[UE4] Uzumaki Rowhouse

rexo12

I decided to put together a simple scene based off the rowhouses in Junji Ito's Uzumaki. My intention is to use this to get better at producing buildings (which I felt sorely lacked in my last project), as well as dip my toes into foliage production. Alongside this it will be a day scene, as I find I also - quite literally - retreat into darkness with my projects as a cheap and easy way to develop atmosphere, and so for this I aim to force myself to experiment with different methods of lighting a scene.

Early look at the scene so far. The focal point will be the rowhouse, with a (planned) siren beside it, and perhaps some trees around it. I intend to have foliage growing around the building in a spiral (hehe) pattern, with a path cutting through the middle. I intend to populate the backdrop with mountains, but i'm unsure of how to fill out the midground space (fence, perhaps?).

The building is made up of (very simple) modular elements, seen here. Will include a window later.

Some foliage elements I have put together (which need to be rescaled). I anticipate that baking these down to foliage-level budgets will be difficult given how they splay all over the place, meaning I can't really use polycards.

And a little experiment with those elements in producing a full piece of foliage.

Some base materials put together in Substance Designer for this project, which i intend to augment on the props themselves with hand-painting. I aimed to imitate Ito's shading style of hard inky lines, accompanied by watercolouring in the select panels that are coloured (although I think I will do away with his more pastel colour-scheme), and translate it into a more realistic style.

Thank you!

rexo12

Put together the window model, and baked and textured the grass assets. Also textured the main modular component. I feel that the shading in engine is far too harsh, but I think I should refrain from fiddling too much with lighting until I have most of the props finalised.

The grass assets in engine and in painter. These all (plus a couple more that I haven't finished) share a single 2048x2048 texture sheet, and each sit at around the same polycount as the example in the previous image - with the exception of the non-curly variants which are of course a lot lower.

High poly of the window asset. Nothing terribly remarkable here.

And a look at the textured modular component. This is using the materials I prepared earlier (see last post), with a little bit of hand-painting to create variation and detail.

rexo12

Haven't had a ton of opportunities to work on this recently. Put together a siren prop over the last week.

High poly of the siren.

Normals on the speaker, hook, and base do actually conform to each other as seen above, using shrinkwrapping and normal transfers. Blender's outlining FX makes them appear separate.

Low poly with UV maps. I've decided to split the model into 3 MatIDs: Speaker, Pole, and Base, in order to conserve texel density, which is about 20px/cm. Model has 10,322 tris.

rexo12

Painted the Siren prop. Decided I'd try a different, sort of more impressionistic (?) style of texturing, and I'm honestly really impressed with how it turned out. I do think however that it's a bit uniform, and I wasn't sure how to go about breaking up the material definition between the siren and pole components.

And here it is in engine:

Thank you, C&C welcome!

rexo12

Quick update, probably won't get an opportunity to work on this for a while now. Finished painting the main rowhouse, and put together a tree model. Am looking at ways to populate the backdrop but I haven't found anything that works yet, if anyone has any pointers that would be neat.

Trees are hard..

And a couple of beauty shots.

Thanks!

rexo12

Very quick update again, Painted the potplant and put together a clothesline prop.

rexo12

Finally had a chance to work on this again, put together a fence prop to help seal in the background, and generally worked on sealing the level in.

I think next I will work on a water pump and/or old well, and maybe see if i can do some fancy swirly clouds in Houdini or something.

rexo12

Okay I think i'm going to wrap this up. Put together a pump and bucket prop, some clouds (which I think could be a bit better), and some pockets of mist.

Some renders:

I think this turned out quite well, as I managed to put together something I liked in a lighting environment I was unfamiliar with working with, and I also managed to (where I had the opportunity) work on this pretty consistently over a decent span without getting burned out. I also feel like my individual props were of a much higher quality than previous large environments, which is nice as I always felt they tended to suffer in these projects as I lose focus on the details. I also got to experiment with some different texturing styles which was nice.

Thank you!