[UE4] [WIP] Red door - Student personal project

Peter_tran

Hey guys, I'm Peter and I study modeling and 3D animation in Montréal. I've decided to join Polycount mainly to received feedbacks but also to keep myself on track so I can stay motivated on actually finishing a personal project before jumping to another one. That being said, please do feel free to critique, question or comment on my works. I really do seek and appreciate ANY kind of feedback    .

So this is what I'm working on right now, an environment based on Stephan McGowan concept art.

After deciding that this would be my next environment to work on, I quickly found some photo stock of this place from almudena-stock  which is awesome for more references.

Then I quickly blocked out the environment inside ue4 to get a sense of the place. 


Once I nailed down the proportion and the scale of the door, I made the base on Maya and exported it to Zbrush to sculpt. 

It was a lot of masking > inflate > refining with brushes (95% default brushes). I was rather lucky since the photo stock was taken in front with very little perspective. I took advantage of it by using Pureref to make my references see-through and to stay on top of Zbrush to do all the masking. 


Next steps are the retopoly and texturing. After that onto the rocks but I'm still unsure on how to tackle them.  
I will definitely update soon enough with more images! Once again, feel free to critique, question or comment on my works. I really do seek and appreciate ANY kind of feedback    . Thanks! 

Shyralon

Wow, masking out all those details looks like a lot of work!
Result is looking very good, can't wait to see the final asset.

Peter_tran

@Shyralon Thanks man! Indeed it was a lot of masking and it was well worth it 

Update, finished retopology and it was quite simple, could've spent more time on uv but I really wanted to spend more time on texturing since I know very well that I will struggle. The bakes went also fairly good I think. 

Texturing is definitely my weakest point in my opinion as someone who wants to be an environment artist. I will gladly listen to any tips or advice for texturing. This is my first iteration so far on texturing with Quixel. 

*Also, there's a problem I'm dealing with at the moment ... somehow the textures look totally crappy inside ue4  or rather different from my Quixel viewport. I've tried the ue4 rma export, the usual export to ue4, checked off srgb for my roughness, metallic, ao but still kinda look disappointing.  I think it may be a lighting problem (even though I've left totally by default the lighting in Quixel and ue4) and I might be able to fix it if I try to tweak the lighting inside ue4.*


If anyone could enlighten about the looks of my textures inside ue4 or any critiques, please do! For the time being, I will keep on testing and searching. Thanks!

samdelfanti

You may want to try a couple things to make your textures look a little better in engine. Mess with your skylight intensity or delete it because it can really blow out scenes. Also your roughness map is you friend. You can add a lot of variety and "lived in" feel to your assets by tweaking your roughness map ie. lower roughness around the door knob and high points to simulate a worn out polished look. Hope some of this helps!

Klawd

Nice job with the highpoly @Peter_tran, very neat!
As for the UE4 issue, if you are using packed textures you need to disable sRGB in UE4 for them (it's enabled by default). Keep in mind though that the results will not be 100% the same between UE4 and the Substance or Quixel suites, because the latters do not yet use ACES colors/filmic tonemapper standards. If the above doesn't work, and you want to check if it's the tonemapper you can disable it in the viewport from Show>Post Processing>Tonemapper

Peter_tran

@samdelfanti I messed with the skylight and it did help a bit! After seeing that I'm pretty sure I have to tweak a lot on the lighting in general to fix the look of my textures. I think. Also, I definitely will pay a lot more attention to my roughness map for my second texturing iteration. Thanks!

@KlawdI can't really wrap my head around the fact that textures don't quite look the same in the engine and the texturing package... Do artists really go back and foward everytime? It seems a bit tedious / unproductive, well with Quixel at least. Also, I definitely don't know enough about ue4 and its tonemapper yet but after disabling it in the viewport, it was actually a lot closer to what I had with Quixel, especially for my albedo. Thank you so much for pointing that out!! 

jStins

Nice work on the high poly! You may want to revisit the scale of your medium and high frequency details in your textures as they feel a bit too large at the moment and hurt the sense of scale on the model. Take a close look at your reference photos and try to identify the small patterns and shapes that help define the surface and try to match that in your texture. The door in the photo for example has a fine (small) grain texture. You can see they are about 2x bigger in your textures (most noticeable in the second image of your last post).

Peter_tran

@jStins Thanks! On the second iteration of my textures, I did pay more attention to the size of the details on the textures. However, I'm not so sure if I made it worse. 

Update, I still haven't fully figured it out for the UE4 textures wise issue. It did get better but still nowhere near what I can get from marmoset toolbag. At first, the result from toolbag also wasn't too good but then I accidentally put my ao map in the cavity and it looked extremely close, if not exactly the same to what I had in the viewport of Quixel. For now, I've done some small and subtle changes on my textures (still in Quixel). Please let me know what you guys think, I definitely will do another iteration on my textures since I'm still not quite satisfied yet.