Environment (WIP) - Orient Express - Feedback/Criticize please
polycounter lvl 8
Edit: Posting final images here, too
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu4kTosXzag"]UDK Orient Express Environment - YouTube[/ame]
Hi everyone,
I'm a Games Art Student and for my final year project I am modeling a small environment. I am doing the interior of a few cars of the Orient Express and putting them into UDK. I was hoping to also add a moving exterior, so it looks like the train would be moving.
I am still in an early Phase but I was hoping on getting some feedback here to improve my work.
After doing blockouts for 3 different cars I started on modeling the dining car. So far some assets have normal maps from high polies, for the rest that needs normal maps, high polys are done but I haven't sorted out the UVs for the low polies yet. There is tons of space left in the shell for some and I was hoping to combine them with some later assets to optimize UV space.
At this point I'm not really too happy with the curtains, so I will probably do them again later. The way I did them was getting a plane subdivide it to a point where I still could take out edges without going insane, then played around with the cloth modifier.
I definitely need the UVs for that to be a perfect rectangle since there is a pattern going on the curtains. I'd aprreciate any suggestions on how to best go about doing curtains.
Also I am having a little problem with the trim piece for the dividing wall. It only shows up in UDK however, in 3ds max it's looking fine. The UVs for that are overlayed with the ones for the trim pieces for the side walls, so there is some distortion which i hope won't be too noticeable with textures later on.
Hope someone actually does reply to this :poly121:
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu4kTosXzag"]UDK Orient Express Environment - YouTube[/ame]Hi everyone,
I'm a Games Art Student and for my final year project I am modeling a small environment. I am doing the interior of a few cars of the Orient Express and putting them into UDK. I was hoping to also add a moving exterior, so it looks like the train would be moving.
I am still in an early Phase but I was hoping on getting some feedback here to improve my work.
After doing blockouts for 3 different cars I started on modeling the dining car. So far some assets have normal maps from high polies, for the rest that needs normal maps, high polys are done but I haven't sorted out the UVs for the low polies yet. There is tons of space left in the shell for some and I was hoping to combine them with some later assets to optimize UV space.
At this point I'm not really too happy with the curtains, so I will probably do them again later. The way I did them was getting a plane subdivide it to a point where I still could take out edges without going insane, then played around with the cloth modifier.
I definitely need the UVs for that to be a perfect rectangle since there is a pattern going on the curtains. I'd aprreciate any suggestions on how to best go about doing curtains.
Also I am having a little problem with the trim piece for the dividing wall. It only shows up in UDK however, in 3ds max it's looking fine. The UVs for that are overlayed with the ones for the trim pieces for the side walls, so there is some distortion which i hope won't be too noticeable with textures later on.
Hope someone actually does reply to this :poly121:
Replies
I redid the curtains and are much happier with the results this time
Along with that I also replaced the chairs I had in the scene with a newer version with less polies and baked a high poly on it. There is still some errors in the normal maps though but I will paint those out in Photoshop at a later point. I also finally got a high poly bake on the ventilation, next one coming is for the table lamps.
some nice work
i think my main comments would be that there are clipping errors with the curtains, the supports for the over head storage look a bit thin in places and also there are some shading errors on the side of the seats
but is looking nice
could we see some reference images also?
I went back and made the supporting bits for the racket a bit thicker as suggested. Also reduced the rows on the grid and made them a bit thicker so it is more noticeable overall. The alpha for that is coming once I start texturing.
Clipping and shading errors for curtains and chairs were already fixed in the new versions.
I also started doing a high poly for the corridor of the sleeping car.
Here are some screenshots from the sleeping car in UDK now, along with some reference. I am sorry about the UDK stuff being all messy, but some bits don't have unwraps on them yet and for now I just put some random lights in there to work with.
I sculpted the creases on the sofa and bed but the result is not really representing the material they are made of too well. It's my first time i really went in to sculpt folds, I will try getting some better results.
next i will start texturing some of the stuff i made so far
I started on texturing and creating some shaders. I want to cover a variety of different materials in the beginning to make sure i can get these right.
For the windows i want a similar look to this with condensation on the windows and small trails from the water drops.
I expected this to be more work on the material side, but i had to go back to the diffuse and spec quite a bit, because those were not very refined on my first try.
For now i used a cubemap that came with UDK for the reflections and then added a fresnel to make it more reflective when viewed at an angle. Once I have an exterior I will go back and finetune this a bit more.
To work on some metal i did one of the lamps from the dining car, which basically is around the train everywhere. I also redid the model to make the finer details more promintent in the high poly bake.
For the curtains in the connection i tried to simulate a bit of a velvet feel by adding a fresnel. They need some further work though.
The ceiling of the connection bit:
And now to my big disgrace...the wood, which of course is the most important kind of material since it is going to be everywhere. And of course this is part is looking horrible
So any tips on wood greatly appreciated
Thank you
So what i then switched to was doing high poly models straight away for some pieces, and then baked ao and normal to a low poly later. This worked good in most cases where I had much reference.
For pieces i did not have a lot of images on it just turned into a mess because I was pushing and pulling loads of verts from the high poly, trying to get it look decent, which eventually worked out, but when i created the low poly from it I realised that the mesh was very unclean. For example vertices that should be alligned were not for whatever reason.
So I would say it works in cases where you have good reference and dont need to make up stuff to look believable. In any case a kind of mid poly blockout would probably work good for most stuff.
Also played around with the metal shader a bit more
Gonna try and follow the advice of one of my tutors now and do a quicker rough first pass on the textures and then go back and polish them later.
Got a bit more texturing progress, went back and adjusted the wood colour slightly again. In terms of lighting I'm not sure if it might be a bit too dark, but what i was planning is making the sleeping carriage pretty dim and the dining car brightly lit up to contrast them.
Also finally got around putting up a portfolio. if you have any criticism or suggestions for that, please tell me
http://sdammrau.blogspot.co.uk/
coming along nicely! Good eye for detail.
The rainy windows look great, but will work only for a train which has been standing for a while.
The materials for the lamp and leather look excellent!
The specular of the wood looks a bit too clean and broad in some of the shots. (Maybe not retouched yet. )
You could try a double highlight if that's possible, one for the laquer and one for the "glow" of the fine wood. If you can have just one, go with the sharper ones, or try adding a cubemap. Even if the surface itself is clean, the reflection/specular will be distorted by tiny changes in the surfaceangle. You could try to imitate that with the help of the normalmap. Also quite a lot of what should be diffuse "reflection" of the light on the wood seems to be specular right now.
Try to avoid to split the scene between very light and dark materials like the dark wood with the red and yellow carpet. It's possible of course, but will make lighting harder.
Basically I'd go with a lighter diffuse that reacts better to the light and a sharper specular.
Hi Mr Smo,
what kind of detail would you put in the specular? I cant really think of anything else than fingerprints or so.
Thanks very much everyone for commenting
And as for the specular, I haven't got a clue either, have done some searching for something to add but did'nt really find some stuff.
That said really loving it! keep it up!
Moved on to the dining car now because i am running out of time for the hand-in
After the hand-in i will keep working on it and go back and make some changes for the sleeping car textures. also someone showed me how to get distorted reflections by just adding a texture to the cubemap.
The lighting in the dining car is a bit strong at the moment and i guess the textures need to be desaturated as well. For the moment i am focusing on adding little meshes to make it look more interesting. Sorry about the shading errors on those, those are just blockouts for the moment
Thank you
Also thanks for the image you sent me,I like the slightly oily, smeared look, gonna try bringing this effect subtly into my textures
I am incredibly grateful for everyone showing interest in my work and giving me feedback, which has really helped me on my way of creating this scene. You guys are great
[ame="
You really nailed the look of every material, good job !
Here you go, I am sure there is a lot better and more effective ways how to do it, but here is what I did:
Basically most of the stuff is made up of 3 different "layers". There is the normal window surface, then the little raindrops who have settled on it and then there is the rain running down the window.
They have different properties for stuff like reflection and distortion, which is done with a lot of masking and then adding everything together. The rain thats running down is created by using a black and white texture as a mask and pluging in a panner to make it move.
For the rain drops and rain trails i have created a normal map from the diffuse in crazybump.
The "Flicker" stuff on the top is to make individual raindrops shortly flash and make it look like raindrops would be hitting the window. For the texture for this I painted everything black and just left a few individual raindrops.
For painting the rain drops onto the window i found this tutorial very helpful: http://blog.entheosweb.com/tutorials/realistic-rainy-window-effect-in-photoshop
Diffuse:
Specular:
RainTrailMask:
Anyway, just wanted to say that this came out awesome, especially in motion. Congrats!
Great work!!!