Creating the USS Valkyrie Bridge (Star Trek Scifi Environment, UE4)

Peyton_V_Thomas

Hello, my name is Peyton Thomas. I am an aspiring 3D artist who lives in Austin, Texas.

In this post, I will be talking about how I constructed the bridge environment I constructed, and the techniques I used to build it. Star Trek is my favorite franchise, and it’s the reason I wanted to go into 3D art to begin with. It was only natural that I wanted to recreate a bridge environment.

I should mention that I did create this bridge once in Unity last year for one of my game art classes. That project was an entire semester’s work. However, I felt that it wasn’t up to par with my current skill set, and since it was the only environment I had under my belt, I decided that remastering it was the best way to build a fleshed out environment to get experience before branching out into other genres for more environment creation. Overall, this environment took about 3 months to complete in full.

For setup work, I took as many movie screenshots as I could from the movie Star Trek: Beyond, as well as researching any set photo I could find. I then took all of my pieces and blocked out the entire scene within 3DS Max.

If you want to look at more of the bridge, check out my Artstation post:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/q14ry

First, I will go over the process behind the unique objects in the scene.

1. Unique Assets

I started with the more complicated pieces on the asset list, with the first one being the captain’s chair. The captain's chair was made with a standard workflow. I constructed it in 3DS Max, textured it in Substance Painter, and then exported to Unreal 4. However, I did use ZBrush to sculpt some wrinkles in the cushion for baking. This is the only time I used ZBrush in the project. The captain’s chair and the normal chairs are the only objects in the scene that use 4k textures for crisp closeups if needed.

The next piece is the central Helm/Navigation console. The main bulk of the console uses two 2k textures, one for the console and one for the control panels. While mostly being a standard workflow, I did a couple things differently. First off, the metal seams that are on the console are actually achieved with floating geometry strings on top of the model. This was so that I could increase the resolution on the seams within the UV’s by expanding the islands for the seam geometry unwraps, as they would not be confined to certain UV islands for resolution and I could have them nice and crisp while being smaller.

The painted labels you see use a decal sheet that I created for the entire bridge environment. That sheet uses floating planes and an opacity mask to composite it in the scene.

The light grates on the console use a a tileable light grate texture that’s used on the rest of the bridge.

The touch screens are rendered as MP4’s with 3 second loops for all of them. The consoles all have a 1k screen textures made exclusively for themselves, and the wall monitors are separated into two 2k texture sheets and one 1k texture sheet. These displays were created with both Photoshop and After Effects. I will be uploading a demo reel showcase of the bridge on my Youtube channel soon. You can find the channel here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwtUDxHB9J76jQBTUz_OTcA

All the control panels you see around the walls share a single 2k material. A lot of work was done in Photoshop creating alpha cards for all the button layouts that I could then use to stencil onto the meshes in Substance Painter.

Lastly, the Science and Communications consoles in the back were built the same as the Helm/Navigation console, however the floating seams for these console actually utilize the trim texture I created for the floor.

2. Trim and Tileable Texture Assets

The floor uses 2 textures: a 2k tileable metal material, and a floor trim material. The floor trim contains a one-directional tiling seam line, amongst other things. This seam line within the trim allowed me to use the trim for all the small seams you see along the walls and ceilings of the bridge.

Pretty much all the wall pieces and ceiling pieces use a tiling painted metal texture I created in Substance, using a simple box unwrap in Max (I did tweak the lightmaps in the 2nd UV channel to get crisper resolution in some areas though). A few other tileable texture I created are also utilized. To get smooth corners for these walls, I chamfered a lot of the curves and corners, using a weighted normals plugin to make the chamfers look nice and crisp. To get different colors of metal on the walls and ceiling, I simply cloned the material and setup a blend node system to alter the base color, that way all versions of painted metal use the same textures. The light grates on the floor use the same method, as they are green colored.

3. Unreal Lighting Setup

Most of the work with lighting was trial and error, tweaking certain settings and playing with different light positions. The lighting is also different than what we see in the actual film. This is because I wanted stronger lighting to highlight the assets I create, as the film’s set was very dark. Moreover, the Franklin in the movie had been sitting on a planet for 100 years and falling into disrepair. I wanted to construct a version of the bridge that represented what it may have looked like when it was newer and well kept. All the lighting within the scene is baked, so that I could get nice volumetric bounce lighting. The tricky part was that large ceiling light above the captain’s chair. Since Unreal to my knowledge does not have planar lights, I used an architectural visualization trick that utilizes a bounce plane. I set up about 7 spotlights and pointed them up at a simple plane. Then, I set it up to where the spotlights only affected the plane and nothing else via lighting channels. The end result was that the light from the spotlights bounced off the plane and back down onto the environment, simulating a large overhead light.

That concludes the summary of constructing this environment. If you have any questions, feel free to comment either here or on my Artstation. Any critiques would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for checking this post out!

NikhilR

Love it! Making all those unique alpha textures must have been quite a challenge!