[Unity 5] Sci-Fi (-ish) laboratory scene

praesidenter

Hi there,

I’ve been reading here for a while now and I'm one of those guys who for some reason never show their stuff. So I want to start both giving and receiving more feedback and decided to post here.
I’m by no means a professional when it comes to cgi or game art in general, but I spend a good amount of my free time modeling, texturing or playing with Unity. I’m also a passionate gamer, so discovering these forums was amazing for me. Didn’t even know that there was such a huge community for this.

Here's my moodboard. My art direction probably won’t be as good as in these references and everything will be a lot simpler, but this doesn’t have to be a portfolio piece (as I don’t have a portfolio  ). Still, I want this to be as good as I can make it. Also, I want the scene to be a bit dirtier and not so shiny like some of those images.


This is a screenshot of some of the assets I want to use. Nothing spectacular - basically just cubes -, but I'm happy they are working in a modular way (screenshot taken in Cinema)



I also made a very rough blockout to try to get a feel for the space:
[ame]

I already want to change a few things (make the big room even bigger, get rid of one of the corridors, maybe fewer rooms...), but wanted to show it anyway.

Workflow:
I'm using Cinema 4D for modeling and UVs (I really like Cinema, but the UV tools are... well, not THAT good) and I recently bought substance after trying their demo, so I'll use that for texturing. The engine will be Unity.
A quite unusual combination in these forums I guess.

I’d be very happy if some of you pros took some time to give advice and feedback! I try to update this thread whenever I have to show something new and I'll check for feedback daily. Thanks!

RobeOmega

Looking good I have followed this to see where it will go, one small piece of advice I would give though is that you should focus on making one room to the finish first before you move on to other rooms. Now do not take that the wrong way, I love how you have planned out several rooms however with each room you are adding more and more workload and time which in turn may reduce your chances of getting a full product done and you may also be reducing the final quality of the piece in order to forfill needless quantity.

praesidenter

Robeomega wrote: »

Looking good I have followed this to see where it will go, one small piece of advice I would give though is that you should focus on making one room to the finish first before you move on to other rooms. Now do not take that the wrong way, I love how you have planned out several rooms however with each room you are adding more and more workload and time which in turn may reduce your chances of getting a full product done and you may also be reducing the final quality of the piece in order to forfill needless quantity.

Yeah, you're probably right. It's that thing with personal projects though where you don't have any pressure to finish something on a deadline and you tend to go overboard with all the details... I'll try to focus on the main rooms, see them as "hero rooms" and then add to that later.

JoscelinFrost

Yeah, I would definitely agree with Robeomega. Starting with the larger elements and working your way down in the details is highly recommended. That way when you start to expand to the other rooms, you only really need to focus on a few unique additions to make them really special and different. Also helps your work feel tight and cohesive.
That being said, it definitely looks like you are heading in a solid direction, the moodboard works and the blockout of the space is a very nice start. While things are still really rough you might want to think about some of the sight lines a bit to make things a bit more visually appealing. For example at the beginning of the video you have a very tall staircase that you could lower so that some of the light and features of the next room peek through and draw you in. Not necessarily what you would want for a game environment for streaming and whatnot, but definitely would look very nice for a portfolio piece.

Keep up the good work!

praesidenter

JoscelinFrost wrote: »

Yeah, I would definitely agree with Robeomega. Starting with the larger elements and working your way down in the details is highly recommended. That way when you start to expand to the other rooms, you only really need to focus on a few unique additions to make them really special and different. Also helps your work feel tight and cohesive.
That being said, it definitely looks like you are heading in a solid direction, the moodboard works and the blockout of the space is a very nice start. While things are still really rough you might want to think about some of the sight lines a bit to make things a bit more visually appealing. For example at the beginning of the video you have a very tall staircase that you could lower so that some of the light and features of the next room peek through and draw you in. Not necessarily what you would want for a game environment for streaming and whatnot, but definitely would look very nice for a portfolio piece.

Keep up the good work!

Thanks for your feedback! It's always hard to not spend too much time with small details too early in the process, but I'll keep an eye on that.
That idea about the stairs is something I will definitely try. Could look really interesting, since I plan to add some kind of statue/"logo" in front of that big wall after the stairs which could then be a better eye catcher.

jjd5989

Your start looks great and with the reference the scene should shape up to be really impressive! Looking forward to seeing more!

praesidenter

Here's a quick update. I changed the blockout quite a bit based on the feedback I got and finally put my assets into unity. Those are still WIP textures, lighting isn't finished obviously and the lightmap is very low resolution for preview. But I think it represents the overall mood I'm going for.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixXz17o1Xyg
The video might be too dark, but that's partly because Screenflow for some reason adds contrast to a screen recording, and I don't know how to get rid of that...

Also, the room won't be empty at the end, I am right now in the middle of modeling some props, one of which is this crate here that I finished UVing yesterday.


I'm having much fun with this scene, although I'm playing too much Fallout lately instead of working on it
Let me hear what you think, I'm sure there are lots of things to improve!