2042 Interior ~ University Classroom

Ashervisalis

Hey friends, I'm participating in the ArtStation 2042 Interior Contest. Wish me luck! I've been working on this for a few weeks now, and the idea is finally coming together. This project is being done in Maya/Renderman (I forgot how much more beautiful the nodes/hypershade in Maya is compared to UE4!). The idea is a classroom which is technologically advanced, but is still close to nature. Every desk is going to have a cintiq-like screen. Here's what I've got so far. Any suggestions or critiques are more than welcome.

Alex_J

cool. is the design up to you? if i was designing a classroom "close to nature", the roof definitely has to be open or at least glass. Maybe some cool designs inlaid or something.

I think symmetry is a good look for futuristic things. Probably a nice view to showcase the final work would be looking straight on at the instructor with the two big trees framing the small class and those light bars running down either side. If the roof were glass with puddled rain water on top to soak up some of that lighting, that might look really nice.

Ashervisalis

@BIGTIMEMASTER Hey dude, yeah, the design is up to me. I've actually gone through a few iterations trying to find the best layout. Still deciding on what to do with the roof. Glass would be really cool, I've still got to fully figure out the ceiling. I think the above picture will be one of the final views, I really wanted to use the Fibonacci spiral to help the composition. I'll be adding some brown ivy climbing up the trees, as well as some yellow plants at the base. They were going to be green, but that wouldn't really fit with the composition's colour scheme.

Ashervisalis

Been working on the lighting. I created a tiling panel texture in Substance for the ceiling. Due to the constrains of working with 5 texture groups, I'm looking for a way to force Maya to repeat UV tiling across specific constraints on the UV layout (i.e. have my trees UV mapped to 0.0-0.5 of both horizontal and vertical, and then set the material to tile in that range, so I can increase the tiling repetition). If anybody knows a way, that would be wicked! I'm going to put the desk, computer, chair, and a few other props all onto one texture group.

Ashervisalis

Hey team, whats going on. I decided to revamp the colour scheme to a more neutral lighting. The old lighting just wouldn't be seen in a classroom. I've also adjusted some of the shapes and added ivy. I'm going to add some dirt and start adding plants to the areas where the tree is. Still figuring out Renderman, so there's a lot of issues with my render so far.

Ashervisalis

Spent the day working on foliage. I've added Ivy, but I think the leaf texture needs to be flipped around! I also created a second tree as the trees were duplicate before. I created several leafy plants but will wait until they're textured before I post them. I need to finish off my bark texture for some variation as well.

After many test renders, I think I'll be going with a green-heavy scene. Only question is if I want to use red as an opposing colour, or venture into the tri-colour range and pick orange and purple as a colour scheme.

Trying to figure out if I should do anything to the floor. The chairs have wheels and the floor is currently tile, and it's been driving me mental thinking about trying to roll around on a chair on tile floor. You would just keep getting stuck in the grooves between the tiles, would be outrageous. Can you imagine? Maybe I'll elevate the classroom area slightly, and put the desks on some sort of wooden raised bit.

I'm not sure if anybody is really reading this, so I'm just going to say that I'll be having avocado and tomato eggs benny for breakfast tomorrow, and I'm really looking forward to it. If you happen to still be reading this, you're a trooper.

Ashervisalis

Bark texture re made.

Ashervisalis

Adding more foliage. Going to be redoing the tree on the left because I fee like it.

Alex_J

that bark material was a big improvement.

Big leaves seem like they ought to be a leeeetle bit shinier. I could almost image something like a mister like you have in the produce aisles at the supermarket keeping everything juicy looking.

Ashervisalis

@Bigtimemaster Thanks man. I'm struggling a bit to make my materials look the same as they do in Substance Designer. There doesn't seem to be a way to plug an AO map into a Renderman material O.o I may have to edit the material to just make the albedo darker in the crevasses of the bark. Same with the leaves, they're no where near as shiny as they are in Substance Painter. I will go back and edit some more.

Ashervisalis

Redid the tree on the left as well as the ivy. Also put some work into the lighting. The deadline is coming up fast!! Instead of the screen at the front, I might try creating a hologram projection, which would definitely draw interest. I'll be removing the figure soon, and working on that area of the environment to provide more interest. I didn't model the tops of the trees, so I might throw in some random translucent meshes above the roof to fake tree shadows. I've also got to texture the chair, desk, and computer. Any advice on colour management so far would be appreciated!

Ashervisalis

I've started texturing the desks, computers, etc, finally. Also managed to model this little guy super quick (heavy inspiration taken from Hover Camera). I have no idea how I'll be doing the effects I plan on with Renderman. If this was in UE4, a cool trippy shader would do just fine, but alas, it's not, so wish me luck.

Ashervisalis

Righto, so I've put some variation into the ivy leaves, and cranked the bark displacement. The basic texturing for the desks/chairs/computers/drones are slapped on. Honestly it's surprising how many options you have with a rendering engine compared to a video game engine. I find it fun, but can spend all day fooling around with the settings, and miss out on all the other things. I've been researching colour management (as recommended by Greg below), and I've still yet to get a grasp on it. Will keep trying to figure that out though.

I modeled the hologram, bonus points if you can figure out what class this is. The material was quite fun to make. Slightly opaque, iridescent, glowing. The lasers are just glowing meshes.

Reminder for me to fix;

- The ceiling UV's are a bit warped.

- Tone down the displacement on the bark?

- Change colour of whiteboard container, as it's not visible right now. Black maybe? Might need to change the colour of the drones as well, because they're blending into the background a bit too much.

- Darken ivy bark.

Ashervisalis

Been goofing around with lighting and shaders. Spent an hour today tweaking my plant shader, and another few hours to figure out why some of my meshes were black. I've actually got the next four days off work, so I'm wondering if something is missing that I could make for this. I never ended up making the native american art, maybe I could spend a few days making that? Not sure if I'd had time really. I also condensed a bunch of textures and realized I've only used 8 texture sets, so I actually have an extra 2 I could create something with (the rules for the competition limit number of texture sets to 10).



I might make the light for the hologram more green to give it a glowing look. I also think I might make the tiles for the floor darker. I realized they got their dark red colour before because the lights were overly red hahah.

Ashervisalis

I figured I'd like to use another texture set for some props, and also realized I needed a spot light source for the stage. Only took me this morning to create these guys, will throw them into the scene and see how they fit.

Ashervisalis

Well guys, it's finished

https://www.artstation.com/contests/nvidia-metropia-2042/challenges/62/submissions/40323?sorting=latest

Alex_J

I think the individual props are great, the composition is probably fine but i'm not expert there, but the lighting is holding the scene back alot.

I might expect the lights to be dimmed so the students can focus on the projection, then a bit of sunlight coming down from the holes in the ceiling where the trees go through. Maybe a bit of atmospheric fog or little bugs there.

There's all these lights framing in the scene but the whole scene is very flatly lit. I think toning down the ambient light significantly and letting all the little point lights in your scene do most the work would make it a lot nicer to look at.

Ashervisalis

@BIGTIMEMASTER Thanks Alex! I can totally see what you're getting at. I probably spent an entire week fooling around with the lighting and trying out new things. I actually had the contrast pushed and more light shining down through the holes in the ceiling, and it looked interesting, but I really wanted to go for a realistic, well-lit uni classroom during mid-day. Now that you mention it though, I should have played around with some volume fog around the trees, that would have been dope. And thanks so much for keeping on checking up on this

EliasWick

Hey, I believe you were going for another tone, but I brought in the image into photoshop and started to adjust some colours and added a bit of contrast, light shafts, etc to make the image pop a bit more. You should definitely play around more with lights and post process and your environment can become an incredible piece.

This is something I quickly whipped up in a couple of minutes, of course more work is required for something better.

Ashervisalis

@EliasWick Hey thanks! Your edits did for sure make the plants and trees pop a lot more, and the yellow tint on the ceiling looks really interesting. If I go back and do edits, I'll probably do so inside RenderMan and Maya. Maybe I'll return to this one in a month or so because I've just worked on it so much lately Do you think the floor tiles in my original look too desaturated?

EliasWick

Ashervisalis said:

@EliasWick Hey thanks! Your edits did for sure make the plants and trees pop a lot more, and the yellow tint on the ceiling looks really interesting. If I go back and do edits, I'll probably do so inside RenderMan and Maya. Maybe I'll return to this one in a month or so because I've just worked on it so much lately Do you think the floor tiles in my original look too desaturated?

Thanks
The floors could be darker or brighter depending on just the feel you get from it. To be honest, if you have got the time for it, try to change it to something else to see how it would look