216 - Pi meets Deus Ex Environment
Hello, this is my first showcase thread, hope you enjoy.
I made this environment for my second year in university, I'm studying Game's Art at Bolton.
This project's brief was to create a two-room environment based around the theme "Inventor's Lab", using Unreal Engine (v4.4.3). I decided to base it around Deus Ex concepts and the film Pi. Took a little over 4 months to create while juggling two other projects. Textured using dDO, if you couldn't tell already!
Still wrapping my head around all the material nodes and all that, so this project was aimed towards understanding them more. As for efficiency of them? It's definitely questionable. Feedback would be great.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDgyhKMu5e8&feature=youtu.be
Programs:
Maya
Photoshop
xNormal
Quixel suite
3D Coat
Unreal Engine 4 (v4.4.3)
Screenshots:
Some materials:
I made this environment for my second year in university, I'm studying Game's Art at Bolton.
This project's brief was to create a two-room environment based around the theme "Inventor's Lab", using Unreal Engine (v4.4.3). I decided to base it around Deus Ex concepts and the film Pi. Took a little over 4 months to create while juggling two other projects. Textured using dDO, if you couldn't tell already!
Still wrapping my head around all the material nodes and all that, so this project was aimed towards understanding them more. As for efficiency of them? It's definitely questionable. Feedback would be great.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDgyhKMu5e8&feature=youtu.be
Programs:
Maya
Photoshop
xNormal
Quixel suite
3D Coat
Unreal Engine 4 (v4.4.3)
Screenshots:
Some materials:
Replies
Can't really understand why no one posted in here yet.
A few things I've noticed:
(I hope you don't mind painting over your shots to illustrate better what I mean at some points.)
First of all I really like the overall feel and style of the environment. You matched the Deus Ex style pretty well imho and did a good job in building beyond the borders of the concept art I think to recognize.
I think your materials need some improvement, especially the wood on the floor and the wallpaper. Your wood does not really read like varnished wood (which I think it is supposed to be).
Varnished wood has very bright, small highlights and reflects it's surroundings quite a lot while yours is very dull overall and the highlights are very diffuse as well as there is no reflection (at least not visible).
If you were going for varnished wood, these are some things you maybe could improve but I could also be wrong and you were wanting a different type of wooden floor.
The 2nd thing about the wood I've noticed is that your normals are a bit muddy and very soft which makes your floor even less look like wood. In fact, on one of your shots it even looks like your normals on the floor are inverted.
UE4 uses X+, Y-, Z+ coordinates for normals (just in case!).
Your wood on the small cupboard on the other hand reads a lot more like lacquered/varnished wood but is missing a slight bit of detail structure in the normal map.
Another thing on the small cupboard is the razor sharp, weird looking edges in some places.
In such cases its better to bake a normal map from your high poly to get a lot smoother edges.
Another thing is your wallpaper. I like the pattern and it looks very Deus Ex-ish as well but it
's roughness is way too low (i.e. reflects too much light).
Structure wise it looks a bit more like very reflective cardboard than like wallpaper. Wallpaper is, as the name implies, made of paper (as well as cardboard is to some extent) but has a way finer structure:
The floor in the lower room is very dull for it to be...yeah, to be what? It looks like some kind of metallic sc-fi-ish floor to me pattern wise but with the roughness of, for example, carpet or rough wood.
If you would define that material better, it would have a great effect on the whole feeling of the lower room I think
There is also a lot of objects missing some roughness variation. If you play with the roughness values a little more, you can add a lot of interest, quality and realism to your materials. If you observe objects in the real world, you can clearly see that their roughness is not completely flat all over their surface.
I, for my part, couldn't tell that you used dDO for texturing (maybe it's because I don't use it very often). I think you hid it very well.
A thing about the lighting:
I really like your lighting overall since it creates a good mood. You used a nice color scheme but I have the feeling that your lighting in some places is a bit too dark, especially around the entrance area, in the staircase and around the servers.
If you think about it, it's quite funny that it's exactly these places because all of them had good reason to be well lit.
In most cases you'll have entrances as well as doors lit very well in reality to make it easier to find them and open them. Staircases are lit well because it's really hard to walk stairs down/up in the dark. (If you have ever lived in a house with timer controlled stair case lights, you know what I mean.
And lastly, the server. It got very bright displays but for some reason there is almost no light spreading around from them and lights the surroundings.
Same for the very bright light above the door: it's very bright but the corridor is very dark for some reason.
I also wanted to say that I really like the bookshelf and the candle holder a lot! Also the animated textures on your server displays look great! Also loving the ceiling and windows! Very Deus Exy!
Can't say much to the "Pi" part though since I haven't seen the film.
Overall, this is a very very nice piece, good work! If you would invest some more time to address some of the issues mentioned above (even though I might have missed some things) this could look really amazing!
One thing to notice though: I'm a beginner myself so take all of those crits with a grain of salt!
So, wow, very long post, sorry about that.
I hope it helps a bit and since this thread gets now bumped back to page 1, hopefully some other artists will give you some crits here since I really see a lot of potential in this piece!
Cheers!
I fully agree. Before this texture I had a really crappy one with high intensity normal's and it looked off. The normals themselves are actually stretched, as the panels were too short. So the texture itself isn't uniform in the UVs.
I think I focused too much on the material editor itself, instead of photoshop, tweaking the textures etc. I wanted to make a material instance, using the same wood, that toggles on and off the planking pattern, so that blinded me a bit. I was also too worried that the floor would look wet, so I ended up playing with the light roughness so it was diffuse.
How would I go by creating bright and smaller highlights for the wood? I could achieve this, no doubt, with a spec map, but UE4 doesn't support them to my knowledge. Or would you suggest not adjusting the lights roughness as I had?
The cupboard, like the chair, would've had so much more TLC if given the time. If I could have I would've high poly modeled all the props in the scene and baked them down, but I just didn't have the time due to two other projects sitting on my back.
The wallpaper, like the wood, didn't look that well due to my lack of references I think. Material definition is something I really need to get to grips with. I'm planning on doing some mat and lighting studies at some point to help with this.
Again, like the wood and wallpaper. You hit the nail on the head, I needed to define it more. In my head at the time I wanted something metallic, but not overly shiny. My main concern was getting those harsh shadows from the windows to cast onto something, and the metal floor wouldn't allow me, so I tweaked it. I think I moved away from material definition to accommodate lighting, which - in hindsight - makes me think that I should've tweaked the lighting.
The lighting was a huge factor for this scene. I wanted to make something that lead the player, if there was one, down into a dark and dingey computer room. An apartment that was seemingly normal until you reached that room, like discovering a huge secret or something.
My main problem with lighting, for some strange reason, is that I always make it rather dark and I'm not sure why. I need to get out of that habit and try some daytime scenes. I'm a nightime kinda guy so I love the dark haha. I think I've been playing around with shadows too much and not enough light. I'm gonna nip back into the project and play with some lights.
Your post has been very very insightful AkiRa and I'm glad you posted. This is my third environment I've attempted (the first was terrible, the second rather boring) and my first inside UE4. I'm really hoping to ramp up the quality for my next one. I've been studying the content examples quite a lot too and getting to grips with all the material expressions. It's all quite fun!
I think I'll definitely tweak this project over the next few months and see what I can do. Either that, or start fresh and come back to it. The whole project has been very, very helpful and I've learned so much.
this strikes me as being very "sane" compared to Max's apartment, as Pi was about a genius on the verge of insanity. where's the math equations scrawled on the bathroom mirror?
this environment seems to me like the dwelling of someone firmly grounded in reality, which is not what I got out of Pi haha.
you definately got the deus ex vibe going though :thumbup:
I was focusing more on Deus Ex than Pi haha. The project brief was to make an inventors lab, themed around a central prop, so it was kinda hard to get both Deus Ex AND Pi both in there. I wanted a big fat computer, but I had to explain why it was an inventors lab, so Pi's plot came to mind. :P
It's more like Deus Ex meets a slice of Pi. Excuse the pun. You know what I do need? More paper! And scribbles. I was actually planning on throwing a drill in there too.