SpaceShip UDK

Emanuel_palalic

Hey guys,
This is a map Rafael Perez, Felix Burgos and I were working on for class. We had a month to complete the assignment.It ended up being a lot of fun. Let us know what you think of it. I know someone mentioned on a different post to change the slurpin cola logo. I was going to change it but we were crammed on time I will still make a change to it in the future!
We ended up using UDK, Maya, and the Quixel suite for all of our assets. Quixel suite helped us a lot by speeding up workflow by a ton!

Xaragoth

Looks quite alright. It reminds me of both Dead Space, Alien Rage and StarCaft 2's environments in places. Gimme a floating corpse with some blood and I'm game

UE4 would likely help make it look a lot better. You should consider moving it over if you want to use it as a folio piece (reflections and great lighting do A LOT for this type of environment).

There's one really big thing you should watch out for next time. You are using a lot of grey textures, which leads to rooms looking very boring and samey. Your floors, walls and ceilings all use a very similar color and texture (grey with smudges of other grey). The scene being very dark doesn't help. Generally you want ceiling, walls and floor to look distinctively different enough from each other (preferably in color and texturework). Even if it's just a bunch of dark blue or red pipes that run along a corridor.

Basically you want to try to make a dark ship that uses a color scheme you'd expect on a ship engineered by humans. Cables would likely be color coded, panels would be clearly labeled and a lot of style in terms of colors would be used. I'd expect some white paint in places (maybe a lil' used if the ship is older). Section markings are also likely (remember the long color bars along the walls in Half Life?).


Do a bit of texture work to clean up those things, move it to UE4 and you got yourself a really nice thing you can toss up on a folio, I'd say.

Deathstick

It looks pretty solid but I'd definitely do something about the lighting in a lot of the screenshots (some scenes are better lit than others).

You have all of that beautiful detail and 80% of it is covered in darkness. I'd probably take a look at a few of the games mentioned by Xaragoth to see how they lit things. If I recall correctly bioshock 1 and 2 had a pretty dark feeling but there was alot of contrast in light and shadows.

I think I read somewhere they studied a lot of theater lighting. IE silhouettes, stark shadows contrasted against bright spot lights, making global illumination do it's thing, warms vs cools, rim lighting etc.. could be your friend.

On that note, I like the dead space/alien vibe. Keep it up!

DWalker

The color palette is rather limited - really just red, yellow, and grey. Consider adding status lights that could be green or red, monitors casting blue light, blue light from the generators, etc. Large stations might have colored stripes on the ground to give directions, and zones might be color-coated to indicate their purpose.

Emanuel_palalic

Haha I do want to throw a few floating corpses in there. Would look so awesome. I agree we do need to work on our color schemes a bit, everything is a bit bland. Thanks for the advice from all of you! I definitely like the idea of color coating zones!

Emanuel_palalic

I do agree lighting does need some work, I'll definitely go back and work on all of that a bit more

JoshWilkinson

I think part of my beef with this is the noisy textures. Everything has equal amount of noise. Make the exposed metal less or more noisy than the peeled paint. Also, use big chunky shapes and delicate, feminine shapes to compliment the environment. Right now it's just blocky and noisy. Honestly (and this is harsh) i just skimmed through all the pictures and noted nothing.

If the composition of any of your renders leads the eye to a focal point (hallways and landmark items) through the use of shapes, directionality (in your shapes or textures) and repetition I think this could be much, much stronger.

Emanuel_palalic

We didn't really have time to throw unique pieces into the mix, we kept everything pretty modular, me and Luis(Rafael Perez) ended up pulling most of the work because our other teammate didn't do much haha. Thanks for the critique, will definitely build up on this. Oh one last thing, what do you mean by noisy textures? Grain?

Deathstick

Noisy can be a bunch of different things. Too much grain for example, high frequency, etc.

I believe BringMeASunkist is saying most of the materials/texture work has the almost exactly same amount of scratches/dirt/beatup edges/ "noise" leading the textures to look rather unclear or muddy when used in the environment as a whole. In this case muddy isn't necessarily saying that scratches and dirt or bad, just that everything is kind of uniformly covered in dirt and scratches.

Basically all of your details are the same amount leading to too much competition for our eyes to handle. It could use a few moments of rest and larger solid shapes for our eyes to rest upon amongst the smaller details here and there. Doing some black and white screenshots of your environment to see if there's enough difference in value for you to separate the walls from the floors and the like can help as well.

I also find setting the view to "Lighting Only" when your doing lighting helps a bit as well when trying to figure out the best way to light a piece and make sure there's enough interest going on.

Don't get me wrong it's a lovely environment, it can just be so much better with the correct time and adjustments.

JoshWilkinson

Racer445 is credited with one of the better tutorials about texturing I've ever seen: http://oesterkilde.dk/racer445.html. Do yourself a favor and try to read the entire article. So much important data in there.

Subtlety is key. Have your painted metals look clean (except for shallow normals and dirt trextures) and have your scratches really rough and obnoxious. That way your eye is drawn to the details but rests on the surface. It's better composition.

xChris

Looks good, I agree with everyone else though, those colors feel weak, although the environment would feel real interesting though (in a players perspective) if you wanted to keep going and adding interesting props.

Also I'm not into the dust particles in some of those images, and the screenshots don't look as crisp as they need to me, but overall it looks sick!

Emanuel_palalic

Ahh ok I see now haha. I didn't know if it was the scratches themselves or grain in the textures haha, but that makes sense now. Thanks for the tutorial btw looks awesome! Oh yeah sorry about the lens dirt, had it turned on still, just had lens flares and dirt for when in game lol.

Xaragoth

One more thing I just got out of my sleep addled brain:

Try to make each area very easy to distinguish. Either with color or architecture. It's very important for the player to be able to orient themselves. See System Shock 2 for an older, but very good example.

Digitalair

The lighting could look more intersting

Emanuel_palalic

Thank you, I'll make sure to do that, I actually never thought of looking at system shock haha, Idk how I managed to completely overlook that game lol

Emanuel_palalic

So we began changing the lighting around a bit. We haven't gotten a chance to touch textures or add new props yet. Still very rough with the new lighting but ideas to help guide us would be nice.