[UDK] City Hall, looking for critiques

visoutre

Hello comrades!

I'm working on an environment for a school assignment and hope to put it in my portfolio. If you have any suggestions for lighting, design, modeling or anything, I would love to have your opinion! Want to get really good at environment art, creating interactive worlds is something I've enjoyed since the days of Lego.

I took most of the architectural inspiration from the cities of Detroit and Brussels (you might be able to tell my main inspiration ). I want this location to be gritty, part of a dictatorship state. The year is around 2020 in an alternate reality similar to our own. These people developed strong technology for robots and the dictator intends to replace the majority of humanity with them for the elite to thrive. Of course there are rebels who fight back and this is the faction the lead character is involved with.

The city hall is one of the smaller headquarters of the elite, where they plan the next robot attacks and store data. I imagine the player assaulting this location early in the game. She'll first see the building as she's riding her motorcycle through an alley and encounter a new enemy to battle. I can have some fun since it's game art.


Going to save the rest of this post for the final renders (when it gets doen eventually). I'll upload my WIP's in the next posts.

visoutre

Here's the main concept art I developed:





I also have a bunch of concept art in the following blog post: http://dariksmithart.blogspot.ca/2013/10/action-analysis-concept-art.html

Some designs from that post:





This is the main character. Will probably have to give her another design revision, but just to get an idea of the rebel characters.



One of my moodboards. Have tons of these, but I'll just upload 1 so this thread doesn't get image spammed:



My first UDK block-in is really rough. I used Ryan Smith's 3DMotive tutorial to create the water shader and the water effects were temporarily taken from the Eat3D cinematics tutorial. Also did some in-game shots with the character since I had her rigged, why not .











Started modeling one of the buildings in Maya. Maybe it's too high poly? But I'm still learning. Want to do some architecture sculpts for some of the assets.



Color and lighting will be difficult, just some experiments:



I have another 7 weeks to finish this. I learned so much from lurking on polycount, hopefully you guys will give some crits. I will share the love after I gain more skill points.

Cglewis

its a good start, for sure...and alot of work ahead but i would say focus on one thing before you start jumping around....like your main building/area is still in the block out phase and you havnted added the orb thing yet, where is the reference for the building with the curved corner? its looking good though, but looks dense, are you going to be bake it down to a low poly form?

i would mess with atmospherics yet, i know its fun hahah udk is aweosme like that , but i would say work on the models first before you do that stuff, its cool getting them in engine to get a feel for what your making but focus on the models bc that will make your projects rock!

I hope this helps

Good luck bubba!

visoutre

Haha yeah man thanks for the feedback. I bombed this project big time. Was a little ambitious for my skill level since I don't know how to make a solid in game mesh yet. Going to go back to modeling simple assets to get the workflow and technical issues down before attempting a big environment again.

I had to learn some matinee stuff too since it was supposed to be animated in real time for school. So didn't finish to an acceptable level (def. not going in portfolio!) But it taught me a lot and I had fun working through the whole process. Not going to take this as a failure, but a stepping stone to greater things.

BTW I made everything in the scene except for the effects which I took from UDK's content browser and the texture for the ground came from somewhere on the internet.