WIP Mortuary: What I wish someone told me 8 years ago (but to be honest, I couldn't listen)
ngon master
C&C's are very welcome!
UPDATE: I return to this project after over 2 years of a "break". I'll be starting from scratch, aiming for a look closer to the original concept:
*sigh* ... 8 years later. I feel like there's an ocean between me then and now. In knowledge, skill and bitterness. I've been thinking about this project and how much wrong I did the first two attempts at it. My priorities were all wrong, severe lack of experience and an underdeveloped artistic eye.
I figured that correct thing to do would be to return to it now, starting over and step-by-step write a little feedback to my former self on work-flow, what to think about and how I should have approached this 8 years ago. Sort of like "This is what I wish someone told me 8 years ago (but to be honest, even if someone did I was probably not able to listen and understand at the time)".
I feel like there's a lot to write about, but honestly it's probably better if I keep it short, to save time and not bog down too much.
Re-re-start starts here.
Replies
Another screen-shot. I adjusted the textures a bit on the shelves and the cabinet slightly, pulling down the roughness.
My friend @Solara asked me for feedback on her scene, where my first reaction was that the roughness was a bit off. Then I realized that I should iterate over my own roughness, since Bloodborne is "the game of gloss" (everything is way too shiny). So I lowered my roughness channels in Substance by about 0.2 units.
Today, I made experimented with some wood floor shapes:
I reduced the noise a bit:
It's great that you have a clear main reference. The purpose of a reference/concept art is to "answer questions" for you and this one is actually pretty good as answering some of the basic questions. What I mean by "answer questions" is; "What am I making?", "What's the target look?", "What's the mood?", "What's the composition?", "What assets should I make?", etc-etc. All questions that need to be answered by choices you make during the project. Without a reference or piece of concept art, it's very easy to get lost in a sea of questions. It's also really hard for anyone to give feedback if they don't know what you intend to do (and when you're in portfolio hell and trying to break in to the industry with a dubious skill-set, getting feedback is really important).
Now, I can see that you've done a break-down of the assets in the reference image. This is cute and all, but you might be missing the bigger picture here. The important part isn't to make a list of things, if you do you really need to use that list otherwise it's worthless. An asset list is only useful if you use it to manage your time and help prioritize. Sadly, it looks like you just blocked out a lot of colors over the reference and then forgot about most objects on the list, seeing as you spent a lot of time polishing materials and background assets as well as digging in to nifty final-touch solutions to break up texture tiling and what not. This is how you don't use an asset list.
You will also need to gather more references than this one image. They don't need to be from Bloodborne, because it doesn't matter what a chair looks like in Bloodborne. You could gather more references now, but honestly it's a waste of time to guess what assets you need references for at this stage. You will know better later on, when you feel like the main reference isn't telling you enough about an object.
Also, in both of your attempts at this, you seem to have forgotten the most important part of the scene; the light source. This is one of the first things you need to consider in a scene. Luckily, there is a very obvious light source in the reference... No it's not the chandeliers, it's the windows. That's one really important question answered by your reference.
Here's what I threw together; It's a quick block-out of the empty room that I threw in to UE5's blank scene that I did some quick tweaks to, to set the base. It's important to start implementing into the final engine (in this case Unreal) as soon as possible, otherwise you're just working in a vacuum and guessing your way forward. (and I can see that you did that before, good!)
Is this block-out perfect? Is it even close to what the final target is? Of course not, it's ugly as fuck. But that's what the rest of this project is supposed to address. And as you can see, there's a lot to do.
What I've done here is to reproduce the very basic composition and established a light. The goal at this early stage isn't to make anything "perfect" because eventually all of this will be changed (so put in as little time as possible and don't get caught in details, just keep moving forward). The purpose is to establish a base where you can keep adding things. After that, when all objects are in, it will be much easier to spot what is and isn't working. Then you know what to prioritize in when refining the scene.
Next step is to fill this bad block-out with placeholder assets.
I saw that the shelves and the cabinet were both too short and looked way too small, so I just scaled them up in the z-axis (blender, y in Unreal) to make the proportions not too wrong (they're still wrong though, but that's for later).
My point is: This is why it's so important that you start implementing into the engine asap and take screenshots of (or at least spend some time looking at) your scene regularly, so you can notice at every step what's going right and what's going wrong. And this is why the block-out assets need to be done fast and should be seen as temporary, because you need to be able to do quick changes to them anyway. And please don't start finalizing the models and start texturing them now, chances are you will just have to re-do them anyway.
We're also quickly running in to problems that makes the screenshot look very different from the main reference. I remember that you were confused about some of the inconsistencies in the reference; strange angles in the corners, the door seems to not go down all the way to the floor, etc. The horizontal line seems to be by the top-row of the shelves... but take a look at the chandeliers and you'll see that they are horizontal too.
I know that it's confusing and hard to accept, but your goal shouldn't be to make a 3D 1:1 representation of the reference. I agree that it would be cool if you could post a side-by-side comparison and have them match perfectly. But that's not really possible in this case. Listen, there will be some things in every piece of concept art that just doesn't make sense, but it's your job to make it work anyway. This means that you have to deviate from the reference.
Another problem that doesn't become obvious until this stage here is what happens when you ask the question "what's just out of frame". This reference isn't answering this. And you need to know this, because this is a 3D scene for your portfolio for game art, you need to make an entire room that a player could walk around in, not just one angle of the room.
This is where you need to start making things up to answer some questions yourself. What is just out of frame?
As you can see, one of the things the reference isn't showing is whether or not the shelves wrap around the room or not. This obviously looks silly, but if we start divorcing from the idea that we need to keep the final render to be accurate to the reference, this isn't really a problem.
But I'll continue blocking out the smaller objects in the room, then when everything is in place, that's when we can start making real decisions about how to proceed.
Notice that these ~50 something objects aren't really covered in the asset break-down of the scene you did. Now, these ~50 something assets might be a bit overkill, some of them aren't visible at all right now and you might just end up cutting them or add new ones later anyway.
I also tweaked the lighting/post process a bit to get a little closer to the right mood. The shelves in the foreground were blocking the view too much, so I made a quick change to them as well. They're obviously still a problem from this camera angle (blocking the chair and the door).
Now that all basic pieces are in you'll have completed the initial block-out. Nothing is perfect, nothing is final and there's a lot to still do. But with this step done you can much easier see what needs to be done. Knowing this will help you prioritize what to put time and effort into.
Something you might notice is that I'm waiting with making any decisions or finalizing anything - this is very intentional. You want to wait for as long as possible to make sure you know enough before committing to anything.
I haven't really done any work in UE5 before, so I'll have to refresh myself on what still works like in UE4 and how all the new stuff works - this should likely be the next step, make sure that you know enough to make a better base lighting set-up for the scene.
After that, the next step will be to start figuring the scene out - how to fix all the composition problems and what to do with everything in the scene that isn't shown in the reference.
Will have to look further in to getting not so sharp window frame shadows.
Either way, with this all out of this initial set-up out of the way, it's time to make a final block-out of the scene.
Consider the focus point in the scene; the table with the body and the nearby assets. This is where you want the attention of the viewer to be drawn while everything else is just background and shouldn't grab too much attention - this informs how you should think about the visual hierarchy in the scene.
While it might sound like a good idea and enticing to put a lot of details and time in to every asset to make them "pop", be very mindful about how it impacts the visual hierarchy; if the wrong things grab the viewers' attention it just weakens the scene.
The visual hierarchy is mainly constructed with contrasts; colors, light values, details, etc. Keep the background somewhat uniform in terms of brightness and hue while pushing the focus point with more saturated, contrasting colors - you can see this a bit in the initial reference with the brightness of the image, but we can push this even further.
Next step is to fully establish the focus point composition and fill out the background in all angles - this is where you have the chance to make this scene *yours* and not just follow the reference. This is also where you'll start to know what assets you need and what to cut - with that it's also good to start gathering complementary references.
Did some further tweaking of the lighting to get a softer result. I know you would have preferred a much much darker lighting but it's important to keep the scene bright enough so that it can be seen - You've made the mistake too many times where you put months into a project only to end up with "moody atmospheric lighting" that just obscures way too much and looks terrible on high-contrast screens.
It's good to make sure that as much of the image is somewhere on the grey-scale spectrum and not completely white or black.
(here you can see the brightest and darkest areas in the above image, only the windows are peak-white and only pitch-black in some tight crevasses facing away from the light)
I also scaled up the floor and walls by about 25% to make the room feel less cramped (again, this is why it's important to not commit and start texturing assets too early). There's a lot more breathing space in general; Some areas that feel too empty right now will be filled in with more assets later, either more copies of already planned assets or maybe something new to make the scene a bit more varied.
I did some really dirty paint-overs to figure out how to fill out the rest of the scene, mainly the areas of the room that aren't in the original reference.
It's a good idea to per-visualize before committing too much time into modeling anything, just don't spend too much time on it. Try to get more used to doing these (I still need to). A little warning though, while working, certain art directors will like seeing these paint-overs a bit too much - this might lead to you spending too much time on them. Don't implement any feedback into the paint-overs, just keep the notes and carry them over to the actual 3D work.
I want to add a very large shelf/bookcase, on the wall opposite to the windows, with one of those ladder you can roll to the sides. This shouldn't be too much extra work, since I'm already planning on making a bunch of glass vials, flasks and jars and a few books as well.
Along the wall opposite side of the door is a bit hard to figure out, I get too many ideas. While it's not supposed to be the main focus in the scene, it's okay if it holds some interest. I still need to nail this bit down a bit more and make sure that it's not adding a bunch of new assets to make.
Lastly, the real focus point of the scene. I feel like the pale corpse is a bit too boring, so I painted a purple humanoid monster mid-autopsy instead. This is what I really meant before when I said "make the scene yours". This is *your* portfolio piece, not a commission or something that needs to fit someone else's vision or art direction. It also means that you don't need to make an anatomically correct human, which honestly helps. Now it's a monstrous feature that the proportions are off.
The main point to keep in mind about this focus point is that it needs to be bright and colorful, in contrast to the rest of the scene which is pretty cold, moody and monotone.
Either way, the next step is to figure out all this a bit more. And now it's high-time to look for more references.
I'm okay waiting with this until now because I'm just doing this for fun. I'll manage the scope later but for now I'm not worried. If this was in production, aka under time restrictions, this is one of the first things you should start with. All assets will need to be time estimated and fit into a schedule so you can't just wing it. Also, some assets might require special technical solutions (like a special shader for the the glass vials, flasks and jars) and that might impact how you should prioritize certain assets or avoid them entirely. But again, I don't have those restriction right now and I sure as fuck won't put them on me in my spare time.
but I did have some time to implement some changes to the scene
Next step will be to populate the scene more to fill out all the areas, get a more final feel for the entire composition.
In doing so I'll also be gathering references and refine the list of assets needed - I want to make sure that I commit to making as few assets as possible.