Gears of War - Cellar Environment
grand marshal polycounter
Sup guys,
My goal for my portfolio from now on is to tailor my projects towards the studios here in Vancouver. There's some pretty cool studios, and one of the games which I think is quite suited towards my desired art style is Gears of War, from The Coalition. One of the things I looked for in concept art was an environment which wasn't overly complex, as I don't want to spend 6 months creating clutter and junk to fill the scene. I stumbled upon this concept by Adam Baines and it stood out to me as a fun project.
In this scene I'm going to focus on and push my skills in;
- Creating poly count and texture size which is optimized.
- Creating collision for each mesh.
- Material blending (with masks) and projections.
- Matching the GoW art style.
- Indoor lighting.
- I would also like to learn how to create a water material from scratch and a simple dust particle system inside UE4.
As usual, I like to start off with something a bit easy. The colours don't match the concept, and I'm currently deciding on trying to match colours now, or in post processing. The barrel on the right is using one of the concept images as an environment in Substance Painter. I'm still working on the texturing but I think I'm going to get halfway through the texturing for several assets so I can find a groove/theme which I can get into.
My goal for my portfolio from now on is to tailor my projects towards the studios here in Vancouver. There's some pretty cool studios, and one of the games which I think is quite suited towards my desired art style is Gears of War, from The Coalition. One of the things I looked for in concept art was an environment which wasn't overly complex, as I don't want to spend 6 months creating clutter and junk to fill the scene. I stumbled upon this concept by Adam Baines and it stood out to me as a fun project.
In this scene I'm going to focus on and push my skills in;
- Creating poly count and texture size which is optimized.
- Creating collision for each mesh.
- Material blending (with masks) and projections.
- Matching the GoW art style.
- Indoor lighting.
- I would also like to learn how to create a water material from scratch and a simple dust particle system inside UE4.
As usual, I like to start off with something a bit easy. The colours don't match the concept, and I'm currently deciding on trying to match colours now, or in post processing. The barrel on the right is using one of the concept images as an environment in Substance Painter. I'm still working on the texturing but I think I'm going to get halfway through the texturing for several assets so I can find a groove/theme which I can get into.
Replies
I'm assuming you're working on Gears Of Wars Ultimate Edition which means the concept art's timeline was 14 years after Emergence Day. It's important to remember that because that means many props and buildings are worn out, destroyed, or very old during that time. Right now, your barrel looks pretty new which doesn't fit right into the timeline. So I will suggest you make the wood material looks pretty old and worn out. Water damage will help too as mentioned by MattN.
But if you're working on Gears of War 4 timeline, then it will make sense to make your barrel looks new plus water damage.
Looking forward to seeing more of your works on this project!
Good luck, man!
I would block out the scene and then focus on getting the basic materials and models done that fill 80% of the screen vs spending time making barrels. you will see huge daily gains that will keep you motivated to keep working on the scene. get the entire environment laid out and to an "alpha" (75% complete) state before working on small details and props. it will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.
@PixelMasher Roger roger, will execute.
My hard drive failed on Tuesday. I haven't backed up my art or music production files in over a year, and I was freaking out. Very luckily, the shop I brought my computer to was able to recover my files, thank god. I'll post up more work when I get everything running properly again.
I'd also add download a hard drive diagnostics tool that can monitor/keep track of your storage device health.
Wine cupboard created, pipes have been blocked out, though I need to make hangers for them. Been having issues with light coming through the corners and learned that walls, floors, etc should actually be a cube, not a plane, so I'll have to readjust some things. I've set up basic lighting to get a feel, but on the side I'm watching some UE4 lighting courses to prepare myself for actually creating lights. Currently working on some stairs for the exit, and I might make the end of the large room either a vault door or a rolling warehouse door, though I feel the previous would fit the style and challenge me a bit more. Everything has efficient collision which I'm pretty proud of. So, to summarize;
- Vault door (?)
- Stairs (almost finished)
- Fix corner lighting issue (edit: fixed)
- Lamps, pipe hanging things
- Bottles
- Broken glass
- Spiderwebs
After I've got those down pat, will move onto grunge painting/material blending in engine, lighting, and post.
edit: Fixed the corner lights. Somehow I forgot I had a skylight in the scene and it was causing all kinds of corner light leakage. Is kinda weird because the corners are actually one solid piece.
Stairs ✔
Water material ✔ (will still fool around with to get perfect)
Lamp ✔
Ceiling ✔ (Material looks as good as I'll get it, ceiling plane is no longer flat)
Created a spider web generator inside of Substance Designer!
I've also placed broken glass, texture painted puddles, mold, and dirt, and added the spider webs. The webs aren't exactly how I want them yet, so will have to play around. They're either too opaque or not opaque enough!
The frame rate is only now dropping a little, which for my computer, is pretty good. I'm thinking I've done good with the frame rate because of making almost every single mesh have a custom collision, packed texture maps, and efficient poly counts.
Aside from a few fittings for the piping, working on the spider webs some more and correcting a few mesh issues, the layout is pretty much finished. Tonight or tomorrow I'll be reworking the lighting and post processing!
One thing that I notice is missing from your assets is how they don't hold up against the real thing. I'll use your cobwebs as an example:
Real cobwebs either have the typical radiating "spider web pattern" or they have deteriorated to the point of the more bubbly strands seen below.
Your cobwebs are very rigid, not just in their silhouette but in their details. They are mostly just overlapping wavy straight lines. From a distance they may seem okay, but from your chosen angles I can make out what they are meant to be and also make out that they feel unnatural. In Designer, you'd probably be better off using a cells noise and doing some warping.
What I'm trying to get to here is that attention to detail (across all levels) is what is going to bring your assets from *2007 gamey* to the sort of work the studios you wish to apply to are going to want to see. Their style is realism, and so you need to look at real materials and nail them. I think the best thing to do in your case is get a megascans membership and really look into each map and asset and see what is being done. I'd also consider looking at the free Paragon assets recently released by Epic. Those are awesome learning resources.
From there, try a few real world studies and see how close you can hit.
Your work is good but there's a journey ahead of you if you want to break in! Definitely finish this piece up and stick it on your website.
You've already got some work under your belt and some good traction so play smart, absorb and learn as much as you can, and keep working hard.
I'm still trying to fix the rock ceiling as it doesn't sit right with me. I've vertex painted some areas darker so as to break up the tiling pattern.
I also added water drops coming from the pipes in several locations. Aside from working on the spider webs a bit more, I think I'm going to call this project done. If anybody has any suggestions before I post this onto my portfolio, now would be the time!
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/bQqxa
As for the other assets, I think your brick wall is probably the weakest:
- You've got a lot of grime on there but it's very localised to the cracks. I would have this fade into your bricks to add some depth.
- The bricks themselves look like they're coated in a fresh layer of really plastic paint or something, so I would roughen them up and make them more porous as a high level detail.
- I can only make out two colour variations. I'd either add more, or remove it and have them all be the same - getting colour variation from grunge/dirt instead.
- Some edge highlights would add some more depth. They feel pretty flat.
- You could also add some dripping details on the albedo & roughness maps. It looks pretty humid down there.
- Some vertex painting along the top and bottom could also help to root the wall in the scene.
(I mention grunge a lot here but I don't mean to say make it filthy. Tasteful grunge placement is definitely a skill.)
Your other assets look like they had more thought go into these departments. I see you're done now, but if you wanted to do another pass that would be the best approach to bring it up to the level of the other assets. If you pick good reference and stick to it, you can't go wrong.
Good job on this one @Ashervisalis, keep up the hard work. Keen to see your next piece.
Do you think the lighting is too dark?
Its about getting more light in the right places. ( i put red on them) I'm still learning lighting in unreal myself and I have not done a scene that isn't lit mainly by the sun yet so I can't really help you much on that front. I will say though that with a darker scene like this it helps to balance darkness with some reflections. Like you see on the floor in the concept. you have it a little bit but it should be spread out more in a more natural way. I hope this makes sense
they are also slightly different colors, which helps break up the floor. You could also cut some geo in and raise some edges of a few tiles here and there to add some depth via geo.
for the ceiling lights, its weird that the bulb is so bright but it is not effecting the light fixture/hood at all, the concept has larger sources of light and that would help sell the amount of light that should be in the scene. I would boost your light intensity and crank the indirect amount of the lights to 2 or higher to get more bounce light filling in the darker areas slightly. it should start bouncing up to the ceiling and giving your pipes some form, right now they look pure black and shapeless, some indirect bounce light hitting the bottoms should help show the shapes better.
if you open your screenshot in photoshop and open up the levels or histogram, you can see 2/3rds of the range is not being used, and part of the reason its looking a bit flat. highlights should pop, and midtones need to be more readable.
quick photshop adjustment to help show what I mean
As for the lighting, did everything you suggested and it's actually looking a lot better now. I was having issues figuring out if it was too dark but now I think I hit it on the nail.
@Ged Yeah thats meant to be murky water; the place flooded. I might be able to make it a bit clearer, eh?
I want some more now!!!