Unreal Tournament 1999 DM-Tutorial UE4 Remake. 95% finished. Critique Needed.
polycounter lvl 6
I remade a map from Unreal Tournament GOTY 1999 (DM-Tutorial) using Unreal Engine 4, Quixel Suite, Photoshop, xNormal, and Blender 2.9. It has been an awesome experience working on this project. I remember as a kid playing UT99 and seeing this map being mesmerized by the graphics, now it's 22 years old. I thought it would be awesome to remake it in UE4.
I made everything completely from scratch. All the models and textures have been made in Photoshop, Quixel Mixer, xNormal, and Blender (through sculpting high-poly to low-poly). I repainted the glass textures from scratch using screenshots as references. I made some personal adjustments and it was quite a challenge. This is for my 3D environment game artist portfolio. I'm hoping to land a job in the gaming industry soon. I'm currently finishing this up and moving on to a new project in UE4. Please let me know what you think of this.
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I made everything completely from scratch. All the models and textures have been made in Photoshop, Quixel Mixer, xNormal, and Blender (through sculpting high-poly to low-poly). I repainted the glass textures from scratch using screenshots as references. I made some personal adjustments and it was quite a challenge. This is for my 3D environment game artist portfolio. I'm hoping to land a job in the gaming industry soon. I'm currently finishing this up and moving on to a new project in UE4. Please let me know what you think of this.
[IMAGE REMOVED]
Replies
A couple of things tho... the central pillars look very soft like they are made of wax. Probably due to normalmap/displacement mismatch.
The stained glass projection is very sharp. Normally that light coming through the glass would scatter pretty fast so the projection would be blurry to very blurry (unless it comes from the sun but i guess your scene doesnt have 2 suns).
The lantern/lamp shadow is also very sharp and i know its hard to achieve the penumbra effect (without rtx) but maybe blur them a bit. The contrast from lit to unlit areas is a bit strong. Maybe raise the ambient light a tad.
Keep at it.
The central pillars. Like the corners be sharper? I purposely made them have rounded corners since it didn't make sense to have super sharp edges and if you look at the original, it was just reusing the texture for the small pillars. Maybe decals or more damage on the surface will help make it look less like wax?
No sun lights. I tried to have a single or two sun lights it has caused a lot of problems with certain surfaces that have light bleed around edges. I used spotlight instead for all the glass and then a rect light outside of it. The stained glass shadow is a blueprint in which I had to put the channel of RGB (from texture) to three light functions combined into one blueprint. I'm not sure if I can have any sharpness to blur without RTX. This is on a very old pc and I have no money (like NONE). I would love to upgrade to RTX and have sharp to blur. What I can do however is just blur the whole shadow by making a copy of the glass texture and blurring it in Photoshop and then use that for the light shadow.
I will tweak the contrast from lit to unlit and see how it looks. How can I blur real-time shadows in UE4 (for the lanterns)? It's a simple point light with a timeline that makes it flicker and glow over time like fire.
As for the lighting, I really can't make it go blurry. I have tried distance field shadows but it doesn't support transparent volume materials like my glass materials on the walls or lantern. The only way I could do it is to have an RTX ray-tracing video card which I don't have. Oh well. Gotta just deal with it. At least the art direction of the whole picture is more important IMO than just a tiny bit of quality and detail. You always deal with big compromises in 3D graphics for games anyway (soon that won't be the case with UE5 and next-gen graphics).
I'm up for more feedback and tweaks. I was going to animate the metal chain and cage but I think that's too much work and unnecessary. I will still think about it. I might also animate the light shaft a tiny bit to make it look like there are dust and fog in the air.
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Yeah, I had to turn down the resolution of the textures because UE4 was freaking out about the texture budget being over the memory limit (I'm on a quad-core CPU and GTX 1070). Most of my textures are 4K but everything been turn down to 1K or 2K in-engine. For example, the glass texture is 4K and the green glass is 2K. What I could do is tile the detail more in Quixel Mixer for the meshes and also turn 4K back on just for rendering it out to a video clip which it does a great job doing even if you're suffering poor performances since it's rendering image sequences which you put into a video editor. I have also updated the projects. I added dust, cobwebs, and replaced the lantern mount with a much better one. Also tweaked the fog to use volumetric color which improved the lighting from the glass. I added blur to the glass reflection on surfaces by duplicating the texture and blurring it with a gradient mask which is a neat trick of doing it without RTX. I wish I could do the same with the lantern shadows.
I will see what I can do about the texture detail. I also wonder if it's the fog too which can "fog" or blur detail around the scene.