Fighting Stage redesign (UNI module)

Mark Circus

Hi here is my first semester’s progress of my UE4 scene of a fighting stage redesign that was created for a university module.
I decided to choose the extravagant underground scene from Tekken and my idea was to create a destroyed version of the environment for my redesign.
I will be updating this forum post with my second semester's improvements for the environment. Any feedback or suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Scene


Composition (rule of thirds)


Features and Flow


Main Modular Pieces


Colour Palette


Mood boards








Redesign idea

Rough colour and silhouette layout

Mark Circus

Blockout


Progression paintover


Minor details


Lightmapped scene


Master material for flooring


Final renders for semester one
Detail lighting


Textured renders




Overall my outcome above fell short of my destroyed redesign aim and still looks too neat and tidy. Here and my main points for this semesters improvements.
More detail on the roof as at the moment it looks boring and repetitive. I will most likely sculpt ornate details in Zbrush to remedy this problem.
The debris looks out of place and the harsh falloff fails to make them blend into the scene, so greater consideration for where the debris has come from needs to take place and will possibly have to be redone.
Vertex painting needs to be used to paint dirt, dust etc over models.
More complex shaders within engine, using textures rather than values.
The flooring seems a bit too flat and could do with breaking up into multiple broken pieces. (could also potentially benefit from a bump offset.)

Here is a rough paintover of my suggested improvements


Any additional suggestions and feedback would be greatly appreciated

Lt_Commander

I think what would really drive home the idea of a destroyed environment is one large focal point of destruction, from which all of the damage emanates. So, for example, instead of having a small hole in the ceiling, knock out a good 10-20% of the stage and set the rest of the damage around the idea of outdoor environmental exposure over time. It's not so much that you just want to add patches of vertex painted dirt or cracks/variation, you should try telling a story of what happened and how long ago it occurred. Was it a bomb? An earthquake? A train car that went off the rails and into the terminal? Was it a few days ago? A few decades ago? I think that if you answer those questions, research examples of that kind of destruction, and get into that mindset, adding aging will be a lot easier.

ngw

Some of your normal maps seem weird, particularly on the floor : The bevelling on the tile edges is crazy-big & the uniform noise you've added to your normal maps isn\t particularly active. Possibly the noise will seem more appropriate once you've got some of the larger scale destruction in place.

There's a lot more interesting texture detail in the Tekken reference than in your recreation.

Also your arches don't reach up as high, which means they don't expand out with the central tunnel the way the originals do. This makes the composition a lot flatter.



Currently you have the broad structural/lighting information in place, but your only high-frequency detail is noise & you have barely any medium-scaled detail (colour blocking, generally) in place at all.

Mark Circus

Thank you for feedback, it is greatly appreciated . I agree that some of the normals, lighting and models are slightly off and will be working on correcting these areas in the upcoming weeks as well as focusing on a specific destruction style (earthquake, bomb etc) .

Mark Circus

Sorry I haven't updated this thread in a while. Today was a modelling deadline for the scene in which I had to show improvements made for the environment. Since the last post I have worked on the feedback gained from lecturers and people on Polycount (which I appreciate ) Here are some renders and comparisons. I still have a lot to do on it, but it's going in the right direction.

I've directed the destruction towards an earthquake that has struck the station.















Any feedback and suggestions will be greatly appreciated

Mark Circus

The deadline for this university module is tomorrow so here are my final renders, any feedback would be greatly appreciated (I aim to improve this further after uni) .

Since my last post I re jigged the lighting so that the viewers eyes were drew down the corridor, added more particle effects, add physics too the scene as well as additional meshes.













Here is a brief fly through too, sorry about the lack of audio.

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De1iOT05mv8[/ame]

CharacterCarl

Hey,

looking good. I really like the improvement you've made, especially color-wise. Are those dust particles unlit? Because lit particles work quite well for dust and currenty I think the particles look too big/opaque/bright.
You could perhaps also add some DOF, if only just near focus blur (to blur the particles close to the screen) if you don't want to blur any of your scene.

nickcomeau

Hey! I'm liking the progression that you have. I would say that for me the stone materials is the part that isn't doing it right now. It isn't meshing well with the rest of the scene. I think that is because the level of material detail isn't to scale with what it would actually be. The size of the stone information is a bit inconsistent as well as the grout size in one or two parts. I think if you tighten all that up and scale it correctly, and make it feel really hard, that it will really bring your scene a lot farther.

Mark Circus

@ DerRazputin the dust particles are lit and yeah I totally agree, I was tweaking the post process D of F earlier, but must have overlooked the near transition. Thank you for the feedback i'll go back and changes .

@ nickcomeau Thank you for the feedback it's greatly appreciated. The stone material is mostly a tiling texture so i'll go back into the shaders and make it more uniform over the meshes.