[WIP][UE4] Central Statistics Bureau - Real-Time Environment

alytlebird

Hello!

I'm starting this thread to document the progress on my new long-form personal project that I'll be working on over the next several months, with help from @Lucas Annunziata thru the Mentor Coalition. I'm really excited to be working with Lucas and pushing my art in a new direction!

Here's the concept by Jake Zetter: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/B1ka0D


I'm hoping to use this project as an opportunity to explore a stylized approach to environment creation. For my professional work, I do stadiums and cityscape backgrounds for a baseball simulation game, so I'm used to a more realistic style. But I've always loved games that leaned into the ART, and I want to push my skillset towards a personal artistic style, rather than being something akin to a digital construction worker. Dishonored 2 has been my stylistic inspiration for this project, and I think this concept should work well with that style.

alytlebird

Here is the current state of my ref board:


I have a technical ref board using textures ripped from D2, a good touchstone for basecolor/rough/normal quality:


And I have a small selection of D2 screenshots to serve as a "north star" for this project:


For my last image, I do have a current blockout, however following my meeting with Lucas I'll be working on simplifying it a bit and really making sure the proportions work in the space overall. Figured I'd still post what I have now anyway!


That's it for now!

alytlebird

The blockout revisions are coming along nicely. I've simplified a lot of the geometry and focused solely on the underlying architecture for now. It's been tricky to figure out scale and proportion, as the environment concept is drawn from a cutout view rather than a hero shot from within the scene, so I'm having to rely on "feel" from walking thru the environment in first person.

I think the biggest thing I'm trying to figure out is really selling the sense of scale. When I think back to playing thru the Royal Observatory level in Dishonored 2, it's got a very similar main atrium space that sold its scale and grandeur very effectively. Right now I'm just not feeling that walking thru this space. Could be an FOV thing, could be a scale thing, etc.


I did throw in some mannequins late last night so that might help!


I'll continue tweaking the proportions of the structure and start adding some of the floor-level props.

alytlebird

Bit of an overdue update here!

I've continued to tweak the blockout and add more elements as needed. I've also started throwing in some very simple placeholder materials for certain elements, mainly the walls and floor. My second mentorship session with Lucas was today, and he gave me a lot of good pointers to consider, especially regarding scale of props and context. I should have the blockout in a good place fairly soon, and I'll be branching out into some of the more exciting assets.

alytlebird

I worked on setting up a perspective-matched camera angle today, complete with cut-away geo, and I think it has highlighted some scale issues I need to address, specifically the lower floor area (and maybe the room overall) being a bit too short. Thankfully the geo I'm working with is still very simple and easy to tweak, and this round of adjustments gives me an opportunity to rough out some modular pieces for the main structure, with equally simple geo.



Additionally, over the last week I roughed out some tiling materials for different parts of the scene, nothing polished or all that complex, just getting the patterns down.



Onward!

alytlebird

Alright, this blockout is feeling a lot better. I lengthened the room a bit to accommodate the larger lower floor, and that definitely addressed some scale issues I had.

alytlebird

Here's a long overdue update!

Since finishing the blockout, I did a first pass at the main brick wall material, as well as the wall trim:



I applied these materials to a set of simple modular wall pieces:



I also had my third mentorship session with @Lucas Annunziata, where we mostly covered material workflow and a few nagging issues I was having. One thing he honed in on was the subtlety of the normal detail in Dishonored 2, and some methods to modify the brick material I had made to push it in that direction. This mainly involved using the Dilation node in Designer, as well as hand-painting normal details in Photoshop. I applied this new technique and almost immediately saw improvement in the scene:



Then yesterday I went a bit further and tried throwing some breakout bricks into the mix:



I think from here my plan is to bounce around the scene a lot more, doing first passes on more reusable materials (marble, tiles, pipe trim, etc.), as well as modeling first passes on the hero props and larger structural elements. Lucas suggested this method rather than focusing on getting individual elements to 100% polish one-by-one, which has been my tendency in the past.



These progress-dumps take a while to put together, so I'm gonna do my best to post updates more frequently! However, if I do fall behind here, I have a thread on Twitter that I'm generally better about keeping updated.

alytlebird

Today I noodled around with the start of modular pipe system for the detail pipes:



And I also threw together a first modeling pass for the upper windows:

alytlebird

Been working on doing a first modeling pass on the central pneumatic messenger hub:



Pretty happy with how it's emerging as a focal point and visual landmark for the environment!

Sheers

That focal point will look really nice down the line.  Good progress so far!