Dilapidated House Set

dale22x

Hi everyone.

I've taken a break from working in 3d over the past year and a half and I've started making a few pieces to get back into it before looking for work again. I've really been out of the loop in terms of technology, techniques, workflows. So really Critiques on anything and everything are welcome.

Here is a Dilapidated House I've been working on. Currently working on the set around it.

Deathstick

Hey it's lookin' pretty good so far. I'd say probably the biggest step technology wise will be picking your engine to render it in if you haven't already so you can start to think about the lighting and how your materials will be set up beyond the color map.

The UDK is still available, although people seem to be moving towards Unreal Engine 4 currently (it has a PBR workflow, which is not as scary sounding as you'd think) Then the other usuals are the Cryengine and sometimes Unity.

There's also marmoset toolbag 2 which is great for making real-time renders of props + characters, although for a complete environment I'd probably recommend putting your models in an actual game engine.

Perhaps describing a bit about on what you'd imagine the final scene should look like and if it has a little bit of a background (time period, setting, light/dark, etc.) could help a bit.

dale22x

I've played a bit in substance designer learning about PBR. Would you use pbr even for something cartoony like this? with pre-painted textures?

The final goal would be something with a similar mood and lighting to this painting. Something a bit dark and creepy

Deathstick

Well I'm not 100% sure I'm right when it comes to a PBR workflow, but I believe the whole idea behind it isn't necessarily whether it's PBR itself, but how the artist creates their materials.

IE technically a color map for a PBR material would have little-to no lighting information in it if it was going for realism. That doesn't mean that you still can't paint in additional lighting information in your color maps/hand-paint it.

You could still do a stylized hand-painted material like WoW for example, and benefit from some elements of a PBR engine such as how everything now has a roughness/reflection to it without having to place cubemaps for everything, and creating a material that looks like metal can be as easy as ever. It actually seems simpler in some ways to create a material that looks good no matter what the current lighting condition is. (pre-pbr, artists would sometimes create multiple versions of a material as while it might of looked good in one lighting condition, it would look terrible in another)

Think of it as rather a set of guidelines rather than a strict set of rigid rules. After all, your eye and sensibilities as an artist still is the most important thing in deciding whether something looks right or not.

For example, you could choose in a pbr-engine to use just handpainted color maps and make it look good. You could choose to use color maps and roughness maps and make it look good. You could choose to use color maps, roughness maps, specular maps, metallic maps, and normal maps and still make it look good. It's really up to you to decide how far you want to go with things, and to get an idea of what sort of cartoony style you want.

Looking up specific styles like how Blizzard uses specular and color maps in WoW, or how in Darksiders 2 specular, normal, and color maps were used, or Dishonored, or Dota 2, or LoL, etc.

You can also take everything I said with a grain of salt, as I by no-means am a technical artist and learn mostly by experimenting on my own and reading up on things.

I will say that the new Unreal Engine 4 is fun as hell to play around in, and it shouldn't take you long if you're already familiar with how the UDK handled things. It's also pretty cheap considering it's $20 a month for a subscription, and you can cancel anytime you want while keeping that specific release to play around in. You'd just have to reactivate your subscription if you want the latest updates. (so so so much better than Unity's locked in $75 a month for 12 months subscription from hell, totally wasn't worth it)

dale22x

Thanks Deathstick!
I have a revolver I`m going to use pbr for as soon as i`m done this. It seams really nice to get pretty cool result relatively fast. I have marmoset toolbag so i`ll probably be using that. I`m going to stick to just some old technology for this one though. I`m using it to get a bit familiar with UDK. Honestly I don`t know how I`ve managed not to put anything I`ve made in it till now.

So managed to get my set into UDK. so far it seams alright except I can't figure out why my emissive windows only show up in the editor but not when I press play :S. They do create light information for the light maps. Does anyone know why this might happen? I am just using a png, being mutliplied with a constant3vector. plugged into the emissive channel of the material.

Also does anybody know how to darken the scene.. or even just the color of the sky? this is the night time scene i can select when I create a new Scene. But it is awfully bright