[WIP][UE4] Cat in the Rain (Town Square Environment)
interpolator
Hey, thought i'd start one of these up for my Major Project, assessed in about 12 months time. Aim is to get cumulative feedback on what I'm doing, as well as forcing myself to keep a progress log (one of the requirements of the project). Hopefully I can keep this updated, but i'm always a bit slack about it.
Basic proposal is a small-medium sized environment adapted from an area described in Ernest Hemingway's "A Cat in the Rain" - Essentially a dreary inter-war town square in northern France. There'll be 5-6 areas of interest, where i'll showcase a hero prop of some sort and a little static scenario. As it stands, i'm thinking of: A cafe, A truck unloading, a cenotaph, hotel lobby, and hotel room.
I do have concepts drawn, but they're pretty gnarly as i'm not too good at drawing, so really just there to remind me of what's in my head, and probably won't look like much to anyone else.
So, some progress screenshots:
Early Blockout, really just getting the dimensions for the square down. Will probably re-scale based on the size of the apartment building on the left... I think it might be slightly too small though.
A shot from ground-level.
Putting together a set of modular pieces to quickly put together the buildings that will surround the square. First time i've really used this technique, so still figuring out what works best. (How am i going to do the low poly? what about Material IDs and texture sheets?)
An apartment building i put together using the modular pieces, plus some custom ones that i guess i can add back into the pool (The Awning is pretty dodgy, please forgive it). As it stands I don't think it's detailed enough, but I'm guessing a lot of it will be carried through the textures (Bricks, Roof tiles, stone, etc.)
A closer look at the archways building seen in the blockout - Truck will go in the large arch tunnel. Don't have a concrete plan or reference for this, will have to think about it a bit further. Arches are modular and parameterised.
That should be it for this initial post, I have a specific question to ask but will put that in a comment below. C&C would be greatly appreciated! Any general pointers on making environments (specifically the larger level geometry stuff) like these would also be fantastic! Thank you.
Replies
Seems like it will work well if you want to make different variants of the materials too. You can make different coloured variants of the shop front and the awning with a mask.
Looking forward to seeing how this progresses
Put together the Low poly for that first shopfront, spent way too long on it, sorta using it as a test-bed in order to work out the kinks in my workflow. Hopefully my production will accelerate once i get some momentum going.
I decided I'd split the ID's by modular elements rather than by building. This means that there's an extra 2 ID's (5 for this building), but I plan to make use of economies of scale by reusing the modular elements, so every subsequent building should only have 1 or 2 extra unique ID's. That way the more buildings i have, the cheaper it is!
And here it is in context - kinda wanted the roof to be a bit lower but what can you do? Plan on adding hedgerows out the front, and flowerpots in the second floor windows, but they're detailing props that i'll get to later.
And a look at the door i modeled for this building - will re-use elsewhere.
My only call outs would be that the doorknob on that green door is wayyy too high
and the arches may need to be pushed up a tad bit. Might be too close to the character's head.
As for feedback:
Your slate roof looks very generic/uniform right now.
Try to make your main shapes look separate from each other by adjusting your tile sampler.
To make your noise look less uniform use a high value Directional Warp with your main shapes (before you use noise) as the greyscale input.
This way the detail is appearing individually for each slate which makes your material look way less procedurally generated. This is an easy trick that will boost the realism of your material instantly.
Also be aware that your plaster will have a very visible tiling pattern. No problem for the trims but on bigger polygons it will be visible.
Anyway, good luck your for project!
For a project with this many buildings and large tiling textures, I'd also recommend looking into integrating vertex painting. It'll really help breakup those textures and add some cool detail.
Keep it up!
Good catch on the vertex painting, because i actually already have a system in place for that. I haven't used it yet because the noise i was using to blend was unsatisfactory, and I wanted to refocus on the buildings first (as you've pointed out).
Take a read through this polycount post by Jacob Norris. It was posted a while back but the info is still solid;
https://polycount.com/discussion/144838/ue4-modular-building-set-breakdown
As for the trim for your buildings, you should probably find appropriate trim for the style of buildings you want to make. Shouldn't be hard to find references if you're looking for a specific century of style of architecture
When I mean more elements, I guess some more shapes and models to break up the shilloutte of the buildings. Adding things like guttering or a wind vane or something could help make the buildings feel a bit more interesting and less generic.
Hope this helps!
Also did a lot of work on the layout, along with some minor props (renders came out strangely dark for some reason).:
Materials are not final on the hotel, need to put a bit more thought into it. I also think i need to put together at least one more unique building to fill in the space on the narrow end of the square, as i don't like using that many dupes. Unsure of what though.
I've also started putting together some of the "areas of interest", using the assets from the Kite demo as concepts. For this particular spot i'll have a nice vine wall, and maybe a bench.
Put a bit more detail into the Cafe area, ignore the alleyway to heaven on the left there
Next steps are to rework the narrow end of the square, get a material done for the floor (I'm thinking cobblestones), put together some trim pieces, and texture the props i've already got. I feel as if most of the foundational work is done now, and am excited to start getting into the smaller details, where i feel i excel at (and certainly enjoy the most).
of which i unfortunately lost the sbs for in a crash, so the adjustments i wanted to make couldn't really happen. It looks much better in-engine though.
I'm using POM to add depth to the material, along with a vertex paint blend system to add in the puddles. Might also see about using it to add moss/general grunge to the material as well (right now i'm just multiplying a clouds over the top in order to break up the tiling).
It's probably not the best picture, but I also put together a spline based system for generating gutters, allowing me to very quickly conform them to the shape of the buildings.
Also got some decals off textures.com to add some variation to the archways building. Still have to get the vertex paint system to something i like.
Started working on a system to generate vines along a trellis i put together, after i was dissatisfied with the efficiency of the Ivy generators that were out there. Decided that instead of generating the vines first and indirectly trying to get the ample leaf coverage, i'd start with the leaves and generate the vine stalks from there. Don't know how well this is going to work (especially with my limited knowledge of Houdini).
a beauty shot i put together for social media, so you guys can have it too.
That's all, feedback always welcome!
Started working on a leaf material, i still need to do a lot of work on the colour and roughness, by far the hardest parts of the material for me. Will be using this to scatter into a texture for hedgerows and other foliage.
Finished up the trellis. Kinda unhappy with the leaf material, foliage materials are quite hard to pull off. Does look alright in-engine though. Higher res leaves are scattered on the edges of the mesh so that depth is maintained at parallel viewing angles.
Variant of the clay flowerpot seen in previous screenshots, will populate with a hedgerow.
did some detailing on the underside of the archways, lamp model I did is also visible here.
I have done some other stuff, texturing some more props and some modeling, but don't have screenshots of them on me. Thanks, feedback always welcome!
That's it for now, feedback welcome!
Telephone box, M16 Adrian Helmet and Newspaper models I put together over the last week.
Gramophone model, Also experimenting with some colour grading for a different visual style.
It's not a terrible look, but I feel as if I'm cheating a little bit by desaturating everything and pumping up the contrast. I've noticed my lighting in previous projects tends to gravitate towards high contrast and strong shadows - also tends to be quite dark, and It's a habit I intended to try and break for this project.
So I think I need some feedback on getting the lighting to look nice and interesting, without resorting to stuff like the above.
Thanks!
I personally think that the lighting you have going on now fits the grey/rainy atmosphere that I think you were going for - but in turn it washes out some of the good texturing you have going on, so maybe find a bit of a medium between the two?
That's my opinion anyway - it's looking great so far, i'd love to see it progress further
Put together a bench and drain model as well.
Also did some more backdrop detailing in order to seal up the level a bit more.
I'm considering reworking my window models, I think the square trims on them are far too simple, and I realise are probably part of why I've been unhappy with the project.
First thing I'll say is that it's looking much too dark. On my monitor, a lot of your values are going to black (can be seen in the bushes and walls in the first and second shot, as well as bits around the fountain in the 3rd and fourth, etc.) Either increase your GI in postprocess or boost the skylight values. I know you want to have that nice contrast, but try and brighten things to match the skysphere as it's looking a bit random. I recommend downloading Tim Simpsons UE4 lighting set up just to play around with them and get an idea of how the work with your scene. https://gumroad.com/l/ue4light You can basically just copy the text from the doc and paste it into your scene. It'll just add a new folder with all it's own lighting stuff very non-destructively.
I'll just throw some free fire things I notice here too;
Your books don't seem to have any page definition in the textures, looks very flat where I'd expect some normal details
Hedges are looking incredibly clean and uniform, might be worth scattering some leaves on the floor and adding some abnormal branches or clusters.
The cobblestone parallax you're using is suffering from all the normal parallax issues and it's a little jarring. The places where it's intersecting with other geometry (i.e, the pavements) shows the key signs of parallax errors. I recommend either moving shots away from there, lowering the intensity, or removing the effect completely and focus on getting a solid normal map.
Rooms seem super bright and eye catching. Lower the intensity and drop some curtains in for a better silhouette.
The large square shaped pillars need to be rotated as I can see the same texture landmarks all the way down the row.
AO on the 6th shot is a bit intense for an object in direct light, probably worth pulling back on the AO a bit globally and relying more on your shadows as they are looking nice.
The brown brick house and the orange/brown building are suffering from a distance. It's hard to see any detail in them. The brown brick is also tiling way too obviously. The pattern is repeating way too much. Could be worth redoing this texture.
Lots of ideas here, pick and choose what you work on, if any.
Good luck with your project dude, hope this has helped a bit.
Well you're tackling a big scene so it's very normal for things to slip through the cracks and problems to crop up. Implementing vertex painting might require you to go back to your original kit and add some extra edge loops, but you might be able to get away with sorting out your original textures and slapping on decals here and there. Some grunges, bird poo, that kind of thing.
Keep going though dude, it's shaping up nicely
Okay so in this scene I did not too long ago, I used a stationary directional light and a static skylight. You can see in this screenshot that the yellow colours are coming from the direction light and the bluer colours are coming from the skylight from the windows and glass ceiling. To get a nice bake with your skylight, I've linked some lightmass settings and my skylight settings. You'll probably want to tweak the values for your scene of course. Increasing the indirect and sky lighting bounces will help fill your scene nicely without adding harsh contrast! I also use Luoshangs GPU lightmass baker which does some incredible bakes, might be worth checking out