[UE4] Overgrown Library Enviroment

annah847

Hello everyone,
This is a UE4 environment I have been working on over winter break from school. I would really like to get some feedback and constructive criticism.













https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNq3ig3AheY&t=9s

annah847

Hello everyone,
I would really like to know how I can improve this. I modeled and textured the whole thing. I want to know what direction to move in if I want to start applying for internships. Really, any advice will be appreciated.

Thank you.

AtticusMars

At the moment this looks a lot more like a first pass block in than a finished scene. As a block in it looks great and it has a lot of potential to be an excellent finished piece if you just spend more time polishing it out. It might be time consuming but it'll be worth it in the end.

The most significant problem by far is the lighting, and this scene could be significantly improved simply by relighting the scene.

You appear to have some magical lightsource placed in the center of the room which was a big mistake in my opinion, This removes a lot of the shading from your walls and removes all but the most obvious directional cast shadows, the result is that your scene looks extremely flat. This is very evident in your first screenshot where there are basically no cast shadows from your bookshelves or wall sconces. 

It also looks like you have multiple light sources casting separate shadows. While this is realistic, I don't think it helps your scene at all and you would be better off thinking of your scene in terms of main lightsources and secondary ones, only give main lightsources the ability to cast shadows and try to keep them from overlapping. Secondary light sources should be dim and primarily used to control light where you need it with shadow casting disabled.

It also looks like you aren't using lightmass here which you really should imo. Baked lighting gives you the advantage of having bounce light which improves the quality of most scenes majorly.

Some of the objects in your scene are also very nondescrip, most notably the colored rectangles on the floor, I'm guessing based on context that these are supposed to be books, but they don't look like it at all. Most of your scene is made up of tileable textures which is normally okay, but you're not using them very effectively as you don't appear to be working with normal maps and you have visible seams. I think it would be worthwhile to spend a little bit more time on your props, modeling out a high poly and baking a normal map to a low then using something like Substance Designer or Quixel to get nice texture maps.

I could be wrong but it also looks like you aren't using a subsurface scattering material for your leaves.

sidx30

Good feedback above. Definitely expand your knowledge for creating materials and start upgrading some of your props by baking higher poly objects. Here is a good thread with a wealth of knowledge in it for material work in PBR: http://polycount.com/discussion/136390/pbr-physically-based-rendering-bible/p1 In addition to adding more details to the books, I would recommend getting more creative with the ladder and the objects inside the display case(can't quite make them out).

Start planning out what you want to do for lighting. Look at movie scenes, or images that portray the mood and colors you want to do and start from there. You also have a really good opportunity to bring down some natural sunlight from above rather than having those super bright plain white lights in the center. Look into Lightmass as well. Get lightmaps on your objects and start baking some higher level lighting in.
This has some really good potential, good luck!

annah847

Thank you both so much for the feedback, it's already been very helpful, and I'm going to continue working on the scene. I wanted to mention  that I am trying to loosely match an image, and I have been having a lot of trouble trying to figure out the lighting. Do you have any tips.