[UE4] Lake Agnes Substation
polycounter
Disclaimer: I've been working on this for a few months, so it's not a new thread in the sense that I'm posting what I started with. I totally forgot to post here earlier, so I'll just make up for it by showing embarassing college work as the lead-up to its current progress. 
This project is a 90% accurate recreation of a real-world location that I created as a college project in 2009 as part of our "advanced level design" class at the Art Institute of Tampa. I worked with two other people on this and was the principal modeler, while another artist developed textures for the installation. The last team member was responsible for placing all of it into UDK.
I'm a huge fan of electrical installations. I think they look like metal skeletons, especially at night. With the right lighting, they're very atmospheric and work as great hard-surface practice too!
I always wanted to go back to this project and make it look better, plus have full creative control over the end product, so that's what I'm doing here.
Original college work:
The final UDK work makes me laugh looking back at it, but at least I can say I didn't have a hand in this part.
It clocked in at around 50,000 polygons. It was also grossly inaccurate to the actual photo references I took, so yay for rushing to complete projects before they're due!
Some shots of the substation I took:
I'm shooting for a night scene with a spooky ambiance. Here's the work-in-progress inside of UE4 so far.
More to come as I find time to work on it.
This project is a 90% accurate recreation of a real-world location that I created as a college project in 2009 as part of our "advanced level design" class at the Art Institute of Tampa. I worked with two other people on this and was the principal modeler, while another artist developed textures for the installation. The last team member was responsible for placing all of it into UDK.
I'm a huge fan of electrical installations. I think they look like metal skeletons, especially at night. With the right lighting, they're very atmospheric and work as great hard-surface practice too!
I always wanted to go back to this project and make it look better, plus have full creative control over the end product, so that's what I'm doing here.
Original college work:
The final UDK work makes me laugh looking back at it, but at least I can say I didn't have a hand in this part.
It clocked in at around 50,000 polygons. It was also grossly inaccurate to the actual photo references I took, so yay for rushing to complete projects before they're due!
Some shots of the substation I took:
I'm shooting for a night scene with a spooky ambiance. Here's the work-in-progress inside of UE4 so far.
More to come as I find time to work on it.
Replies
Still lots left to do, but much closer than I was last year!
I liked the slightly foggy look though. I think it's because the front block building has a really tiled, normal mapped video gamey look. Like the background and transformers and stuff look great. But, I dunno, maybe try adding tesselation or POM to front buildings bricks to get some parallax going, right now it feels kind of flat. Though maybe that's partially due to UE4s crappy diffuse shader.
I'm assuming its baked lighting with a high lightmap resolution but I'm very new to lighting in UE4.
Looking forward to seeing more
@FreneticPonies I'll look into a POM shader for the walls. I think it's more of a material issue, so I'll rework the roughness a bit to make it pop out more. Needs additional wear/tear to sell the believability, too.
Working on nailing down the atmosphere and lighting. I was having a battle royale with Unreal's dynamic shadows in this project. A lot of the smaller details wouldn't accept shadowing at all, and cranking down the shadow bias left huge ugly artifacts everywhere. I figured out how to get the spotlights to behave with shadow casting by adjusting their attenuation and making up for the shadow gaps with a small contact shadow. I was afraid I'd have to handpaint some contact shadows in Photoshop - not anymore!
More to come as I keep working.
Instrument transformers! After staring at these things for the better part of a month, I'm glad they're done.
And some sign decals for the exterior. I'll toss some geo into the holes to wire them up to the chain link fencing.
Hey, you. Yes, you. Stay out of here. It's dangerous to go inside.