Ghostbusters Headquarters - Firestation - Hook and Ladder

littleclaude

Hello

Here is my Ghostbusters Headquarters (Fan boy hobby project). I have a to do list but would I love to hear your thoughts, ideas and critiques.

It's based on the Firestation "Hook & Ladder" in New York but the interrior shots in the film were based on a Firestation in LA which was much larger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUpuNx-MgIc 



Then onto lighting setups, I'm hoping a night time with some rain comes out well. 

littleclaude

UE4 Ghostbusters HQ with some lighting set ups. Still got a way to go, pinched the background assets skyscrapers from the UE4 library for now. Any questions, idea or critique please let me know.

I think I'm going to focus on the night time set up.

DavidCruz

would I love to hear your thoughts, ideas and critiques

okay,
I like the top render (dark), i imagine seeing some ghosts loose or the crater hole that gets created in the street (in the show) letting all the ghouls (just adding some glows) and such out of the containment zone lighting up the night, would work also. (probably can be found online, idk the episode) Always such a big idea when i create things, i'd want to liven it up with too much i guess.  Would be cool to see the sign/symbol out front top of the red entrance.
Maybe ask someone with the vehicle modeled out and such to add it to your scene and drop a mention in there for them, like go check out the Ecto1 at : artist name, same could go for slimer (couple of models out there) maybe even pack him up with a blaster/backpack would make it even 'cute' & cooler scene.

On a side note, i collected dvds back in the day of sets of shows i really enjoyed, still got the 2006? unopened complete series collection.  Sometimes i even forget i have it.

littleclaude

Hi David

Thanks for the feedback, very useful and a great idea, it will give the scene some movement and will make you want to explore the interior. 

Next job

• Ghostbusters Sign everyone on Facebook is asking for the same. 
• Move door back and make it black like in the original film.
• Add the fence on the side alley. 
• Dirt/Grime/Decals to buildings
• VFX
• ECTO1, 
• Stay Puft, 
• Zuul the Gatekeeper, 
• Slimmer
  

Some advice please - The interior for the building is based on a fire station in LA (Engine 23) on 5th Street and is a much larger building. (see image below) I'm not sure how to approach this....should I squeeze it all in or do a transition cut on the door?  

CES 2020 - Sony Innovation Studios Virtual Film Production Ghostbusters Movie Presentation
This looks cool....got me thinking about trying a VP set up. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuAnx3mR3II 

littleclaude

I got a little time to work on this today and add some detail, swapped the front doors out for the original version ready for the ECTO1....one day. 

Also bit shout out to Leonardo for doing a relighting concept. I am really looking forward to lighting this project, I just find it easier to build it with the lights on but I am almost at a stage when I can start to think about lighting. 

Elivenger

I'm not extremely familiar with The Ghostbusters universe, but I feel like if your final scene is gonna take place at night, it wouldn't make much sense to see so many stars in the city like that with all the light pollution. Unless of course a bunch of the buildings have no power or something. Just an observation. Other than that I feel like you're making good progress! Keep it up!

littleclaude

Elivenger said:

I'm not extremely familiar with The Ghostbusters universe, but I feel like if your final scene is gonna take place at night, it wouldn't make much sense to see so many stars in the city like that with all the light pollution. Unless of course a bunch of the buildings have no power or something. Just an observation. Other than that I feel like you're making good progress! Keep it up!

 Hi, thanks for the feedback I really appriecate it.

When I get around to lighting I will have a crack at the new skydome set up that comes with UE4.26 as you can get some lovely clouds, skys and other atmospheric effects set up. 

littleclaude

Today I have been working out how Spider-Man on the PS5 makes their windows with a cube map in Unreal 4.

littleclaude

The sign is up

 

The to do list

• Place Skyscrapers in the background. 
• Vertex Paint and decal pass to help break up the bricks
• Add Ghostbusters Sign
• Finish assets in blue and the water tower. 
• Clean up shopfronts. 
• Variation to windows. 
• Sort out red front door. 
• Fence next to the alleyway.
  
• Detail pass, water pipes, trash.
• Balance colours. 
• Different Weather
• Different times of day, lighting

littleclaude

Starting to add details, pipes, vents, roof and decals, I'm looking forward to playing with the lighting and just balancing and tweeking the scene.  

model

littleclaude

Did some photogrammetry today, I used Meshroom and Alice vision to make some decals.

It was nice to be able to get back on this for a few hours here and there this week, I've got a ton of paper work landing on my desk so my procrastination level might even get this finished.  

Next up building stains.  

littleclaude

Going to sort out the pavement with a little more photogrammetry detail.

littleclaude

Ged

this last pic is looking real good . The main thing that I'm finding eye catching now is the lack of foreground and the absolutely flat road. Perhaps just some simple touches like a fire hydrant in the foreground and some litter on the road eg some cans and stuff would break up that flatness, also raising the camera up a bit to see some of those nice puddles etc in the previous shots. The flag being at such a high angle feels a tiny bit odd, I imagine it hanging down rather than blowing in a strong wind would feel a bit more natural but really that depends on if you are doing a video in this scene, in which case the movement would be nice.

Oh and I dont know what your plans are for post processing but at the moment it feels a bit too pure and bright, like a bit too close to primary rgb values. The scenes shown in the movie above all feel a bit more desaturated, like brown in the shadows and even the sky isnt so blue its more washed out, perhaps a bit of that vhs 80s feel is coming through.

littleclaude

Hi
Ged, great feedback, 100% helpful and I will get onto all that you have mentioned. I will post up soon  

Best, Neil

littleclaude

Started to play around with lighting

manavikhere

so cool to see the whole process. 

littleclaude

manavikhere said:

so cool to see the whole process. 

Cheers  

Quick close up before bed. 

Ged

looking great! you could get a bit more light coming on to the sides of the building, most cities have loads of light sources like a shop across the street etc. Also there is room for lots of fun with the post process. I tried making a quick lut to better match your scene colours to the one in the gif with the car from earlier in this thread. Heres the image I got and the lut in case you want to play around with it. This is just using the neutral lut from ue4 documentation in my psd. I also added a big glow in the sky behind the building to better frame its silhouette, you can get away with this in a big city scene as cities often have a glow which lights the nights sky so it doesn't feel too much like a cheat to just stick some big alpha glow cards into the sky.

littleclaude

Ged said:

looking great! you could get a bit more light coming on to the sides of the building, most cities have loads of light sources like a shop across the street etc. Also there is room for lots of fun with the post process. I tried making a quick lut to better match your scene colours to the one in the gif with the car from earlier in this thread. Heres the image I got and the lut in case you want to play around with it. This is just using the neutral lut from ue4 documentation in my psd. I also added a big glow in the sky behind the building to better frame its silhouette, you can get away with this in a big city scene as cities often have a glow which lights the nights sky so it doesn't feel too much like a cheat to just stick some big alpha glow cards into the sky.

Hi Ged

Thank you for the amazing feedback, I've been crazy busy with the start of term. As soon as things calm down in about four weeks or so I will crack on with all that you surgested. Great feedback and thanks for all your help. Its a slow burn on this project! Might as well shift it to UE5  

littleclaude

I promise to do the above soon Ged.

Dropped my Ghostbusters project into Unreal 5 tonight, looking forward to playing with the new Nanite lighting, ray tracing settings and a lot more to come.   


 

littleclaude

UE4, testing out some camera moves. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq-06RVYLqI&t=2s 

littleclaude

lluc21

Hey it's looking great so far! I'd probably try to brighten the main building in the last image, as it's blending a bit too much with everything else at the moment imo.

Not sure at what stage this project is, but I think the asphalt needs a bit more work to be believable, it reads a bit too procedural at the moment and the wetness doesn't quite make sense. The parts where there is no puddle should have some wetness to them, currently it is a bit too much puddle vs completely dry asphalt/sidewalk.
If you were able to give it the extra (not sure if it'll be worth it as you're not showing it that much) water would benefit from having some direction and thought behind it, so it would have more puddles towards the edges where it meets the sidewalk and around cracks and potholes and so on... Should be fairly simple to do with some vertex painting.

littleclaude

lluc21 said:

Hey it's looking great so far! I'd probably try to brighten the main building in the last image, as it's blending a bit too much with everything else at the moment imo.

Not sure at what stage this project is, but I think the asphalt needs a bit more work to be believable, it reads a bit too procedural at the moment and the wetness doesn't quite make sense. The parts where there is no puddle should have some wetness to them, currently it is a bit too much puddle vs completely dry asphalt/sidewalk.
If you were able to give it the extra (not sure if it'll be worth it as you're not showing it that much) water would benefit from having some direction and thought behind it, so it would have more puddles towards the edges where it meets the sidewalk and around cracks and potholes and so on... Should be fairly simple to do with some vertex painting.

Hi, thank you so much, I have made those changes, I will post up some new renders soon and I will keep working into the road surface. I have a bad habbit of posting late at night when my colour vision is really poor. 

littleclaude

To celebrate my "to do list" being complete you can now download and play this fan made Ghostbusters Simulation. It’s a small hobby project that lots of people asked if they could explore the Ghostbusters headquarters that I built. I thought why not it’s a fun way to show of a project.

I have added a few Easter eggs for you to enjoy and I hope there will be lots more to come including a Virtual Reality demo released in the near future.

littleclaude

Hi,

Just made a recording of my hobby project, lots of easter eggs hidden away. Going to focus on the characters and interior now. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bDDM5BZHg8

littleclaude

Ghostbusters HQ in the UE5 matrix demo. More to come soon.

The car is 8 million polygons, mainly cobbled together from downloads and then I just up the resolution so I can’t take much credit for the car. I have switched on Nanite - Virtualized Geometry, I have wanted to test Nanite on a hard surface object. Seems to work well, the glass is a separate object as Nanite will drop any transparency. This makes the model come in at 150mb. So the material is just a bunch of world aligned materials, it feels very hacky but fun to play with.

You can't park that there! 

killnpc

this looks great, solid modeling and texturing, love the lighting, it looks very natural.

littleclaude

And some more images, more to come soon.

littleclaude

Quick test movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJNIV28l3Ww

sacboi

This project is really cool on many levels even though hastening to add I'm always extremely partial too cars 😁

And if you don't mind just for my own clarification, the above recent walk through was captured inside UE5 and lit with nanite?

Because atm I'm personally in two minds whether either switching over to epic or continue with unity, in terms of a certain solo commercial venture I've a notion too pursue over an 18mth - 3yr period. Tentatively kicking off development at year's end, is essentially doable (FPS military sim/shooter) so I think so far what you've achieved here for me at least, serves as a kind of template/inspiration.

Edit:

"lots of easter eggs hidden away."

Ah!....take that to mean greenthooth is in there, somewhere 😀

littleclaude

https://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2770258#Comment_2770258

Hi Sacboi

Thank you, its lit with UE5's Lumen. The ECTO1 is a Frankensteined model from various downloads, remodelled bits and then I ramped up the polygons to 8 million just for the shits and giggles as I wanted to test Nanite which works like a dream. One day I will bake it down as it’s excessive to have modelled tire treads and if your doing body collision your going to have to keep the model very well optimised, so there's still no getting away from retops for playable stuff. For the environment stuff Nanite works super well, especially on rocks. Here is an image of Nanite in action, I was wondering why so much of my scene was black but UE5 thinks anything under 5K tris is not worth optimising, mind blowing as I used to make top end characters on the N64 with about 800 polygons. :)

Good luck with your project, I had an Alumni Mark Ranson who took some time out to make a game called Days of War.  I managed to get him in to be a visiting lecturer for a while as he found it was good to get out of his house once a week, truly an amazing talent. I learnt so much from him showing me his weekly updates, mainly how much bloody hard work it is. 😊 He managed to make a team through the collaboration thread on Polycount.

If you’re going to make a shooter I would recommend you look into the UE5 Lyra Demo. Also when you have a demo up and running apply for the MEGA grant. And get version control not only for back up but when you kill your game with Code and Blue Prints you can role back. I would recommend Perforce which is free for up to 5 users and you can go cloud based for even more peace of mind.

sacboi

Awesome, thank you very much.

Valuable info indeed too mull over and what I've planned will essentially be based off of first hand experience, during my time back in the day spent in the forces whilst doing so perhaps bring something 'new' to the genre.

Cheers.

littleclaude

https://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2770340#Comment_2770340

No worries, BTW if you like cars #lotus are looking for car artists https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6949682678812037120/

Here is another video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyrWth8Ghio

littleclaude

Big thanks to L'Orchestra Cinematique for allowing me to use there music track :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUpuNx-MgIc

Also nice to see this project doing the rounds.

littleclaude

Oh nice, 80.lv picked it up, whoop whoop! :) - https://80.lv/articles/ghostbusters-headquarters-recreated-in-unreal-engine-5/