to go watch a few tutorials on UE4 lighting ><
These are separate meshes however and I'm happy with the way the AO is calculated (minus the roof)
watch this, he literayll covers the issue you have
But thanks for the video.
Anyways, second door.
The constant back and fourth of adding edge loops to HP, going back about 3 meters to see how the edge looks, zooming in again and making changes is all really counter productive for me. Does anyone have a solution to make the process faster and more consistent? Like I know how soft I want x edge to be but since there's no sense of scale when adding the edge loops it usually doesn't end up looking as soft/hard as I want from player view.
Crease sets still require edge looping for certain applications but it's a very fast way of getting results.
Best way to do it is add an edge loop for you MAXIMUM chamfer, then increase the crease to your liking.
I'm currently dealing with my lighting setup. I'm using spot lights with intensity set to 20,000 with inverse square enabled and a distance about 800. Baking at production quality with 100 bounces. Results are pretty far from real life where a few high bay lights would illuminate the entire space of this scale. I'm not sure what I should do to get more illumination.
Any ideas?
Expected illumination:
https://ue4arch.com/ue4archs-unreal-engine-4-lighting-workflow-part-1/
It seems most people use a skylight for GI and then tweak the light settings both in engine and in the source files.
also:
http://rag3dviz.com/ue4/basic-interior-in-unreal-engine-4-12/
This confirms. Light source, Skylight and Post Process Volume with massively tweaked settings. Still trying to wrap my own head around it.
"Therefore, using the skylight to lit the scene, we will have a standard intensity of the natural light (sky light) in all open spaces(doors, windows, etc). If any of your indoors is too dark, we simply use the method from real life … Open your windows, doors and turn on the lights."
But in my case a skylight wouldn't work since there's no open holes for the light to come through.
Same goes for Rag3DViz, they also rely a lot on windows, doors and generally open holes too, while my area is completely closed.
I spent the last 30 mins going through Epic's Subway example content (Matinee and Reflections subway) but... the lighting there is not correct at all.
Played a lot of lightmass settings both in editor and .ini file. While tweaks result in higher shadow quality in return of significantly increased built times, it still does not increase the illumination.
Get a post processing volume and make it fill the room. Then go down to the Ambient Cubemap in the settings and apply a cubemap
(I applied the default). Tweak as needed.
It gives a lot of flexibility allowing for intensity and tint:
You could in theory create a cubemap with a superior rendering software (like VRAY) then use that cubemap in your actual scene to get the exact ambient lighting. although I think just playing around with the settings will be enough.
they say it's not practical but in scenes where you only have 1 or 2 open spaces... why not?
However, one thing I can do is to find an environment with the kind of lighting/dressing I have in mind and create a temporary cubemap out of that, but still not as correct as it should be.
I'll give a shot and post my results.
Thanks.
Tuned my substance, I think it makes sense to also have more dust on top of it. What do you think? Might be too much.
this stuff is all really interesting to me, I will be lurking and watching
progression.
They're definitely more "game prop" than viz but I would really appreciate a quick run down of your process.
Edges probably need some larger damages.
Applying the same 1cm chamfer to other pieces as well.
Car mesh by Chidi Mbadugha + Epic's Automotive Materials.
I don't like it how below the car is totally black. Anyone know how to get some light bounce down there?
Also reflections below the tires are killing me. Caused by sphere capture.
Tzur_H, All walls and columns share a tileable material. I have created a trim for wall edge damages and a trim for bottom dirts.
Usually when I want to lighten shadows in Unreal I use a low intensity sky light, but again it's a problem that is a part of the global illumination issues.
Also when adding scratches, dirt etc to objects keep in mind how people and vehicles interact with them. Dust on the lamps makes sense, but there isn't a lot of situations that would scratch them severely. It's a part of environmental storytelling. Like on your stair you could add some more wear in the ares where people would step