[WIP UE4] Fight Club scene
polycounter lvl 4
I started working on this project a short while ago now, but after a short holiday, now making some real progress so I wanted to set up a thread to show my progress, share some of my workflow and get some feedback along the way.
I was recently watching this film, and when a certain scene came up I knew this is what I wanted to base my next project on. Here are a few concept references that I am using as a base reference. If you know the film post an answer below!
I have also gathered a range of higher resolution reference images captured from the film to help set up the base scale for the environment. I will be following the night time setting for the scene in engine and as this is a night scene lighting will be important and most of the light will come from individual sources such as street lights rather than a global source as they would in a day scene.
I will be also looking to make use of some more advanced features of the engine such as vertex painting to add details such as water puddles and dirt streaks. The scene will be based on the reference, but currently plan to add more details such as graffiti on the walls to make it feel a little more like a video game environment. I will use some post processing to help give the scene some mood and may include VFX such as rain to further enhance this.
I was recently watching this film, and when a certain scene came up I knew this is what I wanted to base my next project on. Here are a few concept references that I am using as a base reference. If you know the film post an answer below!
I have also gathered a range of higher resolution reference images captured from the film to help set up the base scale for the environment. I will be following the night time setting for the scene in engine and as this is a night scene lighting will be important and most of the light will come from individual sources such as street lights rather than a global source as they would in a day scene.
I will be also looking to make use of some more advanced features of the engine such as vertex painting to add details such as water puddles and dirt streaks. The scene will be based on the reference, but currently plan to add more details such as graffiti on the walls to make it feel a little more like a video game environment. I will use some post processing to help give the scene some mood and may include VFX such as rain to further enhance this.
Replies
From here, I have been focusing on getting the scale and proportions of the objects correct. Here's a few quick shots of the level in progress.
I have never seen someone doing a actual asset list. Curious how this goes.
I suggest placing puddles as decals and dont paint them in.
Why do you say to do decal rather than vertex painting? I know decals are probably more efficient but as this is going to be a portfolio piece, I am not too worried about performance.
My thoughts on decals are
- easy to place and move about
- looking good
- good performance unless you place decals over other decals
- most modern games make extensive use of decals
I´m just not a big fan of vertex painting but I would like to see what one can do with good vertex painting.
On which note I have already been working on the shader for the vertex painting and done a breakdown of what I have created here. The post was getting rather long, so I decided it would be better as a new thread and would be a little more discoverable by others.
I have been working on a few things since the last post. 1) Checking my blockout models for consistent UV scale for mip mapping 2) Testing the vertex paint shader and adding some test materials to the scene
1) I have applied my UV checked map to all objects to check that I have the same UV scale applied to all of my objects. Many of the objects will be completely replaced with final props, but some such as the walls will just use simple geometry, so now i just need to add some support geometry where I will be using vertex paint
2) The vertex paint shader is working really well and has all of the features that I planned. I have seen a tutorial video of how to add rain drops in puddles using an animated normal map, so I think this is a feature I would like to add for the floor material as I plan to have a rain weather effect.
I have dropped in some basic materials of the large objects as I felt this was needed to start getting a feel of the environment. From this I have started working on the dumpster as the first prop and hope to have that finished tonight.
Next steps I have planned are to start working on the mood of the environment by switching over to a night setting and further developing the materials which I have already placed.
Textures were developed mainly in Substance Painter which I used for the base materials and layering onto the dirt and wear. The text, graffiti and extra details were added using Substance Designer so that I could work with full materials, transform the details into place and blend together to get the final result rather than working with layers in Photoshop. This was a little bit of an experiment, but it worked really well and allowed for quick iteration and checking the results on the final model in Painter.
Here's a few screenshots and renders of the assets. First is an Iray render from Substance Painter, then a shot from UE4 with the open lid variant which will have overflowing trash bags, and finally my sketchfab upload
model
Stats for the final asset:
1958 Tris / 2474 Verts (in UE4)
2k textures (albedo/packed RMAO(roughness, metallic and ambient occlusion)/normal) for LOD0 which will be used for close up shots, other LOD assets will be used with lower resolution maps for other shots
As always I would love to hear some feedback on how people think the scene and assets are coming together.
I have now switched over to a night scene and quite happy with with overall feel for the updated setting. Once I get more completed objects in the scene then I will make some more tweaks to post processing etc, and also the lighting needs A LOT more work as it's way too dark now.
Anybody that is looking for good material to learn how to create a night scene in UE4, I would recommend checking out Blueprint Games Tutorial - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YpZlUzkQVk
I have also been working on some updates to the Vertex Paint shader I previously had to strip out some features to make it more useful for the walls. I have taken a break to write this post, so will have another update soon (maybe tomorrow).
Here you can see the water effect been applied, followed by the darkening of the albedo and the light passing over the surface.
The water normal effect now blends to make it look like the water runs down the wall rather than replacing the base material's normal on the floor where it becomes totally flat with the wave effect overlaid.
Rather than the wave effect flowing in 2 directions, it now only flows downwards, and the 2 speeds are used to control the wave effect of the normal map at 2 different scales to still give some break up in the effect.
I am quite happy with how the assets are looking and interact with the lighting in the scene. The vertex paint shader is working well with the test materials I have picked out. A combination of the controls I have in the shader and the fact that the plaster has a really defined height map helps break up the blend of the materials without a high vertex count on the mesh.
I have quickly made a shader for decals which uses a lot of features of the vertex paint shader, but has some extra controls such as switch for scaling U or V separately or together, useful for stretches where the same tiling decal needs to be applied such as along the top of the walls for the dripping details.
Also even though I have made no changes I like how the atmosphere is feeling and once I get more assets in the scene it will start to fill out a little more and feel a more realistic.
model
From here I am going to spend some more time working on the smaller props to start filling out the scene.