[UE4] [WIP] Trench Shrine
polycounter lvl 12
Finished! Artstation link
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After taking in all manner of gothic fiction last year, I'm starting off 2018 by modeling and lighting this concept by Mike Franchina. I know where I'm at in terms of modeling -- this project is intended to test me in materials and lighting. I'm binging and taking notes on UE4 Lighting Academy by daedalus51. I'm going for layered materials in as much of this as I can to maximize detail and efficient texturing. I've been playing with MD to sim & place the sandbags. Gonna ZBrush sculpt me a skull and a crucifix. I'm excited.
Starting point block in -- Materials at an early stage on the wood/mud. I don't want to model everything to the smallest detail and find out all my proportions are wrong at the end, so I'm working with that now. It's got a ways to go before I go all sculpt city on this. Use of placeholders might offend some people, bear with me. Also I'm trying to reconcile the FOV/perspective of the concept. I'm not sure I want to fake it in the model, but instead make the camera and placement just right. It's a process.
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After taking in all manner of gothic fiction last year, I'm starting off 2018 by modeling and lighting this concept by Mike Franchina. I know where I'm at in terms of modeling -- this project is intended to test me in materials and lighting. I'm binging and taking notes on UE4 Lighting Academy by daedalus51. I'm going for layered materials in as much of this as I can to maximize detail and efficient texturing. I've been playing with MD to sim & place the sandbags. Gonna ZBrush sculpt me a skull and a crucifix. I'm excited.
Starting point block in -- Materials at an early stage on the wood/mud. I don't want to model everything to the smallest detail and find out all my proportions are wrong at the end, so I'm working with that now. It's got a ways to go before I go all sculpt city on this. Use of placeholders might offend some people, bear with me. Also I'm trying to reconcile the FOV/perspective of the concept. I'm not sure I want to fake it in the model, but instead make the camera and placement just right. It's a process.
Replies
Would be awesome if your share some of your Material workflow, so one can learn from it [:
Bad news is that I can't dedicate as much time to the trench shrine. I've been sculpting the seraphim on the shell casing. It started out simple and kept snowballing. But heck yeah I'm having fun on it! Still cleaning up.
@Finnn Yeah I'll get a good screenshot and breakdown for some of my materials for you in my next post.
baked out this shell all nice. materials in substance. the lighting in the concept is a little tricky, so there's a lot of reflection capture spheres, bounce light behind the camera, and a special light set only to apply to the shell to give it that look without affecting the rest of the scene.
closeup of the shell...
And my crucifix sculpt. Oddly enough I was sculpting him a lot while a guy next to me was starting character creation in Conan Exiles, so that was weird.
All of the wood textures in the scene are instanced from this setup.
I included a "rotate texture" mask so I wouldn't have to worry about unwrapping & packing as much when i needed to line up the grain of the wood. It probably all comes out in the wash though, but it was an idea worth trying. In the future I'll avoid relying on it bu tit's a decent trick.
Treating it all like photoshop, I think of each of these texture blends like an adjustment layer and then do a Lerp against the un-edited version. This acts like the Opacity of the layer in photoshop. So even after I dial in the effect I want, I can fade it out a bit if I need to.
I kept the roughness & AO setups simple for now. Once I've got all my meshes in properly I'm going back here and adjusting the controls.
I'm glad to be closer to finishing this project. I'm pretty busy at work these days but I love the concept too much to abandon it outright!
I keep getting caught in the "there's not enough to show" loop. As if every WIP is a finished product with finalized lighting. Yeah.
So here's where I'm at, the two big areas I've worked on --
SANDBAGS
I've done a pass at placing my sandbags (previously made into low poly meshes) in Max using FFDs to pseudo-sim them into place. I could've used Marvelous to re-sim them, but I wanted to have a bit more control still. I can go in and smush them down in Zbrush or in Maxif I want or go vert by vert. I also experimented with a WPO node attached to vertex color but that's a little too blunt an instrument. Think dental work with a sledgehammer.
CRUCIFIX
Jesus Christ. He's there, sculpted, posed, and with the base wood material I've used for the supports and other wood elements in the scene, plugged in with baked normals and curvature. I'm gonna take a look at him in Substance for some wear and grunge masks, but I don't think it's going to go too far there.
STILL TO DO:
Crosses -- not going too crazy here. Probably will be fine with weighted vert normals.
Barbed Wire -- it's just sitting there. Better posing, grounding.
General placement -- everything's still floaty, gotta get a better sense of gravity. Sandbags still need poliush. I'm going to do some decals soon too.
Material Polish -- the mud especially needs a second look, I might start over from scratch there.
and of course
LIGHTING -- this, along with material quality, is the main point of this scene. While I've blocked in a few lights, I don't want to have to re-do everything five times. I didn't want to get too hung up on modeling this time and focus on lighting and composition. While it's generally pretty basic modeling, I did noodle for a while sculpting the angel on the shell and on the crucifix.
I
'm using a light propagation volume now to iterate faster on my lighting, since my free time is sparse and baked lighting is a pain.
New textures on the wood and ground and metal -- painted now, tuned in substance designer. Added a fresnel too to bring out those edges and am currently in a cycle of noodling on the lighting.
Tuned the fog a bit more, and added some vfx planes where it was just simpler to do so.
Some major features in this pass are adjustments to the fog, global desaturation, some stylized shadows, vignette color, near-de-emphasis, and some decals.
@luthyn -- I scaled back the rim lighting and applied a WSN overlay to get some fake baked lighting in and a few more decals to bring out what was getting too complicated with lights.