THRONE ROOM - Atomic Ruin - Chukker & pwTA

Chukker

Long-time lurker and a collegue new to polycount jumping in the fray. We're thinking something Fallout-esq. Ours is the throne room of a wasteland warlord. He rules from his atomic throne deep within a ruined nuclear missile silo. The throne itself is an imposing Terry Gilliam construct, crafted together with scavenged ICBM and command center components.

I'll be doing the concept pieces, modelling and texturing. pwTA will be working on materials and lighting. We're both fairly new to UE4, so it will be a good learning experience for us.

Some refs...



and some initial roughs of the space...

Grusti

Chukker

More sketches...

Chukker

Aerashi

I love Fallout, I love Terry Gilliam, looking forward to see what you make of it

dustykhan

Brilliant, I want to watch the Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus and play Fallout again now!

Look forward to seeing this progress!

Chukker

Bedrock

Outstanding concepting so far! Love the idea too, can't wait to see this progress.

Geno527

I really love your style, I'm very curious to see how it will look in 3D, this is ganna be awesome

Chukker

Another sketch of the actual throne and the start of the block-in.

Chukker

Continuing with the block-in...

polytom

Nailed the scale.

Looking good

juoolz

this is great..def going to keep track of this.

Chukker

Small update, working on a heightmap/vert color rubble material for the walls, ceilings and rubble debris props. Feels like the broken concrete component could use some additional macro normal information, displacement or just additional modeled edge geo?

Soy13

pretty sketching and cool idea. Following.

SLOT

Great work. Bout the edges, to my mind if you want to make them better looking you should try scaling the texture down a bit. The overall fill is good but the texture lacks micro details. I don't you think you need additional geo because the overall lighting of the scenes hides those details.

Chukker

Some work on the throne itself... I'm currently digging through reference working out the design of this salvaged command chair and electronics which have been bolted and wired to a nuclear warhead per my concepts. I found it interesting that fire control officers in a silo have to strap in when ICBMs get launched. Apparently having a giant rocket take off on the other side of the wall might just shake things just a little bit.

Chukker

Walls, floors and such coming along but so much to do still... ugh.

Chukker

More WiP on the chair, needs more substance so to speak...

Chukker

Minor update, definitely not tracking to finish up. Over-scoped and counted on having more time to devote to this that I have ended up with. Still adding consoles, monitors, etc to the throne, knocking out some more textures/props and while I am watching my daughter I've created some Soviet propaganda with crayons of all things. I'll filter and dirty em up and throw them in the background trash and clutter.

Chukker

Here's an update on the throne. Most of the components are in, but still needing a details and weathering pass. I need to add cables, cables and more cables as well as additional support infrastructure and whatever little extras I find time for. I gotta quickly shift to propping out the background which is lagging behind.

Warhead prop that the throne is rigged up to...

Here's another heightmap/vert color material I tossed together to create the salvaged metal panels that a number of things in the scene will be built with (throne dais, improvised walkways, additional clutter, etc). The bubbly metal along with a little UV stretching works as edges cut via blow torch and can also be used to incorporate bits of blistery/slaggy breakup in the interior of the panels.

Chukker

Here's the latest progress. Throne is close but there's still a sizeable list of things to finish in a week and half. The background still needs more props such as piping, derelict furniture and additional clutter. The silo shaft needs detailed out. Lighting / post-process polish pass.

Chukker

The latest progress and my final revisions before the last week is up. I'm not going to get around to adding some of the d

Chukker

I got finished! I had to drop some of the more interesting background props found in my concept pieces, particularly the rocketry components from the ICBM. The throne itself is missing a few items that were concepted. There are areas where the walls, ceiling and floors are too bare compared to the references I found and what my expectations for this space should be.

Still I had a lot of fun throwing this together. I love post-apocalytic environments and creating something like this has been on my to do list for a while. I've built plenty of environments in this genre during my time on the Command and Conquer team in the Tiberium universe, but those were always RTS levels and never up-close and personal. I learned quite a bit tackling a higher fidelity background and by watching other teams' progress on their environments. There's lots of talent here and I've been humbled.

There were certainly some things that didn't go so well. Compiling all the chair, various control consoles, monitors and wires onto two 4K sheets was such a pain. If I were to do it all over again, I'd just make one sheet for each major component. The end result would have been ~12 sheets, probably 1Kx1K or 2Kx1K apiece. Working on the 4K images dogged all my programs and I was kidding myself believing I was doing some sort of grand performance optimization. The compiled texture also drove me to keep the whole throne area largely one mesh, also a problem when it came to lightmapping.

The environment was overscoped for what amounted to a mostly individual challenge. This led to lots of rushed assets. Messy bakes and unfinished textures and materials are to be found throughout the environment. For many objects I didn't even do a high-low bake and just nDo'ed some details on the low mesh, making for assets that don't hold up well upon close inspection.