[WIP] Sci Fi Botanical Museum

sybrix

Most recent:



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I just finished some contract work and finally got a chance to get back to working on this. I'm making a sci fi botanical museum based on a concept piece by Ryan Woodhouse: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/PDNz1

It's a room inside of a botanical museum set in a future where a lot of Earth's flora and wildlife has gone extinct. Most of the plants are from a pack from the UE4 marketplace but the rest are made by myself, I want to get more practice making plants.

I'm also planning on having holographic exhibit signs by the plants and maybe some sort of holographic mural similar to the concept on the walls.

I've got some placeholders in there too right now, like the bench. I'll update this thread as I go along and put the most recent screenshot in this post. C&C welcome and appreciated, and thanks for looking!

sybrix

Here's a breakdown of the assets so far in the scene.

Nano Pixel

Amazing work, really liking the mix of hard surface sci fi with the plant life. How did you approach the plants, and the modular wall pieces?

sybrix

Current progress, I made some smaller planters to populate around the scene. I have 2 more planters to make (curved to go around the platform and hanging ones like the reference) and then I'm done making plants and can move onto other things.



@Nano Pixel Thanks! Right now most of the plants are from the UE4 Kite Demo on the market place. I just downrezzed the textures and bumped up the brightness and saturation. The willow tree, palm plant, and philodendron that I made are just using images I found of the leaves, where I cut out the leaves on a transparent background in photoshop. Then I arranged the leaves on one texture and duplicated them to make some color/shape/detail variation to make one leaf look like 2 different kinds. I may need to redo the willow tree since I took a different approach that doesn't look as good as the other plants IMO.



In Maya i modeled the stalks first. I referred to the reference on how to arrange the stalks (how many, how spread out, etc) then attached the leaves to the stalks. They look fine further away but if you get really close you really notice the point where the leaf attaches to the stalk (from a flat 2D image to a 3D mesh) but the player can't really get that close hypothetically so I think it's okay.



I'm also using the 2-sided foliage material in Unreal. I have a basic setup that I made Material Instances out of so I can tweak some scalar parameter values for each plant. (Desaturation, leaf opacity, etc). I'm still learning the material editor though.



As for the walls I blocked out the room in Unreal with BSPs to get the scale right, and then worked out the best unit breakdowns to use, translated that to Maya, made sure everything snapped together smoothly and then went from there. To break up repetition I wanted to use more than just 1:1 ratio pieces so I have a 400x400, 800x400, 266x400 and 133x400.

Tectonic

I really like this environment

sybrix

@Tectonic Thanks

Some progress. Mainly added some new props and planters. Next up: fish!

FreneticPonies

Great work! Except the central weeping willow looks, odd? Gives the impression of being extremely low res and pixels for the leaves while everything else looks clean and sharp.

rexo12

the aesthetic is very Prey... yet it totally isn't... loving it so far.

The yellow bench (and actually your props in general) seems kind of jagged around the edges, maybe fuzz the grunge mask a bit to soften it, or add some extra geometry or normal info there - as it (imo) clashes with the rest of the props that don't even seem to have edges, but very smooth curves.

sybrix

Thanks for the feedback guys. I agree the tree was a bit of an eyesore, as it was the first piece of foliage I made and its using a completely different material and approach. it also does look pretty chunky and low rez, so I decided to put more geo in the leaf planes and rebuild the material. I also turned off texture mipmaps on it just because the willow leaves are so small they sort of go sub-pixel pretty quickly, making it look low rez. Since there's only one in the scene and it's a focal point I figured it's justified.



Revised benches and trash can to get rid of jaggy edges. Added more geo and toned down the edge wear on the yellow bench.



Also made some koi fish to go in the pond. Tried not to spend too much time on them since they'll be underwater and fairly small. I plan to adjust their proportions (the thickness of the fins, body width, etc) and put an alpha on the fins. I'll also pose them to look like they're swimming so they're not just little rigid fish boards lol.

sybrix

Posed these little guys and dumped em in the pond. Not too crazy about how the water looks, especially with how crystal clear the fish look under the water. Might try to figure out how to put some sort of fog volume in the pond to make it look more murky? Not sure how to approach that yet so definitely open to suggestions.

FreneticPonies

Koi! The water material itself looks a bit odd, but everything else is looking on point!

ZacD

The lighting and central tree need a lot more love. The props look great on their own, but the scene isn't working. 

The giant block of yellow the seats make from their back is a little odd from a composition perspective. Yellow is being used on the walk way as a warning color, maybe orange would be better? 

sybrix

@FreneticPonies Agreed! I'm still trying to figure out what to do there. Need to gather some more reference and research water shaders a bit more, at the moment I'm using the default starter content water/

@ZacD Thanks for the helpful comments. Can you be a little more specific with the tree? I agree it's not quite there yet but I'm not sure what it needs exactly. I haven't touched any of the lighting aside from the default setup and adding some point lights, and I agree the lighting is pretty lacking at the moment. I'm planning on doing more lighting after I make the holographic signs since they'll be a significant source of light, and dimming the outside light since it feels kinda overly bright. I agree about the yellow benches, I'm going to try orange!

sybrix

Back at it after a long hiatus caused by a mixture of taking an art test, attending GDC, and plugging away on contract work. Starting to experience project fatigue with this so I've been trying to see what I can cut to get this done as quickly as possible, as I intended to be done a month ago. Today I made a display screen that'll show sciency images. Next is the info holograms floating by the plants and holographic wall mural, which I intend to reuse for what'll be on this info screen. I wanted to do a lot of little final touches like a caution sign covering a spilled drink, a dropped brochure pamphlet, arbitrary wall pipes, stains and wear decals, etc. But we'll see. I still need to adjust the bench color and do the lighting/post processing as well.... Will it ever get done?!

sybrix

I should probably update this thread more often.

I'm still working on this while doing contract work and searching for a full time/permanent gig. Since I'll be working on contract work and an art test at the same time this will sadly be postponed for a bit, but I'm finally starting to feel like I'm getting close to the finish line.

So since my last post I made animated holograms, a display screen, pipes, decals, and fixed some minor issues. The yellow benches are starting to grow on me. I also copied everything to a new level because the lighting was bugged out in the default level, and I haven't baked the lighting or set up lights yet (hence janky shadows). Also not sure about the blue border color on the hologram mural.

To do: A "welcome" hologram banner to go above the willow tree, a sign decal for the empty wall, a "caution: wet floor" sign and cup for the spill on the floor, some pamphlet litter because people are sloppy, and a grunge decal to sprinkle around so that everything is clean but not *too clean*. After that it's lighting and then putting a bow on this. C&C welcome of course because I want to make it look as good as I can! 

sybrix

It is the year 2085. Many plant species have gone extinct but for some reason wet floor signs remain unchanged from their 2018 versions.



Here's the animated hologram material in action:

FreneticPonies

Hey yeah, that sign should be an animated hologram with flashing lights and a dancing Shia Labeouf in remembrance of the early 21st centuries greatest badminton player.

sybrix

@FreneticPonies Haha!! You're absolutely right, I'll get right on that 

So I added some little touches today, just need to tackle the lighting now. I swear that damn tree looks so janky/kinda bald from certain angles, might do one more pass on it. There are still little things that bother me that I'd like to change but I'm... so tired lol. Please by all means keep that sweet sweet C&C coming though.

Made grunge decals and misc props littered around. Some dork left their empty coffee cup right next to the trash can because you just know someone would absolutely do this in real life. It was probably the same twit who spilled their coffee all over the steps. I bet it was me.