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I came up with this idea a couple of weeks ago for an abandoned secret cold-war re-education centre thrown together on a budget inside a disused nuclear power station cooling tower for the interrogation and brainwashing of foreign spies. I was trying to get some sleep at 3am and this idea was most unwelcome.
I had a go at making it anyway. There aren't many props in the scene at the moment but it's near enough what I was going for. I'm showing it to you guys now because I've run dry of (good) ideas on where to take it. All crits and suggestions are very welcome. I know it's a bit dark, I dunno how to solve that, fogging it up just kills the contrast completely.
Comments and crits very welcome indeed! :poly121:
Replies
How about throwing some sort of sound system into the mix? Possibly going down the horn speaker route?
Here are more WIP shots of where it is atm. Let me know what you think!
About your second shot: if you have the door open, add light shafts to it so that it gets a more dramatic look. These light shafts will in turn point to the chair and guide the focus of the viewer.
cheers
The lighting feels nice, but the soviet flags destroy the flair. Its a lot more mysterious if you do not really know.
Check out the COD: Black ops main menu or story for reference, and their intro and all these things, they brought the cold war stuff insanely good. I was shocked how well they brought over the feeling, they had a godlike art direction there.
was thinking the exact same thing, and also love it.
Altered the sound system, dropped the liquid (it was meant to be plastic ) sheet, took out the hammer and sickle, pushed the banners into the background, put images on the monitors, other stuff (probably). Any better?
@pixelpatron - I've had a play with the primary light source by the chair and it looks strange if the TVs take precedence over the floodlight, it looks more plausible with the removal of the floodlight, but then the whole platform looks a bit too symmetrical, I'll keep playing with it. I pumped up the light coming from the TVs anyway, and made them glow/bloom a bit more than they did. I'd love to have a wide bloom off the monitors as you've shown in those images, but for some reason that feature has been removed from the latest version of CE3 Sandbox, it'll apparently be replaced by something better in the next version, but for this version we're just going without :poly118:
Can't help feeling I've made something overwhelmingly average here
These ones:
At first I couldn't tell what these shadows were supposed to be coming from then I realized it's the grill covering the light. The problem is that when something small like that is right in front of a light it will hardly create a shadow if any at all because the light above/below/to the sides just fills in the shadow that it would create. If it does create a shadow it will not be hard lines and instead will be very blurry.
I like the contrast in your scene in terms of bright and dark, but I do feel like it needs some color contrast to it as well to add some more depth. Try adding some blue screens that give off blue light and then having the spotlight give off another.
Right now you have a lot of negative space which is fine, but you probably need to work with a little bit more, try to have more things pointing at your center piece. You have pipes and/or cables now, you just need to make them more visable and interesting.
Maybe try to shape & bend them like you would be inside of some kind of dome when you're sitting in the chair.
Other than that, good work!
I think on the wide shot it seems such a shame that you can't really see the chair, it would be nice to have some of it face us but obviously that would mean moving the monitors or have another set but we'll get to see the back details such as cables and frames which would be addition interest.
The reason why I want to see some of the front of the chair is that I will be able to imagine being dragged towards it and getting strapped into it. For example If you hate going to the dentist imagine the dread walking towards the dentist chair. I would also have a single spotlight on the chair just to re-enforced being put under the heat/pressure. It should just direct the attention to the chair and it's horrors, people should then relate it to the film Clockwork orange. Could the chair be raised?
The large pipes going towards the platform work great in directing your eyes but they are hard to see, you could tweak the lighting or change the material to a lighter colour. The details in between these pipes are prob bit too much making it look too busy with lines, you could removed them or have flat panels but keep the outer bits. Under floor lighting?
You also want to see of the of the outer walls as it's too dark to see it's shape. Some subtle up lighters perhaps? Seeing these tall walls will give the oppressive feeling being confined in this space.
You could work on a more interesting chunkier fixture for the monitors, could be like an arm so it has a different shape than all the straight lines in the scene. You could re-enforced this with lots of overhanging curvy cables to counter balance all the straight line shapes in the scene.
Anyway hope that helps.
The first thing I decided to work on was the TV rig, so I've made a massive hydraulic arm along with some wirey goodness.
and here's a marmo render of the arm,
next up I'll address the blocky walkway and railing.
Also, about the average comment. Average on polycount is quite impressive, but imo, this is above average.
Thanks!
I am indeed! I don't think the current version of Sandbox supports the local raytraced reflections they had in the Crysis 2 editor? That or it's a DX11 feature which I can't use because my PC's an old heap of junk. Still got a HD4870 in there.
I'm still not settled with how the speakers are atm. I didn't like how they were distracting from the monitors when I had them in big arrays either side of the chair, but now they don't look at all intrusive for the listener, I'll keep messing with them.
If you're still looking for suggestions maybe a little metal table next to the chair, with something like a polygraph machine, or some 'tools'.
I did this trick on a soda machine once, worked really well. The shaders would usually completely destroy my image when I cranked up the emmissive to get the amount of bloom I wanted. (It would make the front of it go pure white.) Yet I still wanted to see the image of soda graphics. (In your case your tv monitors.)
All I did was float the images (the graphics) off the actual screens on a separate strip of polys with a hint of alpha to allow the light to bleed through. This allowed me to overblow the shader behind the strip of polys to get the amount of bloom that I was aiming for.
Give er a whirl!
not done much personal work since starting my new job, anxiously awaiting the addition of PBR into CE3 Sandbox
You could try pulling those pipes outwards leaving space between so they don't intersect with the walkway, instead going straight down into darkness.
And maybe up a just a touch, think of this image as looking down from the top view and your walkway floating in the centre. The pipes would look more imposing and give a claustrophobic feel.
Keep at it, reminds me of Brazil too.