Abandoned Gas Station - UE4
ngon master
I´ve been blocking out this scene for some time now. My goal is to make a small scene about abandoned gas station and diner. I also want to learn UE4 and this is going to be my first project with it. I also going to use Substance tools as much as possible.
This is what I got so far.
Latest:
Basic blockout:
This is what I got so far modeled and textured.
This is what I got so far.
Latest:
Basic blockout:
This is what I got so far modeled and textured.
Replies
I´m going to try make it more colourful. I also want to add much more assets there. I just want to get the lighting and master material right before that.
Keep it coming!
Cheers!
I'm certain you will get to it in time but be sure to add sufficient lighting inside or tone the exterior light down. Because right now, the sight is drawn towards these big bright spots.
Good work on the textures. That's a lot of progress from the blackout.
I'd advise against making them 'too dirty' from the beginning on, though. It also leaves more room for decals and things you really want to draw attention to that way. I know these are just the main textures without any assets but you can spot tiling pretty easily currently.
I don't know if it's intended but the cloth on the seats also looks a bit too 'saggy' for my taste.
I tried to fix some of those issues and tweaked the lighting and textures. I also added more models there. I need to learn more that UE4 light mapping stuff.
Keep up the good work
@krystalcampioni I´m trying to go with semi realisic style. Taking some freedom with things but still try to keep materials and proportions right. Those seams are made there to illustrate rubber borders that I saw in one of my reference shots but I think I´m going to change that too
I deleted the old lighting setup and started it from the ground up. I wanted to have very strong contrast between shadows and bright spots. I also put indirect bounces to 60 so the light is able to diffuse there more. Previously I put a simple light inside the room that made it look too burned out. Baking was much faster but it looked wrong
I still don´t know how this interior lighting will work with the exterior lighting.
I also played a lot with the post process volume and kind of like this hi contrast setting. There are too many settings to play with
So long story short, here is the latest:
I also worked with my master material a bit:
WIP exterior stuff
One thing: Is that supposed to be water on the ground, next to the jukebox? It looks a bit blue, almost like paint to me
What size are the textures, and are they mostly procedurals or?
@eirikm Textures are mostly 1k or 512. I use a lot of Substance Designer but I also use Photoshop for some stuff if I want to get super fast results.
Long time since my last update. I´ve been testing a lot of different stuff and made s¤¤t loads of assets. Mostly playing with different lighting setups. I ended up using full dynamic lighting outside and baked lighting for interior parts. I wanted to use DFAO and other cool stuff but my old pc can´t handle those. This is starting to be way too big project for just a personal work
So much stuff that I want to show you but here are few shots:
Here´s some shots from the diner lit mostly with indirect lighting. I liked this dark mood that it has now.
For the car (Toyota Yaris) I just modeled hi-poly, sculpted damage in ZBrush, made low-poly and then baked some maps and did a fast Substance Designer run with this graph.
For the ground texture (asphalt) I built this graph. I use it in outside with the material that is blending three different materials. I need to make rest of those.
I made a pretty big set of different props that I´m using to set dress the whole scene. Here is a small shot of them as well. They are very optimized so I can use a lot of them and I also used texture atlases so I could combine models into different sets that I can place to thescene + can save draw calls. Need to make more for the shop and garage locations tho.
Here are some shots about the hi-poly vegetation. I modeled them all in max and baked camera space normal maps. For base colors I just heavily used basic gradients and noises that max have and baked them as well. So far I got the small foliage done. Trees and other bigger assets are still at the WIP stage. I use basic two sided foliage material in UE4 for the low-poly foliage.
Here is btw my ground master material that is doing a lot of stuff
So that´s the latest updates. Still sooooo much to do
@Jestersheepy Thanks, need to tweak that indoor lighting more. I´ve been testing so many different lighting test there that it´s hard to say which looks the best
@ekul I´m much faster with 3ds max for doing blockouts than with UE4. It´s much easier to start making the final assets when using this blockout in max. For the final scene I will be exporting individual models and place them pretty much the same way in UE4. I don´t know if this is the right way to do it but I think it´s pretty fast and easy to iterate with different elements.
Anyway here is the latest shot:
I've always been a little weak on overhanging foliage... care to share how you approach it?
In terms of critique...
I don't actually see any pump stations so I'm not sure if you'll be adding them in or if they're currently just covered by the car but if they're there or you plan to put them in later on.. I suggest moving the outside vehicle from the 2 vehicles parked on both sides of the pump stations... It easily masks what your piece actually is, If I didn't already know the title of this piece it would have taken me some time to actually realize this was a gas station and also they're both of the same colour variation & parallel to each other which makes it feel a little bit dull as well.... Although the gas price board is a good hint it still doesn't give off enough information to your viewers to what it could actually be and from the second screenshot it almost looks like it's a chiseled slab of concrete.
Other than that, there's not much I have to say about this, great work so far (Y)
As for the foliage stuff I just simply model hi-polys and then bake things down in 3ds max. Max also has awesome graphite tools that really helps when making different pine trees. It takes some time to model all the little grass and flowers but I really like making those. I use UE4 two-sided foliage shader with some parameters to play with
When you say the graphite modelling tools for pine tree modelling, what specific tools are you using? I've always been curious on what additional features the ribbon tools held, I only really use it for quick access stuff like swift loops, retopology functions etc... Haven't explored much into it haha
In Vertex 3 there´s pretty similar workflow that I use. It´s the one that is on the cover.
thank you very much and congratulations for the excellent work
thank you very much and congratulations for the excellent work
I used this whole weekend with this project. Added a lot of trees, grass, etc... I also started modeling gas pumps and other props. Here is the latest shots.
Great update, I'd say the gas price plaque/billboard thing could do with some more washing out, bleached from the top and blending back to full saturation at the bottom.
Great work (Y)
KID.IN.THE.DARK Thanks! Yeah that´s a good point. I still testing different color themes and tweaking maps so I will definitely do that tweak.
Keeping my fingers crossed that you release the project itself. I'd love to walk around in the scene with the HTC Vive.
Comparing this to your original is as if a thin film has been removed from over the image. This is a critical step because it mirrors how our visual system expects to see things, but sadly proper color correction is often skipped or otherwise neglected for some reason.
@ FRENETICPONIES Thanks! I´m not aiming for Last of Us style but it´s always a good thing if it has the look
@ STEFAN_ARMAND Maybe, would be awesome to be part of a team that make big games. Maybe some day
@ KIPPERNICUS Yeah, sure thing. It´s going to be a big kind of making of because there is a lot to cover. This has been really big project so there´s quite a few tips I can share and trying to add as much shots as possible.
@ SOMEDOGGY Thanks! My monitor is very old and can´t be calibrated anymore so it´s very tricky to get the colors right. I still like that it has this warm looking theme but definitely tweak it more and maybe even get a better display
I agree that a warm look is what you want for this scene, my pointer is on getting a white balanced interpretation of the lighting before color grading. I think both could be pushed further for awesome results. Hope this helps!
much I can do with UE4 wihtout any knowledge about coding
I also tweaked a lot of shaders, lighting, made more simpler post processing volume + a lot of different fixes like grass is now moving and there is simple camera movement done. I also converted my old pick up model there and textured it with the same SD template that other stuff uses so it fits there nicely. There has been a lot of shader compiling so I had some time to start writing the making of. Now it´s around 10 pages + images
BTW! I calculated roughtly that so far I used around 1000 hours for this project. I really hope to finish it soon because that is way to much time put into personal project I think
anyway, really strong piece! nice work
the only thing that really bugs me is the plastic thrash bag. Those wrinkles really looks wrong to me and material doesn't read to good I think.
@Sunray Thanks!