[UE4] 70's Inspired Sci-Fi
polycounter lvl 15
LATEST PROGRESS:
https://youtu.be/4ci3SQDQNnw
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INTRODUCTION:
Kay so I've wanted to do something with 70's sci fi and something different when it comes to the color-palette. Something more vivid so this thread is basically just me exploring shapes, colors, vistas in UE4. The main reason for me doing this I guess is that I do realistic art on a daily basis and during my spare time I like to explore other things just so I'll be more rounded as an artist.
I've already gotten started, but I dug up some older work-in-progress shots that I thought I'd post here for you guys as well. So it started simple, just colors and big shapes.
I've already gotten started, but I dug up some older work-in-progress shots that I thought I'd post here for you guys as well. So it started simple, just colors and big shapes.
Main inspirations from Chris Foss and John Harris
- After that I basically just wanted determine some kind of foreground. I know I want to have something like this in the scene. Whether the foreground is something man-made or something natural I haven't quite decided yet.
- This is where I'm at currently. I've gone into world-machine and created some landscape vista that I like, it's made the ground and the cliffy bits. I dug up some old spruce/pine trees that I had lying around that was low-poly enough to actually use for vista.
There are lots of things left to do but I'm quite happy that I've established some kind of vista. Now it'll allow me to work more on what's happening in the middle-ground/foreground and I'll still know that I have some kind of kickass vista going on for whatever angle I decide to use later on.
These are the current things I have in my head.
- Spaceships Vista (flying around either close to the towers or further away)
- Improve Skybox
- More detailed moon (DONE!)
- Starfalls! (DONE!)
- Need to blend moon horizon better! - Spaceship (foreground, detailed for close up shots, best case scenario something that evokes some emotion) (DONE)
- Just started a foreground space-ship. (DONE) - Middle-ground Detail (Improve overall vista look, plenty that could be done here) (WIP)
- Foreground Detail Decide whether to go natural or man-made and make it more detailed) (WIP)
- Shader Work (I'm going to make a new 3-way blend shader that'll be the master blend for future projects.) (DONE)
- Texture work (I've barely done any texture work for this. I'm going to need more detailed ground textures for the foreground so at least 3 ground textures and some vista noise-textures.)
- Overall Lighting (Lighting, not sure what to do yet, right now I'm basically just testing stuff out.) (WIP)
- Improve sense of scale (I need to spend more time messing around with foreground objects and background objects. Space ships moving from foreground into the background might actually help quite a lot here)
Replies
How did you make the shadows render so far away dude?
I'm a little bit unsure of the vista. While its certainly impressive, I think the familiarity is hurting the idea of a 70s sci fi shot for me. A lot of the 70s sci fi landscapes that I've seen often have crazy vegetation or trees that look nothing like anything on earth. For example:
Even if you stick with the vegetation you have now, tweaking the colors may still give the same effect. Its pretty common in 70s sci fi landscapes to have orange, purple, teal grounds...they go all over the place. I think that in terms of going vivid or doing something different it might be worth trying.
Like an overpowering orange sky equals really strong Orange light/ambient light which completely takes over the whole image no matter if you put in a contrast color for like the terrain. Looking at most 70's Sci Fi like that it doesn't make any sort of sense and trying to emulate it in a realistic way it ends up looking weird.
That said, I totally agree with you and I want to be able to push in a direction where I feel like I can get more alien things into the scene. That is coming however, I will also try a couple of more variations of the color palette.
But yes! Lightmaps, I had an issue before where the shadows didn't wanna render that far away but...it seems to have gone away somehow.
Things are really frickin far away though. It's actually quite hard to work with haha.
as you move forward with lighting, I would suggest you keep colors fairly muted, and just pump up the saturation in your post-processing. this will prevent any unwanted color pollution.
As for the vista, I see that all those reference landscapes from gsokol keep things pretty geometric- usually there is only one iconic shape that repeats at different scales. You could push your 70's theme by implementing that into your landscape
- Added a river
- Made new grass-textures
- Changed tower shapes
- I also made a tessellation landscape shader though I'm not sure how much use it'll get in this environment.
- I also started making a spaceship that will zip past the camera in the flygthrough. It'll actually come out of "lightspeed" or whatever. Which is what're seeing in the last picture.
I'm getting closer to the finish line. In the end I think I'll remake some trees, they're still just old assets I had lying around it'd be nice to get something else in. I haven't really gotten into any post-processing or luts yet.
Such as
- Foreground elements (I need to add more variation in the grass, additional plants etc)
- Remake the trees, either to some other type of tree or just...current gen standard for the ones I've got. The ones in the scene are currently like...4 years old or something.
- Start marking out timings and Key locations for the flythrough.
Syd Mead is cool and all but I'm not super fond over the hyper reflective surfaces =P
artstation.com/p/nO80E
this ship design fits like a glove, remember a bit the ship design people from hellogames used on NMS, you had the same inspiration than sean murray gang have?