[Finished] Dubai in the Sky - UE4

TheGabmeister

Finished Work:

Original Post:

Hi guys. I'm currently working on an aerial view of Dubai during a foggy afternoon. I'm somewhat undecided on which color scheme is most appealing. Here are screenshots of the scene I've prepared. Which do you think catches your attention most?

The buildings are still unfinished. That's why they look wrong. At the moment, I'm somewhat leaning towards either the one on the upper left or the one on the lower right. Happy to hear your thoughts on this.

Autumn_Rosetta_Cygni

So I think I found your reference image for this shot (or something close to it at least)

Initially I was going to say that I preferred the top two due to the orange glow and deeper shadows however upon loooking it up, a gradient is definitely needed to imply curvature and occlusion of direct sunlight by clouds.  think you may need to tweak the sky colours a bit too, add more of a hazy effect around the sun and just make it less stock in general if possible

I haven't been able to find many shots like this (and I am sure the ones I have found are glamoured up) but at least I would say the buildings need to be darker and to pop more from their surrounds, but other than that, they dont look unfinished as you implied above and I love what you have done so far!

TheGabmeister

Autumn_Rosetta_Cygni said:

Initially I was going to say that I preferred the top two due to the orange glow and deeper shadows however upon loooking it up, a gradient is definitely needed to imply curvature and occlusion of direct sunlight by clouds.  think you may need to tweak the sky colours a bit too, add more of a hazy effect around the sun and just make it less stock in general if possible

I haven't been able to find many shots like this (and I am sure the ones I have found are glamoured up) but at least I would say the buildings need to be darker and to pop more from their surrounds, but other than that, they dont look unfinished as you implied above and I love what you have done so far!

Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, I used the image you posted as one of my primary references. I really wanted to add that gradient you mentioned with clouds occluding the sunlight, but I was unable to achieve that effect after adjusting a lot of settings. Maybe I'll set aside some time in the future to solve that challenge.

TheGabmeister

I made the mistake of posting this thread in the Unreal Engine section instead of the 3D Art Showcase and Critiques.

Anyway, here's the finished work!

Worked on the lighting a bit. Added reflections on the building windows as well as god rays on the sun. I might improve the lighting of this scene sometime in the future to incorporate the previous comments.

Here's a quick GIF showing how I assembled the scene:

The buildings were downloaded online. They are not the actual buildings found in Dubai:

Autumn_Rosetta_Cygni

I know this is likely to be unhelpful given my limited knowledge of this particular aspect, but perhaps you could use lighting channels to this effect? I imagine it would be possible to work with multiple light sources which each effect their own group of clouds, something like that

I need to give advanced lighting mechanics a full work out, but I havent had time yet unfortunately so sorry I cant be more helpful with my criticisms!

TheGabmeister

Autumn_Rosetta_Cygni said:

I know this is likely to be unhelpful given my limited knowledge of this particular aspect, but perhaps you could use lighting channels to this effect? I imagine it would be possible to work with multiple light sources which each effect their own group of clouds, something like that

Yeah, I used separate lighting channels for the buildings to fine tune their lighting. The clouds, however, seem to be in one big group. This might be a limitation of the plugin I'm using. I'll experiment some more.

ambershee

TheGabmeister said:

Autumn_Rosetta_Cygni said:

I know this is likely to be unhelpful given my limited knowledge of this particular aspect, but perhaps you could use lighting channels to this effect? I imagine it would be possible to work with multiple light sources which each effect their own group of clouds, something like that

Yeah, I used separate lighting channels for the buildings to fine tune their lighting. The clouds, however, seem to be in one big group. This might be a limitation of the plugin I'm using. I'll experiment some more.

Bit of a necrobump, but which plugin would this be? Truesky?

TheGabmeister

ambershee said:

Bit of a necrobump, but which plugin would this be? Truesky?

Yes.