Abandoned Power Plant
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Hey guys my name is Aim. This is my work in progress thread for an environment I'm making in Unreal 4. The environment is the inside of a cooling tower in an abandoned power plant.
Here's a little background on me. This is my first polycount thread. I went to school for Game Art & Animation. Graduated a year ago in May 2013. Most of what I learned was technical skills, i.e. how to use Maya and Max. How to bring models and textures into UDK3 and setup materials. I completed my program in trimesters back to back and I feel like I never really got a chance to work on an environment outside of assignments, needless to say, I feel mighty inexperienced. Here goes!
This is my first attempt at doing a production quality environment for my portfolio. Shortly after graduation I found a job doing mobile app and game development. Adjusting to a life of full-time work has been a bit tough on my morale for personal artwork, but I've recently gotten in the zone and I'm excited to improve my skills.
Enough about me. My abandoned power plant environment is based on a real life abandoned power plant in Belgium. I'm going for a realistic art style but I'm attempting to create all my textures from scratch in Photoshop instead of using photos so I can learn more. Here's my primary reference image.
So far I'm 1 month and 2 days in and I've finished modeling it for the most part.
Assets I still need to model:
- The railing in the middle of lanes.
- Flowers, grass, and small foliage.
- A door
I've begun texturing the meshes that I have completed. I'm starting in the middle and moving outward.
Renders done in Marmoset.
Thoughts? Feedback? Critiques? Questions? All welcome. I'd love to hear what you think.
I'm gonna post updates to this thread regularly as I work. I also have an art blog that I've been keeping since I started this project. I try to post there every day and it includes some of the other stuff I work on. That's here.
Oh and one more thing; I think this community is fantastic and I can't wait to be a regular!
Aim
Here's a little background on me. This is my first polycount thread. I went to school for Game Art & Animation. Graduated a year ago in May 2013. Most of what I learned was technical skills, i.e. how to use Maya and Max. How to bring models and textures into UDK3 and setup materials. I completed my program in trimesters back to back and I feel like I never really got a chance to work on an environment outside of assignments, needless to say, I feel mighty inexperienced. Here goes!
This is my first attempt at doing a production quality environment for my portfolio. Shortly after graduation I found a job doing mobile app and game development. Adjusting to a life of full-time work has been a bit tough on my morale for personal artwork, but I've recently gotten in the zone and I'm excited to improve my skills.
Enough about me. My abandoned power plant environment is based on a real life abandoned power plant in Belgium. I'm going for a realistic art style but I'm attempting to create all my textures from scratch in Photoshop instead of using photos so I can learn more. Here's my primary reference image.
So far I'm 1 month and 2 days in and I've finished modeling it for the most part.
Assets I still need to model:
- The railing in the middle of lanes.
- Flowers, grass, and small foliage.
- A door
I've begun texturing the meshes that I have completed. I'm starting in the middle and moving outward.
Renders done in Marmoset.
Thoughts? Feedback? Critiques? Questions? All welcome. I'd love to hear what you think.
I'm gonna post updates to this thread regularly as I work. I also have an art blog that I've been keeping since I started this project. I try to post there every day and it includes some of the other stuff I work on. That's here.
Oh and one more thing; I think this community is fantastic and I can't wait to be a regular!
Aim
Replies
So the big thing that jumps out at me is your remark about making a production quality environment. Of course, that varies depending on the platform, but I'm going to assume you want it to look as high quality as possible (based on your blog having shots inside UE4), so I have some questions for you that will help me provide better feedback.
Are you making any high poly models for baking normal maps?
What's your general pipeline? Right now your screen shots still look very much in the blockout phase but then you have some parts that seem textured already. If you plan on baking normal maps you'll probably want to get those done first before moving on to your diffuse/albedo map.
How are you doing those parts that are already textured? I see some details that repeat for each wing of the building. Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think Toolbag can do vertex blending (I could be totally wrong here) which means you placed those details manually and aren't taking full advantage of tiling textures.
Are you going to be using the latest PBR materials or some other system?
do you have more reference than the one picture you posted? because that will probably make it easier for you to figure out what all these things are made out of..
you said you wanted to do the textures from scratch in photoshop which sounds like an interesting idea, but only if your textures come out convincing.. don't hesitate to use anything that makes the process easier and I'd take a look at zbrush for the dirt if you don't want to use photo textures
you should probably make tiling textures for your floor.. right now you splitted the whole floor into a few pieces and the repetition of the dirt is very visible.. I don't know if a unique texture is the best way to do this