UE4 Future Apartment (Rework, looking for crit)

Polyghan

Hey everyone! I'm currently reworking a cyberpunk apartment scene I made earlier this year. I'm basing my changes on some feedback I received, and fixing issues I believe to be weak points in my scene. I'd love feedback as I go along. I'm trying to not make my scene worse with these changes, and fresh eyes would be incredibly helpful. 

So here's my scene before any changes:




Here is a checklist of changes I'd like to make, feel free to critique this list:

Lighting:
Move from primarily dynamic to primarily baked lighting
Fewer light sources (I feel like the lighting is a bit too chaotic right now)
More of a focus on indirect lighting (side effect of fewer light sources)
Increase warm/cool contrast in lighting
Remove the crown molding lighting (some people were confusing it with light bleed)
Make wall sconce lights more diffuse (less of a hot spot on the wall)

Computers: (the strange things with the glowing buttons)
Rework them completely
Create a kit so I can build heavy variation into them, use tube amps and analog synths as inspiration, less glowing stuff
Connect all computers with wires that snake around the apartment
Remove monitors and replace with hologram displays
Place more computers and computer racks in the scene

Material:
Desaturate materials a tad (allow the light colors to have more influence on the scene)
Replace wood ceiling with plaster ceiling (in some cases, the dark wood ceiling placed too much weight on the top of the image, it's especially evident when the crown molding lighting is removed)

Misc:
Remove books, replace with a few hand-placed books (book generator forces books to be "movable", which makes them glow when lighting with static lighting)
Replace most of the bookshelves with computer racks

I'd appreciate any feedback or comments! Thanks guys!

Polyghan

I've already done a few of the changes I'd like to make.

I'm working on the computer kit. I mostly have made tube amp-like kit pieces so far, but will be making more synth-like kit pieces soon.

Here's a pic of the current kit pieces I've made assembled into a little piece.

I've also begun moving the lighting over to baked lighting. Some of these images look a bit empty, since I removed some items from the scene. There will be more items added back in time. Right now I'm trying to get the outdoor light looking good.

chrisradsby

Good work so far ! I do however feel like you have some design issues in general with the apartment? Like very modern looking ceiling lights but the wall-lights are candles? The "mood" is completely different and I feel like it would totally help the scene if you brought some of the props more inline with what people are expecting when you say "Cyberpunk". 

Considering the brightness coming from the window your bedroom would also be fully lit I think. I think it's better for you if you want the apartment to be darker to just fully switch over to night-time and think about what kind of city lights would come in from the street from signs, lightposts etc. (imagine yourself having an apartment with a window facing times-square during night kind of)

It also usually helps to just reinforce the scene with some kind of narrative, like: "It's a cyberpunk apartment that houses a well known hacker, the apartment has just been raided by the police, what you're seeing is the aftermath."
The same goes for the intentions and behaviors of the Hacker himself, would he care enough to fully furnish his apartment? Or did he just setup his PC and all his tech first and fully neglected the rest of the apartment?

Just thoughts like this will help a long way just to start bringing some more interest and depth to the scene and it'll help you narrow down what props you actually need and the props that are just fleshing out the apartment.

Sorry for the wall of text! Either way you're doing good man! And keep going, it's already looking really cool!

Polyghan

chrisradsby said:

Good work so far ! I do however feel like you have some design issues in general with the apartment? Like very modern looking ceiling lights but the wall-lights are candles? The "mood" is completely different and I feel like it would totally help the scene if you brought some of the props more inline with what people are expecting when you say "Cyberpunk". 

It also usually helps to just reinforce the scene with some kind of narrative, like: "It's a cyberpunk apartment that houses a well known hacker, the apartment has just been raided by the police, what you're seeing is the aftermath."

Thanks so much for the feedback! I appreciate it!
Yeah, calling it "cyberpunk" isn't exactly accurate. It's more of my own style that was inspired by cyberpunk. It does have some thought behind it, you can read a bit of what I was trying to accomplish in this article I wrote about the space a little while ago. Relevant information is under the sections "Concept and Design Phase", "Unified or Disparate?", and "Classic or Contemporary Design".
http://www.therookies.co/tools-techniques/learn-how-to-design-develop-ue4-environments/
Of course, I'm open to critiques on the thought process as well, I may be developing this scene under incorrect assumptions or may not be correctly executing what I'm attempting to. Or perhaps I'm biting off more than I can chew, I know creating a new-ish style is more difficult than staying within an already developed style.

Also, the pieces on the wall are not candles, but wall sconce lights.

chrisradsby said:

Considering the brightness coming from the window your bedroom would also be fully lit I think. I think it's better for you if you want the apartment to be darker to just fully switch over to night-time and think about what kind of city lights would come in from the street from signs, lightposts etc. (imagine yourself having an apartment with a window facing times-square during night kind of)

Agreed, I'm still trying to get a handle around lightmass in outdoor-lit interior spaces. Right now, I've already boosted the indirect lighting intensity beyond "physically accurate", and I'm trying not to push it too far for fear of washing out light-based contrast. Though I will try reducing the light intensity to city-night levels and boost the indirect intensity even further to see if it gives me a good result. And the idea of a lit city at night is a good one. It may allow me to play with more light colors and angles.

chrisradsby said:

The same goes for the intentions and behaviors of the Hacker himself, would he care enough to fully furnish his apartment? Or did he just setup his PC and all his tech first and fully neglected the rest of the apartment?

Agreed. In the above article I have a bit of information on that, though I may add more. A large portion of the overall theme of the space was to come from the original idea of the computers, but I didn't have the time to execute it properly. I'm hoping I'll be able to now. But I should think up more backstory to this guy now that I have more time to implement ideas.

chrisradsby said:

Sorry for the wall of text! Either way you're doing good man! And keep going, it's already looking really cool!

Thanks so much! And I appreciate walls of text, more information for me to learn from.
I appreciate you taking the time to help me out!

Polyghan

Sorry for the wait, been away for awhile.

I tried reducing the outside light brightness and increasing the bounce lighting strength, but it just made it really dark. I'll have to add extra lights to brighten it up if I decide to reduce the outside light. Adding an ambient-like light washed things out more than I'd like, and reducing contrast in the post volume did the same.

Been playing around with lighting in the hallway (very WIP), thoughts? I'm liking the added color personally. I'll be fixing the light's SSS soon.

Mathew O

Hey man, I know you're going to try and address how dark it is so I won't crit that, one issue I think you have and that can be easily resolved is that you're hitting pretty much every colour you can which is making the scene quite hard work and my eyes don't want to seem to settle anywhere. For example, do I want to focus on the heavy stand out orangy yellow coming from the two wall lights or do I want to follow the neon blue cable to the computers?

I like the composition although maybe a smaller FOV could help with what you're going for, so that you have less empty wall space in the image. 

So anyway, the helpful bit:

I really like the cyan and gold that you have going on so I decided to quickly colour grade your image to show how (I think) the overall image can be improved by pulling out the heavily saturated green and generally reducing reds so that the red elements you do have pop out more.



Feel free to ignore me as you have a great piece going here, if you decide to stick with your very red/blue image then maybe just pull out any heavy green elements (the matrix monitors) but as a general rule of thumb I'd try not to go past 2/3 primary colours too often.