Bioshock Infinite PBR Effects
polycounter lvl 10
I've been working for some time on this Bioshock Infinite based project and now I want to tackle the textures for this airship launchbay. I've been taking a painstaking amount of time and effort to remain true to the original design and art style of the original game. The hard part is that I don't have access to any of the presets or special systems built in IG's custom engine build and I'm not sure what's the best option to go about replicating them.
An example of some of the effect's managed. By IG employees, Spencer Luebbert and Steve Anichini: http://vimeo.com/87363349
The thing I can gather that's most relative to this point in my project is the PBR presets they used. Most this interior will require some form of reflective, gloss and metallic properties being that it uses a lot of metal truss work and supports. Maybe I'm wrong but by default there is no default PBR systems in the stock Unreal 3? I was lead to believe it only uses the older cubemap systems with static based reflections. Correct me if I'm wrong but it looks like I may have a harder time managing that kind of visual effect.
So my questions are, since I'm using stock UE3 what are my exact options to go about this? Within the bounds of what the engine has to offer, does anyone know of some good resources that might shed some light on working with the existing systems in UE3? Currently I'm preparing for what I'm going to need to pull this off, so if anyone would like to make additional points for me to note about this I'd love to hear it.
An example of some of the effect's managed. By IG employees, Spencer Luebbert and Steve Anichini: http://vimeo.com/87363349
The thing I can gather that's most relative to this point in my project is the PBR presets they used. Most this interior will require some form of reflective, gloss and metallic properties being that it uses a lot of metal truss work and supports. Maybe I'm wrong but by default there is no default PBR systems in the stock Unreal 3? I was lead to believe it only uses the older cubemap systems with static based reflections. Correct me if I'm wrong but it looks like I may have a harder time managing that kind of visual effect.
So my questions are, since I'm using stock UE3 what are my exact options to go about this? Within the bounds of what the engine has to offer, does anyone know of some good resources that might shed some light on working with the existing systems in UE3? Currently I'm preparing for what I'm going to need to pull this off, so if anyone would like to make additional points for me to note about this I'd love to hear it.
Replies
Option 2: Create a PBR shader using CustomLighting slot (theres a bunch here. I think AlmightyGir posted one up)
Here's Steve Anichini's blog explaining how it was done:
http://solid-angle.blogspot.com/2014/03/bioshock-infinite-lighting.html
It's not possible to do what he mentions without the full source code access that you get from being a licensee.
Funny you mention that, as I was actually studying that very same blog post when going over all this yesterday. They said they setup their own PBR templates and while I'd love to use UE3 for keeping the engine build authentic, there is absolutely no way I could pull off what they did in terms of lighting. I'm still very new to working in Unreal Editor so while I consider a lot of the workflow would remain the same. UE4 will still take me a while to completely transition to.
I guess now my question would be how to go about transferring all my existing assets over, or if it would be easier to simply re-import them all manually?
An aside from the engine talk, I have a crit for the geo
I think in these shots your floor strikes me as far to flat. There's alot of texture detail, but no height definition. I think just lowering the floor an inch below the metal trim around the room would help alot.
@Fearian. I've sorta been debating the floor details in terms of geometry for a while now. My reasons were mainly for flat, smooth navigable plane that wasn't bumpy. But I guess I probably could raise the collision surface to the higher metal trim. Since there obviously isn't going to be any NPCs walking in this scene there wont be a way of noticing that collision distance. I'll have to re-import all the assets to UE4 anyway, so that'd be as good a time to change it. :thumbup: