[WIP] Insane Asylum, UDK

eidriaen

Hey guys!

I'm currently working on an environment level for my Master's project, and was looking for some feedback on what I've done so far. I wanted to do something special this time so I went for a greyscale/red outline shader.

The room is loosely based on the film One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest:



Anyways, here's my level as it is now:
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otxEBZb536c&feature=plcp"]Asylum Level [WIP] 1.2 - YouTube[/ame]

It's a work in progress project, so there's still more models I want to add.


P.S.
The Shader isn't mine, I borrowed it from a user on this forum named Drachis

JoshWilkinson

Your modeling and texturing is pretty solid but your environment skills could use some improvement. You included some great reference but a couple of things working against you. Take a look at this breakdown:


The big thing I notice is that all of your reference is daytime but your scene is nighttime, might be necessary to collect more reference. I think Gothika had some nice night- asylum stuff if that's the route you want to take. Anyway, there are areas where beautiful highlights streak across the wall from exterior lights. The floors include reflections and also have a really cool highlight from exterior lights, giving the material a ton of depth from that angle. The ext lighting also casts nice shadows along the walls. I noticed you included the poker table? I think the circular pattern of chairs from the support group is a lovely composition as well.

Now regarding your work, I think your shader decision is hurting more than it's helping. Borderlands does an excellent job with the outline shader because their textures look hand done and the outline compliments it. You have what looks like photographic textures and an illustration-looking outline; the inconsistency hurts your final piece. The grey scale also hurts the image. Nothing in reality is ever white (nearly all the reference is composed of beige values) and the grey scale makes a lot of your diffuses look like they were made from pure white.

When you examine professional game environments, many great ones are defined by the story they visually tell without needing any text or context to supplement them. I'm not sure what story yours is telling. There are columns with pieces missing like a war went on, but the scene is pretty clean for chunks of concrete and plaster to be removed in columns. Blood text is laying about but I feel like dead bodies should be accompanying the text. Bloody text on walls is also pretty clique, I'd stay away from it. What's the last game you've seen use hand written text on walls? Better yet, what's the last good example of text on walls at all? If you want to place text anywhere, place stuff on a chalkboard or announcement board. Nothing too morbid, but just something that alludes to people now gone. Batman Arkham Asylum did an excellent job of illustrating the cells of mad men and telling the player which cell belonged to which villain without many inmates even appearing the game. Check out Calendar man's cell.

Too many environments are ruined by poor lighting. If I were working on your scene, I'd stop modeling for a bit and first focus on a good exterior and interior lighting setup with warm and cool lights. Then I'd figure out what direction I want to take this. Is this day/ night? Should general aesthetic be photographic or illustrative? Is it telling a story and if so, what?

Good luck my friend, and I'm excited to see more from this.

nathanbarrett

BringMeASunkist has got it spot on, some fantastic advice there. I agree, I think you should focus on the lighting of the scene to get the mood right first because at the moment your scene is very grey, dull, and lacks any real atmosphere.

eidriaen

Thank you very much for your feedback! I've taken it to heart, and working further on the points you mentioned.

I haven't really focused much on lighting yet, just to say that.

Just to try it out I've added colors to my textures, to see how it compares to my grayscale theme, so what do you guys think?



Btw, I know the floor and ceiling texture doesn't look right, I'm working on it

eidriaen

Did some work on lighting, got some moonlight coming in from the windows with cold colors and set the lighting inside to a bit warmer colors. Also changed the floor and ceiling texture. Desaturated all the textures a bit apart from the models that were red, wanted them to stand out a bit. Also added a sky dome and some fog, but the fog needs some more work.






EDIT: Lighting is just build with preview quality, going to do more work before I start working at production

nathanbarrett

It's coming along.. Your details are really cool. I just think you need to work on the larger areas of it. Your walls/ceiling/floor is WAY too grainy. I'm unsure if this is a PP effect, or if it's the normal map. I think it is the latter - the texture of them. In which case, you should really crank the normal maps down, especially on the walls because at the moment, those and the ceiling look more like furry carpet.

eidriaen

yeah I know.. seems to be maybe a LOD setting perhaps, they look fine up close but grainy like hell from a far. Was going to address that next

JoshWilkinson

Dog this seriously looks miles better with color! Excellent progress. Nathan is right about the grain but it sounds like you already know that. I can't tell if it's normals though, the wheelchair is grainy too and surely you don't have a speckled normal to that so what a unique issue.

Also the light on your floor looks a little low in detail, even for preview lighting. I suspect you're using BSPs with default light map values? I would go into the properties and drop it down a good bit. If you've never played with lightmaps before, Eat3D has a wonderful free tutorial on the subject.

Curious about the LOD problems though. Do you have LODs loaded into this scene? And what are you using to capture the images?

eidriaen

The floor is actually a mesh, but it's quite low poly (approx 20-30 polys). Didn't think it would matter, but perhaps it's messing up the lighting? I'll test it out with more polys or just change it out with BSP. The shadows aren't doing what they should, and I even got a really dark area on the floor even though it should be just as lit as the rest of the floor.

I can't figure out what makes the grainy effect, I've had a similar problem with a previous project...

Wall up close:


Wheelchair up close:


Thanks for feedback so far guys

nathanbarrett

Yeah I've just spotted the lighting in that bottom shot.. Definitely switch it to BSP mate, with a nice high lightmap res of about 1 or 2 it should look lots better. Are you using lightmass?

eidriaen

Ok, I've switched to BSP and the lighting looks a lot better, but I still can't get the shadows from the moonlight to look like they should, it's still chunky shadows, whereas I want more detailed shadows from the grid on the windows.... :poly127:
Also got some weird shadows on the ceiling now for some reason.



Oh, and I was making myself the fool when I just screenshot it from the "play from here" instead of using TiledShot, since the grainy texture isn't there now

but I am wondering about something... how do I increase the resolution from just playing it in the editor? I'm going to place some cameras around and Fraps it once I'm done, and when I use "play from here" it shows the grainy texture again

roosterMAP

That wheelchair texture still needs work. Most of the grunge seems a bit random and isn't showing where you would expect. Also, there would totally be some wear and tear and ass prints on the leather.
Keep wkin on it. This is going somewhere.

nathanbarrett

What's the lightmap resolution on the floor?

Here's a quick image of what I mean and what should solve it.



The platform on the left has a lightmap resolution of 64, the one on the right has one of 1. You'll wanna change this to 1 or 2 and that should give you nicer shadows If not, there's a problem with the mesh.

eidriaen

I've tried every setting from 1 to 32, but it's still not doing it correctly. Could be the mesh that's casting the shadow yeah, but I can't see what might be wrong with it. Far as I know there aren't any n-gons, open edges or overlapping/inverted faces

TigerGD

The lighting doesn't seem believable to me. I've worked in one of those facilities, and it's a great setting for terror. At night, the flourescent lights would fill the entire space, so your scene is too dark with those lights on. At night, with moonlight coming through the windows, you should be able to get enough bounce off the walls to be able to walk around, but the shadows will build upon the terror.

Some of the patients would put glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, so we got the idea to write and draw things on the walls with laundry detergent so it would glow under blacklight. You could have your scene change from a sterile institution in the light, to a nightmare house when the lights go out. Maybe have some lightning outside to reveal even more stuff in the shadows.

JoshWilkinson

Love Tiger's idea of the glowing stars and stuff. That'd be real easy with just emissive decals but perhaps tricky to find the right content to decal.

And about the strange shadows, do you use lightmaps? If not, that's definitely the problem with this weird lighting:


If you aren't using lightmaps then the engine is lighting this with vertex lighting and there aren't enough verts to properly distribute light and shadow. This can be fixed by rebuilding the whole scene in BSPs or applying light maps to your modular meshes.

Also, I learned recently that if you're using UDK after March 2012 then alpha masked meshes don't create any shadow at all. I know you're still working on getting the moonlight to highlight properly but the chains are never going to appear if you're in May 2012 or July 2012.

eidriaen

Yeah I've noticed this! Was working on trying to get my chains to cast the proper shadow all night yesterday with little luck. It looked like I was getting somewhere with messing around with different material setting. I'm thinking to perhaps have the chains as just a plane and use a translucent material to see if that works..

I did however manage to get better looking shadows for the window bars by changing out my moonlight from a dominant directional light to a regular point light, but it doesn't have the same look yet so I need to continue tweaking it.

As for lightmaps, all my meshes has a 2nd UVW channel for lightmaps, so that shouldn't be a problem. But I see what you mean by the corner there... if you see through the glass(nurse station) there's also a light coming through the walls. I might just place some BSP walls around to try to hide it, but would be nice to figure out what does it.

TigerGD wrote: »

The lighting doesn't seem believable to me. I've worked in one of those facilities, and it's a great setting for terror. At night, the flourescent lights would fill the entire space, so your scene is too dark with those lights on. At night, with moonlight coming through the windows, you should be able to get enough bounce off the walls to be able to walk around, but the shadows will build upon the terror.

Some of the patients would put glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, so we got the idea to write and draw things on the walls with laundry detergent so it would glow under blacklight. You could have your scene change from a sterile institution in the light, to a nightmare house when the lights go out. Maybe have some lightning outside to reveal even more stuff in the shadows.

I agree about it being too dark at the moment, still working on it

I did have an original idea to have the level change as you walked though it, sort of like the Little Sister level in Bioshock 2 if you've played that. In that level it flashes back and forth from a pretty looking area to a old and derelict area. But... due to my time constraint on my project I don't think I have enough time for it, as I want to focus on lighting and perhaps add more meshes and decal for the few weeks I have left. Definitively something to have in mind for it, if I choose to do more work on it after it's handed in (This is my Masters project by the way).

I like your idea, but I think I want to keep to the way the film looks. And in the film it does get quite dark during the night:


Thanks again guys for the feedback I've received, you've been a great help so far!

JoshWilkinson

Man I don't know what it is but those corner shadows/ highlights are definitely a light map issue. I ran into the same thing before I knew how to properly use modular assets and there are three things that could create that issue.

1) Vertex lighting on modular assets.

2) The walls are a single sided plane so by being illuminated by interior and exterior light, the engine doesn't know how to consistently calculate the light and gets funny in corners.

3) The lightmaps are too low of a resolution.

Is it possible to post a screen of your lightmaps?

eidriaen

Here you go:


As you see, the walls are one solid mesh, I did it that way so I could get the insets for the doors and windows. I didn't spend that long unwrapping it since I was going to vertex paint it (can't vertex paint BSP as far as I know). The lightmap is basically just the unwrap copied over to channel 2. Probably not ideal, I probably could make the faces that you see in the level bigger...

It's set to 256, too low perhaps?

JoshWilkinson

Ya having the whole scene as a single mesh is extremely not idea (made that mistake before as well). Modular pieces are most ideal but this is salvageable. I would use your 3d building application (max, maya, etc) and make a second UV channel in there.

Obviously interior walls should be largest in the UV space and exterior faces can be tiny. Also, the amount of padding you have for all these UV shells is good for something probably as low as 16, but since you need an extremely high light map resolution, you can get those shells a lot closer together.

But the first step is to crank up the light map resolution to an ungodly number, maybe 2048? Just to see if it fixes some of the lighting errors. If it does, then I would play around with the aforementioned process and then the resolution number. The lightmap resolution video I cited earlier is great for lightmap resolutions but if you've never light mapped before, 3Dmotive can walk you through the steps better than me. The video's in max but the principals apply to all UV processes.

eidriaen

I did make the second UV channel in 3ds max already, that wasn't the problem. Seemed to fix it by just amping up the light map res, worked fine with 2048. Got rid of some of those lighting issues I've had. Really bugging me that alpha masked materials doesn't work, guess I have to go back to a version pre-May.

eidriaen

Latest progression on my project:
[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np40hAWl_Ls&feature=plcp"]Asylum Level [WIP] 1.3 - YouTube[/ame]

The lighting is brighter in the video there than what I've set up now, still working on it. Nearing the end of my project period, but I'm still interested in getting feedback on it. I might not be able to fix all issues before my hand-in though

Paunescu.Daniel

the fence door on the elevator right at the end is way to big in scale, i think

eidriaen

Hello guys! I'm hoping this is just a simple button or something I've forgotten to press, but I'm absolutely stuck on this problem.. I've made a kismet event where I have some flickering lights that go on and off, and a ceiling fan that is animated with matinee. I've also got a camera set up to do a fly-through on my level and I'm using "Create a Movie" tool to capture each frame so I can set it together as a video later on. I found out that this was a much better method than using Fraps from the Play from Here window, especially considering the FPS I have at the moment.

However, for some reason it appears that the Kismet event does not seem to start... It's almost as if it's still the editor viewport, not the Play from Here viewport.

I'm nearing my deadline for this project, and I would appreciate if I could get an possible solution for this

Thanks!

P.S.
Here's an image of my Kismet event:

Impala88

You'll need to create a toggle cinematic mode node between level loaded and the matinee.

You can also setup the movie render with the executeble outside of udk, here's the tut for that (unless that's what you are doing, haven't used the create a movie tool) http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/CapturingCinematicsAndGameplay.html

I'd give more info on the cinematic mode node thing, but i'm still at work so i ain't got nothing to look at lol, been a while since i made my last fly through environment.