UE4 Spirited Away Gate
polycounter lvl 12
After mainly working on interiors I wanted to try my hand at an outdoor environment. So I decided to try recreating a scene from Studio Ghibli in UE4.
If you haven't seen the film here is the reference:
And My version in UE4
If you haven't seen the film here is the reference:
And My version in UE4
Replies
Maybe you should try making the light a bit more brighter and warmer to match the one from the movie!
The trees probably look great from further above but the current camera locations make the 'planes' look very obvious. I would take the canopy and angle the planes until they almost face the low camera. The one closest to the building is almost there.
Lighting is a bit too dark. I would suggest going a bit crazy with simple point lights to fake a lot of the sun light/light bounce in the scene. I'm talking like 15+ point lights probably.
The shadows in Miyazaki's work are always super defined and yours is very blurry! I don't know what your settings are so can't really say what values need to be changed in fact I'm not even sure if I'm looking at baked light.
The paint on the wall has a stronger gradient in the reference of almost white -> redpink -> dark red.
The stone road has a much lighter color. Could probably just multiply the diffuse in the u4 mat editor. And throw point lights at it to get that nice gradient.
All the detail is already there and I dig the texture work on the wall a lot. Makes me want to do a Miyazaki scene myself for sure!
I do really like what bedrock did/suggested
The door being taller, the trees having more organic shapes, that kind of thing. The statue in the center looks more like a chocolate Kiss candy than the shape of the statue in the reference.
Notice the shape of the stone ground work how it looks to roll with the landscape. This is something I actually saw quite a bit of in Japan. In your version, you've flattened it out entirely.
I'd spend more time trying to get the right shapes/proportions now that you have a solid round of feedback on lighting/color/materials.
Good work, overall.
The painted walls, however, don't quite capture the reference and I remembered something that might help!
I watched a talk recently on how they managed to get really nice layered paint on the wall materials in Sunset Overdrive.
It involved layering a bunch of greyscale masks in the material and coloring it all with vertex colors. You can probably make sense of technique in the PDF version (pages 49-62).
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1022324/The-Ultimate-Trim-Texturing-Techniques
I really think the layered paint effect on some of those Overdrive buildings more closely matches that Ghibli look that painters like Kazuo Oga manage to produce.
Good Luck!
@alecchalmers Thanks for the great link! Love the optimization of the ULTIMATE TRIM, going to have to give that a try on a small environment.
@Bedrock Thanks for taking the time for the paintover and detailed crit. I was trying to go for an overcast moody look with more diffuse shadows but after seeing your paintover I decided that it did need brightening up. Unfortunately I've run out of time for this project but think I'm definitely going to comeback at some point and rework some of the trees as I've had a little bit of trouble with them and really want to set aside some time and nail it down.
@SamStark Thanks! Added in a couple of subtle particle FX.
@aclund3 Thanks for the crit, I went for the front reference for the door, I tried it being a bit taller and just personally preferred it being a bit shorter.
The only thing I'm bothered by is the obvious leaf planes on the tree leaves, the polygonal shapes stand out vs the rest of the scene. I know it'd up the polycount a lot to fix that but... argh! It's the only thing that really stood out as "wrong" in the whole scene, which otherwise has great lighting and texturing and... everything! :*
@FreneticPonies Cheers
@Beestonian Thanks! Realistically I would have to have to lower the density of the standard grass model and take a few of the leaf clusters out of the middle of main trees if this was going into a production product.
Take a look at this picture here for an idea of how to greeble it a bit more etc:
The statue in the film and the majority of the concepts was almost totally covered in moss. Looking at this now my issue is with not having the moss thicker to separate it from the stone as it is in the reference above. I initially made the moss shader that is used for the rocks in the background and should probably have tweaked it a little more for this piece.