[WiP] Catacombs Corridor

Daniel_Swing

This thread is to document my progress on a small scene I'm making. The project as a whole is meant as practice in environment art and material art. I hope to speed up my pipeline and iteration process and not get stuck on details. The idea is to not follow a specific piece of concept art, but to piece together several references.

Here's a day 1 mockup of the scene:

The idea is to add skulls and skeletal appendages that hang from the ceiling and stretch out from the walls and bone splinters on the mud. A wild and more "active" variant of the Paris catacombs, like that Dark Souls skeleton ball, except it's the catacomb's walls:

I also want to add some more hard-surface props and modular assets to the scene. Like a large coffin, busted wide open. Support pillars made of rock and decorated with bones. Maybe some faint, burning candles and other small decor props as well.

Daniel_Swing

Yesterday (the first day of this project) I started with some mockup materials and started tinkering with material blending in Unreal:

I also made some basic block-out models and set up some basic lighting:

Today, the idea is to make more block-out/speed models to populate the scene.

Daniel_Swing

Didn't have that much time today. I spent most of it figuring out the bigger building blocks in the corridor:

My initial thought was to add large slabs along the sides and straight pillars from floor to ceiling. But then I got the idea to mimic a spine-esq shape along the ceiling and "ribs" as support arches - I liked this a bit more as it keeps the round shape through the corridor.

icegodofhungary

Materials are looking good. If I had to pick on anything I'd say it needs a little more bounced or secondary light in those black areas.

Daniel_Swing

@icegodofhungary Thanks for the input! I'll keep that in mind when I'm doing a first proper lighting pass!

Beginning of third day:
Did a quick iteration of the support pillars.

I've also been wrestling with xGen to instance objects along the walls - super confusing and un-intuitive workflow.

Daniel_Swing

Daniel_Swing

hublus

All those skeleton pieces protruding from wall are looking super cool. Great process !

jStins

I like the spine / rib cage like forms of the pillars and overhead beam in the catacombs. The protruding skeleton pieces are cool, but right now they feel too random and lacking logic in how they got that way. The arms coming out of solid stone are the worst offenders in this regard. 

Daniel_Swing

Thanks for the input!

Daniel_Swing

I mostly been doing some clean-up, tool research and re-figuring the flow/layout of the scene the last few days.
I've updated the materials to match the metrics and texel density a bit better. I also adjusted the shaders and blending slightly.

Instead of using xGen to randomly distribute skeletal limbs, I've started using MASH to pose skeletons and place them by hand (still on the fence if I should remove the xGen skeletal limbs or not):

Daniel_Swing

I'm getting somewhat happy with the skeletons and the population of the scene. I'll move on to doing some more non-skeletal props before I move to polishing everything up.

ItzOmega

Looks great! Really different environment 

Daniel_Swing

Thank you @ItzOmega

Doing a second iteration of the materials:

When I've sculpted bones and skeletal parts, I'll bake some down to height-maps to use as well.

Daniel_Swing

I'm starting to think I should do some sort of "in between" material and lerp between three sets of textures (instead of just two). That way I can control the look of the transition between cobblestone and mud much more - I'm not really liking the gradient transition between mud and stone.

Daniel_Swing

Been doing some restructuring in my substance and shader graphs to get a more pleasant blending, now using three texture sets (mud, muddy cobblestone and cobblestone):

Daniel_Swing

I think I've gotten most rock and stone shapes to where I want them - I'll focus a bit more on the color and roughness next. After that, it's probably time to start sculpting bones.

Daniel_Swing

Finally getting back to this.

Note to self: Add some sort of grout, pouring and dripping out between the stones.

I wanted to participate in the ArtStation challenge this time, but art tests came in the way and I feel like I won't be able to finish it in just 3 weeks. So I'll just do this instead.

Daniel_Swing

fixed the floor rocks accordingly as well:

Note to self: Make the mud more caking. Add more grime ontop of stones.

Daniel_Swing

I'll start sculpting the bones now.

Daniel_Swing

First draft:

corviera

Nice texturing. I like how the scene has these empty spots to balance the composition with the crowded spots. The scene feels a bit too monochrome and warm, perhaps bringing the shadows closer to green or blue would help to make it more interesting.

Daniel_Swing

Thank you! I'll make sure introduce more colors with some decals and other meshes later. As for the lighting, I'm still experimenting with that, I'll try making it colder in the next iteration.

I think I'm done with the skull sculpt (though some areas are a bit problematic and I may have to revisit them):

I'll try a quick re-top and bake, then I'll do the rest of the bones.

Daniel_Swing

Finnaly back to working on this one again. During my vacation break I've had some time to think about the scene, and I feel like I need a new take on the support pillars and arcs. I'll be going for something more like this:

I'm thinking that I should do a trim-sheet to cover those areas

Daniel_Swing

Progress for today:

Since I'm not using the full stone brick material anywhere (no UV fills the entire 0 to 1 space), I decided to customize it a bit so that I can map large and small rocks to different parts of the textures:

I puzzled this piece together by doing some cutting in the UV and mapping it to the stone brick material:

The idea is to add a step to the base, so it looks like something like this:

Or maybe I should just sculpt a proper mesh in zBrush? I don't really like the dull edges I get this way.

griffitii

Hi Daniel, I scanned through your progress, looks like it's coming together well but the whole image is very busy. Have you thought about having some larger areas with not much in them so that the eye can rest as it moves around the image? Reducing the amount of skeletons in places would help with this.

Daniel_Swing

Thanks for the input @griffitii ! I'll experiment more with the population of the scene when I've finished sculpting bones.

Daniel_Swing

Quick update on the skull - I'm struggling a bit on keeping the number of polygons down (since I'm going to have 100+ of them in the scene, I feel like I should keep it somewhat low) while also keeping a suitable silhouette. Though I think I'm happy with this one (some triangulation issues here and there, will have to fix) moving on to other bones before I texture (and maybe some variants?).

(Different lenses)

Getting some Papyrus vibes, is it the teeth?

Daniel_Swing

Feels like I'm saying this every time I post something here, but I finally got in some time to work on this.
Spent today doing the arms. I'll do another pass on the high-poly, probably tomorrow (the hands look pretty strange).

Like with the skull, I'm struggling a bit to keep the amount of polygons down while still keeping an acceptable silhouette (almost 2k for the entire arm ).

Test-bake in Marmoset:

The idea is to fit all skeletal parts into the same texture set.

Daniel_Swing

Spent yesterday on these ribs:

Test-bake:

This time I'm very happy with the amount of polygons, though I will have to revisit the topology a bit to fix some baking issues.

The idea is to put all skeletal parts into the same texture set, so I'm waiting to do the final touches until I have all parts ready.

Daniel_Swing

Will be doing some more tweeking on this one (I noticed that the arms are far to long):

Daniel_Swing

Will be baking these into an atlas so that I can use them in Substance Designer. Will have to figure out a way to extract each skull separately from the atlas, I have a few ideas I'll get to work on. They're scaled according to texel density. Will do another atlas for some of the other bones as well.

(this is literally over 100 million polygons, so I had to install xNormal again since Marmoset can't really bake that many)

Daniel_Swing

Daniel_Swing

Added more variation and damage. Maybe made it too noisy?

Daniel_Swing

Less noise and a less dense variant:

Will get on to making an atlas for the other bone parts now.

AdrianZaplata

God, I love those textures. Looking good so far! Keep going with it. 

Daniel_Swing

Thank you @AdrianZaplata !

Update on the variant:

I'll add some small bones to the dense version between the skulls as well.

Daniel_Swing

Spent today on mostly un-nesting some dependencies and other oddities that'll make the graphs easier to work with in the long run.

Also, mud:

Really finicky to fake transparent surfaces.

I'll be getting back to the skeletons next, texture and pose them.

Daniel_Swing

Spent today doing this:

I decided to use Designer instead of Painter, so I can more easily use the same patterns and color pallets as I did in the tiling materials.

I also re-baked the skull atlas, with some teeth missing from certain skulls.

Daniel_Swing

quick in-engine test:

Daniel_Swing

Some more tests with posed skellies:

eika

U Kill it guys ! Keep it up

Ashervisalis

Hey, for future instancing, I'd suggest trying out Mash in Maya. It has some issues, but it's a much better workflow than xgen I believe.

Daniel_Swing

Some ceiling art:

Also been fixing the modular assets a bit. Since I'm using displacement, I noticed that I need some extra uv-space for the bevels (as they're getting stretched).

@eika thank you!

@Ashervisalis I'll keep that in mind, thank you! Though since the most reoccurring point of feedback I've gotten is that the scene is too busy, I may not have any randomly placed skeletons/arms at all in the final scenes.

Daniel_Swing

Testing another arrangement:

oraeles77

hey, im a bit confused what is it you are making and the skull/skeleton, is that 100 percent substance designer, or does it use a mesh which is skeleton shaped? can you upload a wire frame of some of the scenes?

allmighty_thunder

I really like how you have the fully process here awesome!

Daniel_Swing

Been tweaking the materials a bit more today and posed some more skellie-boys:

@allmighty_thunder thank you!

@oraeles77 I baked the skulls and bones from my sculpts (so no, not made in Substance Desginer) and use the height-maps in my graphs.

And here's my wire frame:

I'm tessellating all the modular assets so I can displace them with my height maps. While it leads to a ridiculous amounts of polygons, I'm still running this scene at a constant 120+ FPS (I don't know the exact number, since the FPS counter maxes out at 120).

It doesn't require a monster computer (mine isn't, and it's at least 4 years old by now). However if needed, it's also very easy to scale down since I'm controlling the tessellation factor in the shader. The base meshes have a polycount at around 1k tris (and it would have been less, but I wanted some extra for vertex painting).

oraeles77

thats your wireframe? its big green something! are you sure you uploaded the correct image?

Ashervisalis

That's the coolest wireframe I've ever seen

I'm really digging this!

Daniel_Swing

Quick update: I'll be making the candles, coffins, plates and urns next. After that it's set-dressing, lighting and fixing the details (I'll also revisit all the feedback points I've already gotten):

@oraeles77 yupp, that's the correct image it's just that many polygons

@Ashervisalis thank you!