THRONE ROOM Divine Antares skywalger
Divine Antares
(Team members: only me
)
This is the main dwelling of the king of Antares star system. But king can be a misleading term, as in Antarian society there is no such thing as absolute political authority. More proper term would be highest spiritual and cultural advisor or guru if you want. Such a person is generally called Numen, the one who is in closest connection with the Logos (universe, cosmos, "god", life itself) and can interpret him/it (the Logos) in extremely clean, undistorted way. Except for great wisdom and knowledge, this connection gives him great powers and skills which can be interpreted as miracles or sorcery when spotted by some undeveloped mind.
This chamber has two main functions. First, it serves as a reception hall, where he receives visits from all corners of the galaxy, but mainly just from politicaly and culturally aligned worlds. Second, it serves as meditation room and Logos energy amplifier...some call this energy as The Force ;-)
References and inspiration
I admit that when I started blocking out first shapes I didn't really have any references which would demonstrate what exactly I would like to create...I just had in mind that it should be in space, there should be a lot of rounded silhouettes with sharp endings, it should be somehow more in “space/future/royal” than “surgery room sci-fi” style. I have seen recently the Jupiter Ascending movie...so that became my first inspiration, I really like some stuff from Star Wars Old Republic concept arts...and some pictures of ancient hindu architecture.
Basic shapes
So for modeling I use software called Blender. As first thing I created prototype for every single asset I need. Prototypes are just simple shapes with more or less final silhouette, smooth groups, proportions, they have temporary (automatically generated) Uvs. Picture below illustrate this process.
When I thought that I was done and a had trouble to figure out something else, something new, I decided to get it into UE4 to see how it is gonna look like with some basic colors, materials and lights.
Getting prototypes into UE4
1. Blender to UE4 pipeline – I found this tutorial which helped me a lot...so I suggest it to other Blender users. Now one might be able to get stuff into UE from blender even without watching it, but you might get your scale, orientation and positioning wrong when in UE. So thanks to this tut I set up my export setting right and everything went smoothly.
2. Composition/right placement of assets – In order to have exactly the same composition of assets in both Blender and UE, before exporting I set pivot to 0,0,0 coordinates. When in UE, I only need to set all assets to this coordinates, make correct rotations and everything is positioned like in Blender source file. But this method work only when doing final composition in modeling software itself, otherwise I suggest to place pivot normally into middle/bottom part of asset.
(Team members: only me
)This is the main dwelling of the king of Antares star system. But king can be a misleading term, as in Antarian society there is no such thing as absolute political authority. More proper term would be highest spiritual and cultural advisor or guru if you want. Such a person is generally called Numen, the one who is in closest connection with the Logos (universe, cosmos, "god", life itself) and can interpret him/it (the Logos) in extremely clean, undistorted way. Except for great wisdom and knowledge, this connection gives him great powers and skills which can be interpreted as miracles or sorcery when spotted by some undeveloped mind.
This chamber has two main functions. First, it serves as a reception hall, where he receives visits from all corners of the galaxy, but mainly just from politicaly and culturally aligned worlds. Second, it serves as meditation room and Logos energy amplifier...some call this energy as The Force ;-)
References and inspiration
I admit that when I started blocking out first shapes I didn't really have any references which would demonstrate what exactly I would like to create...I just had in mind that it should be in space, there should be a lot of rounded silhouettes with sharp endings, it should be somehow more in “space/future/royal” than “surgery room sci-fi” style. I have seen recently the Jupiter Ascending movie...so that became my first inspiration, I really like some stuff from Star Wars Old Republic concept arts...and some pictures of ancient hindu architecture.
Basic shapes
So for modeling I use software called Blender. As first thing I created prototype for every single asset I need. Prototypes are just simple shapes with more or less final silhouette, smooth groups, proportions, they have temporary (automatically generated) Uvs. Picture below illustrate this process.
When I thought that I was done and a had trouble to figure out something else, something new, I decided to get it into UE4 to see how it is gonna look like with some basic colors, materials and lights.
Getting prototypes into UE4
1. Blender to UE4 pipeline – I found this tutorial which helped me a lot...so I suggest it to other Blender users. Now one might be able to get stuff into UE from blender even without watching it, but you might get your scale, orientation and positioning wrong when in UE. So thanks to this tut I set up my export setting right and everything went smoothly.
2. Composition/right placement of assets – In order to have exactly the same composition of assets in both Blender and UE, before exporting I set pivot to 0,0,0 coordinates. When in UE, I only need to set all assets to this coordinates, make correct rotations and everything is positioned like in Blender source file. But this method work only when doing final composition in modeling software itself, otherwise I suggest to place pivot normally into middle/bottom part of asset.
Setup of basic materials, lighting and mood
Custom Skybox – I needed to make big huge universe full of stars, which would surround this structure, which is in space and have many big windows. I found free software Spacescape, which can very quickly create nice looking space skybox. It has even option to export directly as *.dds texture cubemap format which UE understands.
There are just 2 little issues with this. When exporting skybox, you have to adjust 2 parameters in the export window. One is size (512, 1024,...) and second is template (Unity, Unreal,...). If you wanna have sharp looking skybox, you need to select size of 2048 pixels (that is height of texture, the width is 16k pixels). I have read somewhere on forums a reaction from some Epic employee who said that UE do not support textures larger than 85 MB and 4096px in biggest dimension. So I tried it and this is not true. I got the cubemap in, it just took something around 10min of time, during which the UE looked like frozen. Second thing is the template...you need to select OGRE 3D, do NOT select UNREAL. Do not ask me why, because I do not know why xD. After export, it can be additionaly edited in photoshop if needed (NVIDIA plugin needed for export from photoshop).
When the texture was in UE, I needed to double click on the texture and make some tweakes. I disabled mipmaps, compresion changed to TC HDR and played with value of RGB curves (relates to how bright you make stars in spacescape).
Then I followed this tutorial, which walked me thorough the rest of procedures (photoshop pipline mentioned in this tutorial).
Shadow maps – from start I had a problem with really ugly shadow maps (created whenever I clicked Build button). I then found out that all assets have by default shadow maps with resolution just 64px, which is extremely low resolution. I fixed this by setting higher value (512 or 1024px) under Detail tab for each asset. Build time (Preview quality) is now of course much higher, around 3 - 5 min.
Reflection on glass/translucent materials – I am not able to get specularity (hot spot) and Screen Space Reflections (SSR) on translucent materials. I tried all sorts of material setup which a found around the internet. Then a found some official statement from Epic staff that SSR is currently not possible on translucent surfaces...that means that just really ugly (at least from up close) glass-like material is possible, as Reflection probes have resolution just 128x128px and that is simply not enough (see picture). If anybody knows how to solve it, or thinks that I am wrong in some statements here, please tell me
Custom Skybox – I needed to make big huge universe full of stars, which would surround this structure, which is in space and have many big windows. I found free software Spacescape, which can very quickly create nice looking space skybox. It has even option to export directly as *.dds texture cubemap format which UE understands.
There are just 2 little issues with this. When exporting skybox, you have to adjust 2 parameters in the export window. One is size (512, 1024,...) and second is template (Unity, Unreal,...). If you wanna have sharp looking skybox, you need to select size of 2048 pixels (that is height of texture, the width is 16k pixels). I have read somewhere on forums a reaction from some Epic employee who said that UE do not support textures larger than 85 MB and 4096px in biggest dimension. So I tried it and this is not true. I got the cubemap in, it just took something around 10min of time, during which the UE looked like frozen. Second thing is the template...you need to select OGRE 3D, do NOT select UNREAL. Do not ask me why, because I do not know why xD. After export, it can be additionaly edited in photoshop if needed (NVIDIA plugin needed for export from photoshop).
When the texture was in UE, I needed to double click on the texture and make some tweakes. I disabled mipmaps, compresion changed to TC HDR and played with value of RGB curves (relates to how bright you make stars in spacescape).
Then I followed this tutorial, which walked me thorough the rest of procedures (photoshop pipline mentioned in this tutorial).
Shadow maps – from start I had a problem with really ugly shadow maps (created whenever I clicked Build button). I then found out that all assets have by default shadow maps with resolution just 64px, which is extremely low resolution. I fixed this by setting higher value (512 or 1024px) under Detail tab for each asset. Build time (Preview quality) is now of course much higher, around 3 - 5 min.
Reflection on glass/translucent materials – I am not able to get specularity (hot spot) and Screen Space Reflections (SSR) on translucent materials. I tried all sorts of material setup which a found around the internet. Then a found some official statement from Epic staff that SSR is currently not possible on translucent surfaces...that means that just really ugly (at least from up close) glass-like material is possible, as Reflection probes have resolution just 128x128px and that is simply not enough (see picture). If anybody knows how to solve it, or thinks that I am wrong in some statements here, please tell me
[FONT=Cambria, serif]
[/FONT]And that is where I am right now. I think it is useful to preview the whole prototyped scene under simple light/material setup...Thanks to this I now know where I would like to add light sources, how to improve some assets and I have better idea of what is ahead of me. I can set priorities for each asset and preview progress on the fly in context with other assets (color, detail and visual style match).
Prototyping is almost done so see you soon)
[/FONT]And that is where I am right now. I think it is useful to preview the whole prototyped scene under simple light/material setup...Thanks to this I now know where I would like to add light sources, how to improve some assets and I have better idea of what is ahead of me. I can set priorities for each asset and preview progress on the fly in context with other assets (color, detail and visual style match).
Prototyping is almost done so see you soon
)
Replies