[WIP] [Unity Environment] Abandoned Linseed Oil Factory

vonpixel

Hi!

This is a thread im starting to document some of my progress on a portfolio style environment piece in Unity using the HDRP.. The projects main focus is using a photogrammetry scan of a massive abandoned linseed oil factory I did about a year ago with a friend but didn't have time to really work with until recently.

Im using Unity because its what we use at the studio Im at- though we are about to start learning unreal for future stuff so there is a chance I will port over through this project?

First up- the factory scan:

We took over 4k photos but at the time the Steam version of Reality Capture only allowed 2500 (now only 1000) shots so we had edit the data set down. The photo limit change was announced right as I started working on this so I didnt have long to get it completed and out of Reality Capture. Sadly- I cant open the project anymore because of this limit to the photos..

Ended up with a 325 million tri model which got paired down to a 100k for retopology (done in Modo) and a 50 million poly version for baking. Id love to bake to the 325 mil version but my 64gb of ram just wont cut it via Substance Painter...

For the master mesh I baked out 12 8k Diffuse maps from Reality Capture.

From here I made the lopoly in Modo and edited the texture set down to 6 UDIMs at 4k each for Unity. I removed the roof because the texture and detail wasn't very good.

 I have some further stuff that I will update with later.

vonpixel

Here is a part of my pure ref I gathered of what the inside of this place really looks like to help guide me in creating the insides.

vonpixel

Here is where im at now with this. The windows were a quick rough in for look dev. I plan on doing them in higher detail and to correct the scale on them. They seem too large to me so Im going to probably remodel them to be more adaptable to different sizes and arrangements. There is a very basic rough in of the interior in here too. The vines are from Megascans along with a barrel and a log too.

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teodar23

What kind of drone did you use?
Got any tips for delighting?
I generaly think that large objects like this building are better off done in a modular fashion with tileable textures and some decals here and there but this should be interesting.

vonpixel

teodar23 said:

What kind of drone did you use?
Got any tips for delighting?
I generaly think that large objects like this building are better off done in a modular fashion with tileable textures and some decals here and there but this should be interesting.

I use the DJ Mavic Pro 2 for a drone. The other guy I scanned this with has the Mini which is also pretty nice- though the sensor doesnt seem as good. I dont think it shoots to raw.

As for de-lighting we waited until the perfect over cast weather to scan. It ended up taking 2 days to get everything we really needed. I further de-lit using photoshop and my AO bake out of modo to help fill in some of the deeper darks. Having said that- Im purposely crunching my whites down to achieve a more low contrast look in my abledo out of personal preference.

I agree that larger buildings are better for working with tileable textures- but this thing is covered in so much unque graffiti we wanted to retain all that. One idea I'd like to try is based off this DICE talk where you use a second UV set to drive the total colour of the structure and then tileables / vertex blending / for the up close textures.

If I was going to be putting this into a game I would probably go through all that effort. Id probably want to bring the poly count up on the building a bit too as I maybe went a little too hard on reducing the poly count.

vonpixel

Did a really fast mock up of of a door. Its pretty low res and basically just a projection map of a photo. I plan on replacing this door with something more modular and re-usable through out the interior. I did this guy just to play with shape and colour a bit.

vonpixel

Today I processed a scan into a useable chunk in my scene:

(raw 10 million poly scan)

Baked on a 10k retopo via Modo

vonpixel

Today I took a little time to revist the windows which I wasnt very happy with. I made them semi-modular so I will be working on breaking up the variation of them in the future. I think the scale matches much closer now.

oraeles77

nice.

I appreciate accurate depictions of graffiti.

vonpixel

So with a little reaching out to the right people we got the city to let us into this building for just 1 day. We took about 7000 photos and brought in lighting / cameras / drones / laptop. Here are a few point clouds of in reality capture of some of what we got. Currently working on turning these into useful assets.

vonpixel

Here is one of the walls with baked textures. Still some clean up left to do.

sacboi

Like it! and some of those graf pieces are mad, since I live in a city that acclaims urban art with entire lane-ways set aside.

vonpixel

sacboi said:

Like it! and some of those graf pieces are mad, since I live in a city that acclaims urban art with entire lane-ways set aside.

Thats pretty cool. Here in Toronto we have a number of graffiti alleys too. My main goal with this project is preservation of this building before it gets partially demolished and turned into a community center. Its been smack dab in the middle of a huge park for decades now. Lots of people have gone inside for ever- people have thrown illegal break in raves in there- all kinds of stuff.

One thing that usually gets me about graffiti in games is that it never looks right. You can pretty much always tell it was a decal that was just sort of added after the fact- so preserving these pieces has been and important part of the processes via photogrammetry.

murilojones

Man I am loving your work. I am starting with environment art now and your environment is an awesome source of inspiration. I will follow your work here to see if I can learn something. Also there is a lot of questions I have regarding your approach. But I will keep visiting your posts to see if a can understand more about it

vonpixel

@murilojones feel free to ask any thing and I can try to give you an answer.

Im probably doing things a little bit odd though because Id say normally for an environment like this you would break it down into modular pieces / trim sheets / tileable textures and decals and bring it all together. Im doing photogrammetry which is also viable- but on a huge scale. So maybe not the most "game" friendly in an optimization / or gameplay design sense. But im still trying to work within real time in Unity.

murilojones

yeah, so my main question is: you have this very high poly model that comes out of the photogrammetry software, right? But you are probably not using this model in unity... You retopologized the model to work with it in real time. Is that right? The high poly was used to bake normal maps in the low poly? how come a large piece like this was baked in a map? what's the size for the texture? Or did you break the factory in small chunks to have a good texel density? If you did... how did you do this?

lol. sorry, as I said... I had a lot of questions... Still I think what you are doing is incredible. You dont need to answer all the questions if you dont want to. I tried some photogrammetry earlier this year, but only for props. Not for environment. 

vonpixel

@murilojones

"yeah, so my main question is: you have this very high poly model that comes out of the photogrammetry software, right? But you are probably not using this model in unity... You retopologized the model to work with it in real time. Is that right? The high poly was used to bake normal maps in the low poly? how come a large piece like this was baked in a map? what's the size for the texture? Or did you break the factory in small chunks to have a good texel density? If you did... how did you do this?"

The main building scan was upwards of 325 million tri-angles. I exported a 100k version out of reality capture with the textures baked to 12 8k udim textures. I also exported a 50 million tri version of the building for baking (that is about as high a poly count my machine can handle).

I then took that 100k version and used Modos retopology tools (mostly the retopo pen) to make a low poly version of the building. Normally- I dont always go in  and do quad-retopo by hand (especially if the object is static and doesnt need to deform) but this is a large building and I wanted to have as clean a mesh to work with as possible.

I then did the UV across 0 to 6 UV space (this method is called UDIM texturing and it allows for a lot of texture maps to be used on 1 mesh or across lots of meshes) and baked out all the textures to 6 4k texture maps. I baked normals / height / ao in Modo and then brought that model and textures Substance Painter to fix up some bits and also paint in roughness and details like that.

I will admit that this workflow is maybe not the best for your standard texel density and up very close- you can see that the quality takes a dip texel wise but imo it still looks pretty good mostly because of all the real life details that come along with the scan. The height of a single 4k map is = to the height of the building.

There are ways of using the scanned colour info / normals along with blended tibeable textures (they kind of talk about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfLrkL6PoB0) but thats something I think I will investigate in a different project.

as for this question "how come a large piece like this was baked in a map?"- just because I wanted to. I wanted to preserve this building before it get turned into a community center. Its been in the middle of a huge park in down town Toronto for a long time and has a lot of history so my goal is to preserve it to what ever degree I can.

murilojones

Awesome man. That was very informative and UDIM texturing is definetly something I have not head of before. But I will look more into it. Thank's a lot for that information. I will take a look at the video right now too. Photogrammetry in games is a subject I am very interested in studying deeply. 

as for your motives (" just because I wanted to. I wanted to preserve this building before it get turned into a community center. Its been in the middle of a huge park in down town Toronto for a long time and has a lot of history so my goal is to preserve it to what ever degree I can.") I totally get it. Actually my question was only about how did you fit an entire building in a 0-1 map and still have a good texel density.... because I didnt know about the UDIM process. 

Well thank's a lot again. I definetly learned something new today.

vonpixel

Sooo I bit the bullet a little while back and started learning UE4 and... as an artist- im loving it. Ive also scanned a bunch of new things along with slowly working on the inside pieces that we scanned. Ill share more of the inside once Im further along- but ive been experimenting with everything BUT the abandoned factory scan in UE4 lately. Im holding off on the big scan right now because I wanted to get familiar with smaller pieces + compare fidelity with the Quixel scans that im using too.

Here is recent stuff in UE4. I plan on adding the linseed oil factory to this environment and making a small cinematic or something. Got a long ways to go with this scene but im determined

vonpixel

Finished the main processing part of creating the interior assets. Got a handful of small things to fix on the meshes - plus lots of little seams to hide and fix but I wanted to do a quick look / lighting test. This is the standard renderer in unity too- not the hdrp. The floor is very temp. I just put a slightly wet ground texture on it.

sacboi

Amazing, there's definitely no deficit in skill involved combining various workflows too a level I've hardly seen before, so I'm busy taking notes, if you don't mind  

vonpixel

Setting up more of the scene for a demo we are putting together at work. Using props Ive made (everything but the scissor lift). Experimenting with lighting a little bit. This is using a combo of area lights / point lights (to get those nice directional normals) and emissive GI from the materials. This small interior scene is almost complete. Im looking forward to bringing it back into the HDRP from Unity's standard renderer and combining it with the exterior scans and building up more of the inside.

pixelpatron

Looking good, where dem interior shadows at?

vonpixel

Thanks. I probably have too much going on with the lighting. Area lights and point lights along with the emmisive are drowning out the details. Got to revamp the lighting before final version. 

murilojones

Hey man, It's me again. Looking good as always. You helped me a lot with those answers. Although I didnt understand much the first time I read, I started to research some information you gave, watched the video you posted, went back here now and read it again. It is clear for me now the process you used. It's cool. As you said, it looks like it's not the most efficient way of doing it for games, specially if there are large environments and other stuff going on. But if it's looking good and serves the purpose for you, I think this is what matters the most. Thank you again for all the information. It was very helpful.

As for feedback on your work, if I can give some, I would say the yellow cones inside looks very clean yet, but you probably haven't finished yet. And the shadows inside (as pixelpatron said already) will definetly add a lot.

cheers. still following here. keep posting!