[UE4] Sci-fi Armory Walkway

gerridoo

Hey guys I've recently brought my latest environment to somewhere I feel comfortable calling finished and I'd like to share it with you all. This scene started with the intention of interpreting two pieces of concept art (Image1, Image2) done by Josh Kao for Halo 4. My Goal was to keep the major beats of the concepts intact and recognizable while adding my own realization of the two spaces. 

Any critiques would be welcome! 

Cglewis

very nice work man, i love the detail!

kohg

This looks pretty fucking good. Would like to know more about your process. Did you happen to catch Alex Senechal's trim tutorial, because it immediately pop in my head once i saw some of the details in that floor.

gerridoo

kohg said:

This looks pretty fucking good. Would like to know more about your process. Did you happen to catch Alex Senechal's trim tutorial, because it immediately pop in my head once i saw some of the details in that floor.

When I was working on the scene months back I did see Alex post his Research 02 Processing System environment breakdowns and just guessed at how he implemented his textures. His gumroad tutorial wasn't out yet and I still haven't gotten a chance to check it out. The way I did my assets was with custom vertex normal weighting combined with a second set of UV's like Alex suggested on his artstation. 

There is more of a breakdown on my website if you scroll down to the 2nd half of the page. 

Here's so images it to illustrate what my technique was basically: 

samwoodart

This is so cool man. You nailed the feel of the scene perfectly.

RILKE

Really great job with this.

I love the atmosphere and the level of details, this is awesome.

AlexCatMasterSupreme

:proud: Keep it up mang!

gerridoo

@AlexCatMasterSupreme That really means a lot to me! Studying your processing system scene really helped me push my work when I was in a bit of a slump. 

AlexCatMasterSupreme

Nice man, that's cool stuff:D I look forward to see what you make next! 

Zi0

Wow, this looks awesome. I love the amount of detail you added to the scene. Great work man!

macoll

Stellar work to me, gg

Tzur_H

this is great! would love to see a breakdown on lighting :]

gerridoo

@Tzur_H  Believe it or not this scene was my first foray into Unreal Engine, so I'm not sure if any of my methods are best practice scenarios haha. The lighting itself was not that complicated. I prefer to light in layers so I began with envisioning what some of the light coming in from the windows would be. I used two directional lights combined with a very subtle amount of exponential height fog. At the moment I was using Unreal 4.11 which introduced the lightmass portals so I incorporated those into the window sections.



Moving on I placed several 'key lights' which were the major contributors to lighting the scene. These were located on the overhead of the door and the workbench areas as well as a couple on the floor lamps. These lighting setups were created with a simple blueprint which allowed me to adjust the emissive material and light intensity at the same time. I used a spotlight with a soft falloff and IES profile along with a point light that had it's source radius and length modified to represent the emissive shape. Lastly I added a cone shaped mesh to fake volumetric lighting. 



After I was happy with how the initial lighting looked I hand placed some static point lights to help fill out areas that I thought needed it. This helped brighten up some extremely dark areas and bring back lost details. 



As I said, the way I did it was not that complicated. For me it was more trial and error until I found something that I enjoyed. I've included a gif of the fill lights below just to make viewing the difference easier. If you have anymore questions feel free to ask! 

Tzur_H

@gerridoo Thanks for the breakdown, really appreciate it.
Your fill lights, are they point lights with big attenuation, low intensity and no shadow casting?  I'm working on quite a dark scene myself right now and having some issues bringing lost details back

gerridoo

@Tzur_H Yes the fills are point lights and as for the settings, it really depends on how they look after I place them. However the attenuation is usually small and kept local to the space I want the light to fill. Sometimes I turn off Inverse squared falloff, other times it's better to keep it on. Just experiment and see what you like!