Star Wars Mania: Docking Bay 94
polycounter lvl 3
Hey there everyone! I am a long time reader of Polycount, this is my fist post on the forums however. So I am a HUGE Star Wars nerd like so many others, and I have wanted to do some Star Wars art for a long time, but just never seemed to find an appropriate time to dive into a Star Wars themed project. Well, with Force Awakens coming at the end of the year, and just general Star Wars Mania going on inside my head, I stopped playing Diablo 3 and World of Tanks on my lunch breaks and started doing something productive, i.e. started my first ever Star Wars project. So my goal is to build out the Mos Eisley Docking Bay 94, with the Falcon sitting in it and a small part of the surrounding city ( maybe even the Cantina if my limited attention span holds out ) and Drop the whole thing into UE4 so you can run around in it. ( I was originally thinking about using Crytek instead of UE4 since I am more familiar with it, but ultimatly I think UE4 is prettier, especially the lighting, than Crytek )
Film Reference of Mos Eisley:
So I am doing this Pretty high resolution, on-screen poly counts will be right around 2 million give or take 100K or so. As long as I can keep the draw calls down, the poly counts don't worry me too much, especially since I will be running the scene on a Titan Black, or maybe a Titan / Titan Black SLI combo if I want higher frame rate. SO I have started with building the Falcon and it is coming along, slower than I would like since I only get lunch breaks during the week to work on it, but it is progressing non-the-less. I am just hoping that my attention span holds up long enough to finish it. I am trying to have this done by the end of the year when the movie comes out. For the Falcon itself, I am shooting for right around 500K tris for my poly budget. I will continue to post as progress continues. Critiques are always welcom, thanks!
Film Reference of Mos Eisley:
So I am doing this Pretty high resolution, on-screen poly counts will be right around 2 million give or take 100K or so. As long as I can keep the draw calls down, the poly counts don't worry me too much, especially since I will be running the scene on a Titan Black, or maybe a Titan / Titan Black SLI combo if I want higher frame rate. SO I have started with building the Falcon and it is coming along, slower than I would like since I only get lunch breaks during the week to work on it, but it is progressing non-the-less. I am just hoping that my attention span holds up long enough to finish it. I am trying to have this done by the end of the year when the movie comes out. For the Falcon itself, I am shooting for right around 500K tris for my poly budget. I will continue to post as progress continues. Critiques are always welcom, thanks!
Replies
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=151900
Also look for a book "Inside the worlds of the star wars trilogy" It has a layout of the city that someone has thought out which would be really useful to you.
Looking forward to seeing it progress man .
Thanks man, yea, I have that book, GREAT reference for Mos Eisley! If I had help with this, it would be awesome to build out a large chunk of the city, but as it is just me working on this, I will probably only have time to get a little part of the city surrounding the docking bay done. That is, if my focus and interest holds out long enough to finish this project, as I have the attention span of a Gold Fish!!!!
It begins!
Do you still see all those details when you close your eyes? it's insane!
Dat ass...
superb job man...
But if you look at the concept/image from film you will see some small details the if you want to make a very close replica you may want to consider
1. space in docking bay in http://i.imgur.com/nuC97DK.jpg
it looks very squashed and not much space for troopers or anything to move around,this is also means the ship would have little room when parking/docking
2. The yellow boxes/pods seem weird,there is no yellow at all in the shot shown in images given
http://i.imgur.com/fkYrlG6.jpg
Please not these small details are just based off what i have seen from the image sheet
http://i.imgur.com/ids9Ooa.jpg
Also by doing this, I was able to make the bay deeper into the ground which makes the internal walls taller, more like the movie ref.
And you are now higher up on the upper ring of the bay.
Now there is a lot of discrepancy between the actual movie set, the CG docking bay from the enhanced edition and the various books and illustrations that are around, so instead of going for a 100% recreation of any 1 of those, my bay is kinda a blend of all of them. I have also added a few of my own design features to make the whole thing more 1st person real-time friendly. Here is 1 such example, I added a small observation lounge that offers a good close-up view of the falcon from the front. Its not in any of the reference, I just thought it would be neat to put it, so I did. There are a few other non-accurate details and design features that I improvised as well. I am going for a more overall look and feel accuracy rather than a 100% detail accuracy in my whole scene. I would say that when all is said and done, I am shooting for my models to be about 70% - 75% accurate to the reference.
And thought it would be cool to add a subtle engine glow, like the engines are in stand-by mode.
And lastly, just a teaser, OH LOOK, A 2nd DOCKING BAY!!!! I wonder what's gonna go in there???
Here are some videos showing our progress so far.
Part 1 ( surrounding city and Cantina blockouts ):
https://youtu.be/215fr8bOtyQ
Part 2 ( the docking bay upper levels / storage room / control room / upper deck ):
https://youtu.be/xMokQoltrZQ
Part 3 ( the docking bay lower levels / power room / observation lounge / ground level with the Falcon ):
https://youtu.be/qU2kDdpLQH4
And here are some still images for you all:
As for scale, environment blockouts, lighting.... two thumbs up for me. The hype is real with all this star wars awesomeness recently.
If I set the indirect lighting quality to 1 it takes about 45 min on my desktop system which is a 16-core Xeon system, however these images and vids the indirect lighting quality was cranked up to 7 and it took about 4 hours to bake the lighting at that setting. I am anxiously waiting for the epic guys to give us the ability to bake selected objects only instead of always having to bake the entire scene. I think that feature is on their roadmap but I have no idea when it will be implemented.
So I have an idea of how I am going to go about mapping this thing. I am not entirely sure if it is going to work or not but I think it might. Basically I am going to create a bunch of texture sets that define a surface type and are tilable, and then use masks to define where different surface types will go on the model, kinda like the way Quixel Suite works where you have layers that are material types, and masks that define where each of those material types will go. It should keep my texture budgets under control, but it will have the down-side of making my shaders somewhat expensive with lots of Lerp blending between the different surface types going on. I'm running this on a GTX Titan Black though so I am not too concerned. My only real goal is to make it pretty, it doesn't need to be very efficient since I am running it on pretty high-end hardware.
Thanks everyone for the encouragement, it helps me stay focused. I am actually surprised my attention span for this project has held out for as long as it has. Usually I get about a month or so into a personal project and lose interest. So far so good, I'm just going with it until 1 of 2 things happens, I either A: finish it, or B: something else shiny and sparkly gets dangled in front of me and I go off and follow that instead, hopefully option A is the one that comes to fruition!!!
Yea sorry, poor choice of words. When I say masking I mean blending. So doing things like scorch marks, dirt streaks, scratches on the edges, those will all be blend masks blending between thing like painted metal / bare metal / burnt metal / etc.
brings me back to my highschool days when i tried making this in quake arena editor, it suuuuucked
Well done sir!
can't wait to see more
subbed
And another buddy helping out got his low-poly blockout for the Gonk Power Droid in.
And lastly, I got a basic cockpit model in for my Falcon. It's pretty low-detail, but it should hold up good enough since you will never get too close to it.
Thanks everyone, more to come soon!!!
It makes me wanna do some Star Wars stuff as well