THRONE ROOM - Drug Lord's "Throne Room" - Ben Cooney

Coontang

FINAL SUBMISSION

The Drug Lord's "Throne" Room by Ben Cooney

Software used: 3ds Max, Zbrush, Photoshop, Substance Designer, Unreal Engine 4, Marmoset Toolbag

Beauty shots in Unreal Engine 4







Throne breakdown from Marmoset Toolbag



Throne textures



Inspiration and reference sample



ORIGINAL POST

I wanted to think outside the box so I came up with the idea to make a drug lord's "throne room". I'm thinking a sort of City of God kind of vibe. A room in an abandoned building that has been re-purposed by a gang.

3DS Max will be used for the modelling and Zbrush for sculpting if needed.
I also want to make the textures procedurally in Substance Designer as far as possible.

I'm not sure if I will just present the final piece in Toolbag or take the plunge and get UE4.

A quick blockout made in my lunch hour.

JohnBarnard

I really like this idea! If you haven't seen Breaking Bad, I vaguely remember that the character Tuco has a similar Den to what you describe. Might be good reference? You can see it in Series 1.

Keeping an eye on this one

Geno527

I like this idea too, and as JohnBarnard said it reminds me a lot of the Tuco's room, you should chek it if you haven't it's a great reference .

Coontang

Thanks guys, glad you like the idea. I have seen breaking bad so Tuco's room did come to mind. I shall have to re-watch that episode though.

Coontang

Made a start on a chesterfield style chair to be my drug lord's throne.

Coontang

I'm feeling a 70s vibe for the decoration of the room so after finding a design which felt right



I had a go at making it in Substance Designer



I'm sure I will come back to it for improvements later.

Coontang

Making slow but steady progress. It's difficult to find the time at the moment

The textures are all procedural substances.

Lawrence Preston

Really cool idea. Digging the wallpaper, man. The board holding up the air conditioner is a nice touch!

Dykov

Jesse Pinkman throne :poly121:

Coontang

Update on the chair, still needs some refinement.

Coontang

After spending yesterday on the chair sculpt I thought I'd refine my substances at bit more today and also create some new ones.

Once I had tested them in toolbag I added the rest of the scene to try out some camera angles for the final beauty shots so I know which areas to focus on.

Odow

Looking nice ! however i'm not sure about this carpet. it feel like hay.

Coontang

Thanks for the feedback last week Odow. I spent a few days trying to improve the carpet, I'm still not sure about it but I think a detail normal will help. Unfortunately there was no way I could find to add one to the substance and have it show in Toolbag, maybe UE4 will make it possible.



I also ran into an issue with my substances not displaying correctly in toolbag. Though they do work in Bitmap to Material.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=147916

Interestingly the same errors are apparent in UE4. Must be some difference in the substance engines. Hopefully it gets fixed in the next 2 months before the end of the competiton or I will have to swap my kB of substances for MB of textures

I then spent some time making a door. I began making a high poly model and realised I could probably make it procedurally instead. It took a lot of trial and error to get the panels to be resizable without distorting the edges. I may make a video to explain my substances at some point but the basic idea of the panels is :

I separate the panel into a top/bottom piece and a sides piece.



Then I use offset in the y direction in a transform 2d node to move the top and bottom up and down which resizes the panels.

Another y offset in a separate node adjusts their position. The x offset needs to be left at 0 but I wasn't sure if/how they can be hidden.



After making the door I used the other half of the texture to make some tiling sections for edging/picture rail etc. around the room.

As with all of my substances I will keep coming back to add extra details and more parameters.





I had this idea after watching something on youtube recently about prop money used in films. It's not going to be used for a while probably but the idea came to me and I just had to do it.



And finally this week after seeing that amazing Paris apartment and running into an issue with my exposed parameters for the door not showing up in Toolbag I have switched over to UE4.

I've only spent about an hour with it so far testing importing my room and substances but I'm impressed with it. Particularly the speed that it updates when changing parameters in a substance, it's even faster than in B2M or Substance Designer itself.

Coontang

Another week, another update

The first thing i did this week was begin looking at the examples which are available with UE4. I was drawn to this scene/documentation https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Resources/Showcases/RealisticRendering/index.html. Partly because I want to light me scene this well, and partly because there is a carpet in the scene!

I recreated the technique used in that example, though my method was simplified as I'm not an expert at unreal shaders.

I ended up with I think 8 layers for the fibers and then one layer on the bottom which only has transparency at the egdes.



I think it works really well though the blood may need adjusting, it's a bit too bright at the moment.



Next I improved the room itself some more. I have learned that for a nice light map I will need to weld all of the parts down to avoid seams. For now I just increased the lightmap resolution. You can see some light bleeding through the wall on the left still.



And as you can see I have also taken the throne into the texturing stage. It's still a work in progress but I am pleased with it so far. This is not being textured procedurally but is being done in Substance Designer.





Once the "throne" is done I need to start making other props, and fast!

noscope

NICEEEEEEE. that leather texture could do with some more gloss here and there for the little less worn areas.

WarrenM

Dat storytelling with the bullet holes/blood. Nice work!

Invisible Parrot

Great work on throne! Love how did you blend blood to a leather and leather age.

Coontang

Thanks for the feedback last week guys, it was really good motivation. I implemented your suggestion noscope and made some areas smoother and shinier. It might be hard to tell though as my lighting has developed a lot!

So this week I have:

-Improved the lighting and worked on the light map for the room
-Created another rug using the same substance and mesh
-Added glass to the windows with another procedural substance. I'm not sure but the transparent/additive blend modes in Unreal appear to disable the nice reflections
-Created a coffee table, no high poly, just simple model and a substance. The substance isn't entirely procedural as it uses baked curvature and ao
-Floor lamp and table lamp with high poly. Table lamp isn't in the scene yet
-Gun safe with high poly
-TV, very quick high poly, the static noise is animated but not sure why I bothered as the final result will be a screen capture (ahwel, it looks cool)

-I also added the procedural Beretta which I made at the end of last year. http://ben3d.co.uk/beretta
So I'm just declaring now that this is an existing asset.

Geno527

I knew it would be awesome ! Keep up the good work !

Coontang

Thanks Geno

Geno527

Btw, can we have a render of the back of the throne ? The front is awesome and sculpt was really nice, so I'm very interested to see how it looks. (if you already have one, don't bother you of making one, just focus on your work ^^)

Coontang

I didn't have one because it's too dark with the way I have my lighting set up but it's no problem. I just threw another light in quickly.

Coontang

Some images of what I added last week. I'm still playing with the post processing to try and get the right balance of light and dark areas.

The glass lights are just textured with tiling substances as they wont be seen much. The idea is the building has no power and everything is powered by cables coming from generators. I'm hoping I can find a way to add these in unreal rather than trying to position them correctly in max.

Coontang

I've been a bit under the weather lately so progress was a bit slow but I have gotten back on track the last few days and thrown together quite a few new props.

If anyone is having trouble loading the images on here let me know. They're mainly hosted on my website so it might start to struggle with so many images to load.

First since the last update I finally finished off the sofa. I made a lot of use of alphas and noisemaker to create this, as well as using a 3D rope brush for the cushion edging.







Next I made a toilet.







I plan to have a lot of items on this poker table in the corner, so this is just the main pieces.











And finally the last large item I made since the last time I posted was the air conditioner in the window.







The next thing I want to do is add various items of clutter to bring the room to life.

I decided to add in this xbox model which I made about 4 years ago. It's not a great model but it does the job. The table it's on is just boxes with procedural wood.



And some err Men's Literature.



I have a list of items scribbled down on a post it note to add to the clutter such as drug paraphernalia, escort calling cards, poker chips and playing cards, alcohol, knives, money. Hopefully they will be quite quick to make.

Coontang

Finally I spent this morning placing IES light profiles on the main lights and adding depth of field and colour grading to the post processing volume, as well as a few other adjustments.

Coontang

Just testing the high res screenshot function after adding in the money assets.

domonickb

Really awesome concept! The idea ran past my mind, but went with something else. Really cool to see someone go for it!

Awesome work man.

-Domonick

Grusti

I have only one question ... where is DRUGS? O_O


Good job over all)

Coontang

haha fair point. They are going in at the moment. This is the generic brick of white powder that I've made.



Thanks for the nice comments

Coontang

This week I added quite a few more small objects to place around the scene.

Poker chips, playing cards, escort girl calling card with lipstick, wallet, condom, mirror, lines of powder, credit card, bricks of powder, scales, bag of weed and a bowie knife.

Some of these are just simple low models (poker chips, cards, lipstick) with textures made from photographs or procedurally, I have used my own photographs when possible. A few of them had very quick high poly models (condom, wallet) and a few had more detailed high poly models (knife, scales).










The previous image of the powder brick was made using 2 layers and rendered in Toolbag. The inner layer had the powder texture and the outer layer had a normal map of creases set to additive transparency. Unfortunately UE4 doesn't have much support for reflections on transparent/additive materials so I had to combine them into a single texture instead.



For the scales I made quick high poly so I could bake a normal map and colour mask to make the texturing faster.





The knife was made in around 5 hours yesterday from start to finish. I have been sort of speed modelling these assets. The wallet for example took 30 minutes to create a basic high poly, retop, UV, bake and texture.

Coontang

This week I made the last few props and changed my colour grading.





I don't know if anybody else experienced this but when I first started looking into PBR google just turned up results for Pabst Blue Ribbon. Which gave me the idea to make this.





I also made some cigars and related props for my drug lord. I made these normal maps through a combination of high poly modelling, zbrush and substance. Again most of these were only an hour or 2 from start to finish.

Each prop was made separately and had its own sub-graph in the substance which I combined using material blend nodes.



















So the scene is pretty much finished now. I will use the last week to tidy things up and prepare my final submission. Any feedback at this stage would be really helpful.

Coontang

Testing out camera angles

Coontang

My final beauty shot ideas. I think I know which 3 I will submit but I will wait a bit longer for more opinions from friends who have been a great help.