[UE4] Baroque Bedroom Environment
Latest
Setting
This environment has long been on my mind and has seen many different iterations. The idea came from a game concept that came out a very ambitious and quite impossible to make in my spare time. Nonetheless, I very much liked the setting that so I decided to work on one of the environments.
The bedroom is the first environment in the story where our character wakes up. From here she will explore the mansion and we learn that we're in a dark, yet precious horror story. This story was written as a short story so it could be used for a game demo where in the end our character gets killed (like every horror game demo).
For this environment I want to focus on telling the story of this character. The visuals should reflect her personality and her story arch. This inspiration came from film sets by Dan Laustsen (like Edith's room in Crimson Peak, where the furniture and color scheme reflect her position in contrast to the other characters, Elisa's house that shows water elements to foreshadow the plot in Shape of Water).
Persephone
In Greek mythology there is a story about Persephone. The story tells of a young girl, daughter to Demeter (goddess of the harvest), who was abducted by Hades (god of the underworld). Her mother was left in grief and asked her husband Zeus to retrieve her. When Persephone was brought back from the underworld she was tricked by Hades. Persephone had tasted one pomegranate seed before leaving the Underworld. This obliged her to remain in the Underworld. Zeus proposed a compromise: Persephone would spend two-thirds of the year with her mother, and one-third with her new husband. Everybody agreed – and that’s how the seasons were born and how the growth of crops was explained.
Most baroque rooms have references to such myths and stories in their architecture, sculptures and paintings. Since Persephone's story shares many similarities with our character's story arch, I want to create several references to it.
Progress
I started with blocking out the room and some of the assets. Afterwards I did some quick paintovers to explore several different lighting scenarios.
Replies
I've been modeling the room after the princess' bedroom from Hotel de Soubise in Paris. I made the layout more like an ellipse, to make it more baroque. After all, the name baroque refers to a irregular rough pearl.
I tried different variation for the curtains. The back curtain uses a dithered masked opacity so it gets a similar look to tulle. For the curtains in the front I wanted a thicker material, while still letting some light trough (using sss). I like the curved shapes in v3, though it might block a bit too much light.
For now I used the highpoly from marvelous designer to test the shapes in the scene. I'm planning on decimating or zremeshing it afterwards and then bake the normals.
The floor pattern was made in maya, which gave me the best control of creating the individual planks. I wanted to bake the pattern on a plane, but I couldn't get it to show up correctly. The spacing between the planks was too small or they would be at the same height. I did a workaround where I used Xnormal to bake the wireframe and did a cleanup in photoshop. From there I brought it to SD and used the flood fill nodes to work their magic.
The floor material finally has a basecolor. I wanted a darker wood color, so the reflections became more readable in the scene.
I started working on the panel walls. It took me a while to figure out what would be the best way to create all the details.
I wanted two types of flowers which both represent a different element of the story.
The daylily stands for the main character, for this flower last no longer than a day. Which is a foreshadowing that our character is very likely to die in the demo of the game. Because it is unclear what type of flower Persophone picked in the original story, the daylily will also represents the start of the troubling events that will follow.
The other flower is a aconitum, which is highly poisonous. Although I am planning on changing that to a pomegranate flower/fruit, which is what eventually bounded Persophone to the underworld.
In Maya I arranged the aconitum flowers and used a custom material in UE4 and baked a height map. Which I would bring to Substance for the final texture.
The bed now has a proper model with uv's, which I will be bringing into Zbrush for some final details.
The room starts to come together more nicely. Though there is still more work to be done, so any feedback is appreciated
Its been nearly a year since I started this environment and I've abandoned this blog for a long while, though a lot has happened since. For the last year I have been working on it in my spare time and tried to come up with interesting solution to efficiently create the baroque ornament. I am now working on it full time as my graduation project. So let's start with a really quick update:
Most of the meshes have been made, some of them are still in block out and others need a lot of work. Textures for most assets are in, but nearly all need to be completed.
Right now I plan on updating this blog more since I am working on it every day. But before that here are some of the screenshots of the latest version:
You can find the environment here on my Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/QzBKAZ
I also separated the materials here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/k4o3vz
And if you're interested in my workflow, have a look at my tutorial on creating baroque ornaments: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/L2OKew
My main focus with this project was to tell a story through textures and efficiently create baroque ornaments. I have explored a wide range of techniques. While in the end it proved most efficient to create simple geometry and combine procedural and painted heightmaps within Substance Designer. You can find a tutorial about this pipeline in my portfolio.
Many thanks to the people who provided me with feedback and support!