[UDK] The Riddler's Den
polycounter lvl 11
Hello Polycounters!
Now that I'm back from Uni and have a load of free time I want to get started on an interesting project. I plan on making a small UDK environment based on the Riddler from DC Comics. The scene I have in my head is a small, dark, dirty apartment, glowing green from multiple computer screens where the Riddler hides while he challenges Batman to solve his Riddle Death Traps.
I've only built one other environment in UDK before so I'm hoping to learn a lot more about materials and lighting with this project!
Here's a moodboard with some ideas.
And here's a block out in Max:
Thanks for looking!
Now that I'm back from Uni and have a load of free time I want to get started on an interesting project. I plan on making a small UDK environment based on the Riddler from DC Comics. The scene I have in my head is a small, dark, dirty apartment, glowing green from multiple computer screens where the Riddler hides while he challenges Batman to solve his Riddle Death Traps.
I've only built one other environment in UDK before so I'm hoping to learn a lot more about materials and lighting with this project!
Here's a moodboard with some ideas.
And here's a block out in Max:
Thanks for looking!
Replies
Does anyone have any advice when it comes to doing high poly builds for things like bedsheets? The one you see there is a cloth simulation from max but I've considered sculpting it in Zbrush too.
Not to mention, I still don't have a nailed down pipeline that I'm comfortable with. I would build assets but then be unsure about whether I should import them into UDK, or start texturing or start baking or whatever and It starts to become overwhelming. It gets to the point, where I do one thing, then I worry that by doing it, and not doing something else, say considering lighting, I'm being efficient. All these factors lead to me getting stale and not doing any real work, and it's something I have to work on.
However, I've come back to it, after looking at some other Polycounter workflows and I think I've started on a worlflow that I find comfortable and suits me as an artist. And here are some progress shots. Still a LOT to do, but I've achieved a fair amount in the last day, and have a number of assets ready for baking and texturing. Overall, I feel a lot more confident about my ability to complete this in a decent amount of time and to a great standard:
Textures are obviously a placeholder and I was hoping someone might be able to suggest any good shader tutorials for things like computer screens
Comments and criticisms are extremely appreciated!
https://www.3dmotive.com/f106301
https://www.3dmotive.com/downloads
As for your pipe query... I usually just model on the grid and snap pieces about. However i have just seen an update in the news area about a new zpipe maker tool that runs in Maya. Not too sure what your using. I'm on Max, so I'm slightly gutted.
Anyways, i saw it and thought i'd give you the heads up!
All the best with your project
I'm using Max too unfortunately,
And I took into account what Warren said about liking the composition with the split in the room, and I have to agree, I prefer it too. I decided instead of the arch, though, to have some ceiling support pillars and a half wall between them. I think it gives the scene better composition without making it feel cramped, but let me know what you think! I also added a few more assets.
None of the assets are final of course!
Comments and Criticisms are appreciated as always!
Comments and criticisms are needed!
I also found a way of making pipes but would love some more suggestions. I think I'm making more a deal out of it than it really is, but I can't seem to find a reliable way of making sure they snap together constantly in UDK.
As usual, comments and criticisms are sought after, but it's been a bit quiet in here :P
You could also check two sided on those faces, but it is not good for optimisation.
Edit: Strange you did not have that before.
Otherwise, for the lighting, you need to focus more, on a specific mood you are going for. Look at the reference pictures, each environment has its main color mood.
But in your scene you have big vvery saturated green light, very saturated blue light, some yellow ambient-like light, and additionnal yellow point lights. This is too much, too many different colors, it has no homogeneity.
I think there was a chapter about that in Hourences's book: the Hows and Whys of level design.
Edit2: I think you should add more stuffs on the wall next to the monitors. The riddlers is a little bit mad, I would imagine a huge non sense mess on this wall, many papers, maps, pictures, like an obsessive psycho would have in his apartment !
I do have book assets to place on the shelves and elsewhere around the room, but I don't have them in engine yet
I like your block-out and mood pieces. Your high-poly work is pretty cool too and I like the textured crate as well. I think your brick is pretty noisy though, looks almost...furry?
The biggest thing that's going to get you in the right direction is lighting. Some of your earlier iterations were stronger, but there was way too much color and saturation. Your current iteration is swimming in green and it's hard to read the depth of the space because everything is receiving a lot of that same hue.
Firstly, as mentioned before, get some back faces put in so your window cast can be more accurate. It's really distracting that there's so much light pouring in when realistically, it shouldn't be. 2nd, crank up your lightmap resolution. The information hitting your floor and wall looks extremely blobby and low res. Let's get something more accurate coming in. 3rd, check your model shading. Some of the assets have some poor shading. Getting these essential foundations taken care of will hopefully make you feel better about the scene.
Finally, I think you should concentrate on getting your lighting and mood a lot further along before you go about making more assets for the scene. Once you start nailing that, you're gonna be excited to see this piece to completion.
I think you need to remove the monitor lighting entirely for this first pass. Capture what it feels like to have natural lighting pouring through the window by the bed. Is it day? Is it night? Whatever you choose, keep it soft, and watch your saturation and color. Let the bounces dissipate so that the corners and ceiling get darker than your impact point. I'd play with it, but only shoot for one or two bounces and make sure that they're not very intense. Allowing too much ambient light into the scene is flattening it out and making the read very muddy.
Start there first. Nail that side of the room and then you can start adding the focal screens into the mix. I think right now you're so concentrated on the screen that it's taking over everything. You're using a giant green point light that doesn't have a lot of directionality, it's pretty saturated, and it's soaking everything up with light. Adding your natural light on top of that is only adding to the problem. Try to work backwards, nailing the natural feeling of the space first and then introduce the weird/crazy focal point to contrast what you've done with the natural light.
Your "Lighting Only" shots are very telling about how the light is moving through the space. Continue posting those as it paints a good picture as to what you need to be focusing on. You might find some useful lighting tips in my blog (in my signature)...maybe. I'll be on the lookout for updates, good luck to you!
-Jon
I'll also take a look at your blog too and
While I wouldn't nessasarily say that you should create a full suite of 2nd (perfectly mapped) set of UV's for all of your assets, I would say that at the very least you generate a 2nd set in Unreal for the time being. When you're polishing up each asset, spend some time creating a nice lightmap UV set for each. For now, a decent 2nd set should be okay and if you're not familiar, you can do this in UDK. If you open your asset properties, open the mesh drop down in the upper left and select "Generate Unique UV's". You'll get a little window in the bottom right corner that you can fuss with and then apply. For now, that should hopefully give you a decent 2nd set layout.
You can edit each mesh to have it's own resolution by adjusting the "Light Map Resolution" - early on, try a lower number as you experiment so your bakes go faster, maybe 32/64? You can also select all of your assets and do a blanket resolution override and they'll all inherit that value.
For your final bakes for show and tell, maybe bump up the resolution so we can see things a little crisper.
No worries about feeling weak in the lighting department, we all have lots to learn. Don't be afraid like I said, to just delete all the lights in the scene and start simple. Try to nail the time of day and the natural light that would be spilling in the window. Go for something soft as you'll want your focal point to be the screens.
Good luck, looking forward to what you come up with!
-Jon
Comments and critique are very much welcome!
I like what you have here so I think you could try balancing your focal point against the rest of the scene. Looking at your lighting only, there's a lot of green filling the space. I'm not sure if that's your environment color or just some big fill from your screens. When everything has that green wash, you lose some of the shape and definition in your space.
I did a paint-over of a few things I think you could try.
Original
Paint-Over
I introduced a soft purple to offset your green; purple has a mystery about it and I think it'll add some interesting mood here. Throw it in your environment color maybe? Overall, I tried to offset your back room from your screen room. I've pulled back the influence of your green screen lighting, but it's more dramatic at it's impact point; it has a stronger attenuation so it falls off quicker. I think having the greens sit on top of the darker purple read better than just, green on green. Gradients are important here; left to right, top to bottom. The bedside lamp is strong, then soft, hitting some of the meshes along the way. The ambience of the night fills the rest of that space going from the soft orange to the soft dark purple. Same with your screens, really bright greens at the desk and softer, darker greens inching away from the frame.
Just some suggestions for pushing it further. See if you can make the scene pop more so the eye travels about. I find that bright focals that gradient to less important areas help the eye move.
Keep at it,
-Jon
As I've said, this is the furthest I've come with lights in UDK, bar placing them and just hoping for the best!
It might be helpful to do a screen of the scene with the lights in it (not in game-mode) so I can see what you're using. BUT, just making a guess, you have a light over by the monitors that is having a pretty big influence on the scene. Couple things you can try here.
First, in the World Properties, you can turn up or down the number of bounces your GI does. I think at default it's 3 (not sure) so you might want to turn it down to 2. To answer your questions about the "offset color", which UDK would call its "Environment Color" - that's also found in the World Properties tab. At default, it's black. Introduce a soft deep purple there and that should give you that coloration in the areas of the scene where lighting is absent.
Finally, and I think this will help the most, the actual light source itself. Go into the properties of the light that you're using for your screens. There's an indirect scale and saturation setting. Scale means how intense each subsequent bounce is. If you lower that number you'll find that the scattered bounced lighting won't travel as far. The saturation on the other hand controls the amount of color that is brought along on each bounce. I'd pull this down so that you're not pushing that green so far across the space. Also, double check your light attenuation, make sure the light isn't influencing the whole scene with a giant radius.
I'd recommend a few spot lights coming off the screens as apposed to a point light because a point light moves outward in all directions whereas a spot light offers directionality and that would be more realistic coming off the monitors.
Hopefully you can adjust those properties, do some test bakes, and get some better results. I already think you're making some nice strides here especially compared to your first few shots. I think you're about ready to give it another iteration of lighting and then move on to the asset work so you can start balancing everything together for the final look.
-Jon
Let me know what you think! I feel I'm about ready to start tying everything together with textures
One thing I'm noticing is the warmer lamp light pool sitting right beside the green monitor pool. While the lamp light moves through the space pretty well, the monitor light seems to kinda stick to the floor like mud. You could try pushing your monitor lights just a bit further into the scene so they subtlety touch the back wall. Maybe just adjust the strength of the bounce? That would offer some nice contrast - your foreground wall and pipe would pick up that extra touch of color and value to sit over the darker background wall.
So far, I'm okay with the darks; we'd need to see it with textures to understand what it's doing to the scene as a whole. The darker values are a product of a nice gradient, so if you think your back corner is too dark, rework the light and the falloff before just upping the ambient. Adding too much ambient will start to wash out the scene.
These next updates I'd probably start posting textured shots (as well as some lighting only) so we get a better feel for the entire image. Also, are your screen lights casting shadows? The cane and chair are sitting in the light without anything grounding them.
Keep on truckin,
-Jon
@Spangles - Thanks! I figured it out in the end but I'll definitely give that tool a look!
Just some small things, to make other stuff (like the random Rockets scattered everywhere) make more sense.
Now then, now that's out the way, have some updates:
I've fiddled with the lighting again, increasing the saturation and light bounce slightly to make the room slightly brighter, but maintain the atmosphere I had going previously. I may adjust it again though, as I feel it's a tad too bright just now.
I have no idea what I've done to my ambient directional light, but I have a feeling it's what's making the room feel too bright now. I may just delete it and redo it from scratch.
This is what I'm picturing for the hallway area, nothing too complicated, simply a lead in into the main area, with possibly an overturned table and lamp and blood stains and question marks on the walls to suggest a forced entry.
Any comment's are highly appreciated as always!
I've also made a start on the hallway area and I think it helps add a nice sense of space to the scene as a whole. Think i'm quite ready to get texturing proper now!
As usual, comments and crits are highly appreciated!
I think the only thing I feel picky about is that small desk lamp back there. I feel like it's producing too large of an area of light. I've got a desk lamp the same size and sometimes it's a pain cause it produces more of a small cone of light rather than that nice sphere of light. Kinda like this....
Anywho, good work so far
I'm sorry there's still no textures but I'm having way too much fun building loads of stuff and filling up the space!
C&C is greatly appreciated, as always!
Few more shots!
I spent a lot of time trying to get the walls looking better and more interesting than the shoddy brick texture I started with. I think they look a lot better now and really help to give the scene a more "Batman Comic" feel that it was rather lacking. It was achieved using a method I'd never thought to try before, suggested by my friend. I created the diffuse texture first then unwrapped according to that, instead of the usual method and I'm very pleased with the results.
I'm still thinking of something to fill that empty wall in this area though. The floor Im going to cover in rugs and decals (Of general rubbish and painted riddles) but I'd like something "theatrical" on the wall that would be seen by a player as they enter the room. My original thought was a large wooden board with a riddle concerning the explosive barrels but my first attempt was a bit shit and I didn't like the result. Any ideas would welcome, along with any to make the barrels more obvious as a trap. Right now they just look like they're being stored there.
I also took my first steps in actual material creation today (going beyond Diffuse, Specular and Normals) to create a falling rain effect on the windows. The result is okay but by no means perfect and I'd love any suggestions as to how to improve on it. What I'd REALLY like is for the rain to distort exterior light, the way it does in reality but I'm not sure if this would be too complicated to do.
(I'd also like to know how to make animated gifs of the materials to show you guys better)
Cheers! C&C appreciated as always!
I guess the material setup is okay, but the texture you use is a bit strange for rain. I'm not sure how much time you have to create the rain, but this workshop video is not very hard to follow and it produces an amazing rain effect.
http://gamedesignplanet.com/Workshop/video.php?vid=8c6272433