[WIP] Cyberpunk 2077 inspired Game Environment, Third-Year Uni Project

MaraRA

Hello everyone, this is my University third-year work thread. I am an aspiring 3D environment artist in a group of 7 students aiming to create a Cyberpunk 2077 / Detroit: Become Human inspired game demo. Thank you for taking the time to check out my work. Any and all feedback is immensely appreciated!

iam717

No images or links or anything, me thinks you pulled the post/trigger to quickly?

MaraRA

iam717 said:

No images or links or anything, me thinks you pulled the post/trigger to quickly?

Haha no, my lecturer told me to make a thread but I didn't have anything worth showing yet

MaraRA

So let's start with the game synopsis and a bit about the art direction. Homo Machinas is a third-person interactive-narrative adventure game where dystopian sci-fi meets camp neo-futurism. Think Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and The Fifth Element (1997). It's based in a future where the super-rich prolong their lives through cloning. Our game demo level will follow Kimmie, an operative for an extremist group, as she tries to kidnap and publicly kill the clone of a despicable politician.

At the moment, we plan to make 2 types of environments that are both in the same building - Chromo HQ, home of the world's industry-leading clone company. The first will be a luxurious client consultation / lobby area, and the second will be the underground cloning laboratory. These two environments are intended to contrast each other in colour and atmosphere but share some neo-futuristic principles.

We've decided to start production of the laboratory environment first, so here are some of the references I've been given by my Art Director.

MaraRA

The past week has been pretty slow, mostly watching tutorials and planning / discussing ideas. I was really inspired by this concept by Chris Doretz of what looks like a plastic quarantine tunnel running through a damaged hospital area. It looked like it would introduce some really cool opportunities for lighting and also breaking up the harsh brutalist shapes that our lab environment seems to be going down. The idea at the moment is that the tube can run through a biohazardous room where a cloning accident has taken place, so client demand is so high that they can't deal with the fallout at the moment so the area gets vacuum-sealed and production continues like normal. This will give the player the opportunity to walk through and be able to see (maybe partially see because of semi-transparency? will help decrease my workload) and get some environmental storytelling.


https://www.artstation.com/artwork/dyoELK

So I started researching examples of this kind of quarantine tunnel. I couldn't find many real world examples but i did find a couple in films like ET (1982) and 12 Monkeys (1995). There were a couple references of air purifying tubes and machines connected to the tunnels which would be cool to make too afterwards. All of the film screenshots I got from the website shotdeck.com, it's one of my favourites other than pinterest for collecting references!





So I started by blocking out a segment in UE and importing it into Maya. Then I used a lattice on a cylinder and torus to deform it into this shape. Originally the "plastic" wasn't a plane and had some thickness, but this caused me problems down the line when doing the transparent material. The polycount is quite high because i knew that i wanted to turn this into a spline tool and didn't want any visible polygons.




The metal material was nothing special, but for the clear plastic, I followed a transparent glass material on yt. For some reason in the tutorial, his material seems to cast its own shadow while mine doesn't, so that's on my list of things to investigate. Tutorial: https://youtu.be/PkLR8OqPzCA




I wanted to experiment with displacement but for now using normal maps was easier. The segments aren't UVed so i wanted to try using tri-planar projection for the first time. I took the normal and roughness map from a tarp fabric material from Quixel Megascans (https://www.fab.com/listings/ca2bcb13-13c3-4fcc-8bfc-4ba863fd2de6) projected those onto the plastic material following this tutorial. Tutorial: https://youtu.be/r5CxcpxGe-Y

I was really happy with the results! I think I might try to do a lot more triplanar projections in our game environments especially for the spacious and clean client areas. This is what the tube segments looked like now, pus the material setup.





So next job was to make it into a spline tool which wasn't as easy as i thought it would be. I went through 3 tutorials before i found one which worked for me, but it still isn't perfect. Sometimes some weird artifacts or collapsing in on itself happens if the spline is an odd length. The tutorial that worked for me was this one. Tutorial: https://youtu.be/l5W8KdQYI7k




and the final result was pretty good! i still have some issues i need to iron out like why the plastic doesnt cast a shadow and how come when playing as a third-person character the camera has no collision with the tube when the character walking through does. There's also other things like how to put an end piece at the back of the spline regardless of its length, and also I was advised by my lecturer that it should have some kind of connecting mechanism at both or one end where in the real world it would connect to a doorway or wall so it could create an airtight vacuum-seal. For now, here are some more screenshots and lighting experiments.

MaraRA

I'm putting the tunnel on the backburner for now and moving onto making a modular room kit. I've been given a rough concept and greybox by our concept artist AJ Wann (artstation: https://www.artstation.com/ajw4nn) for the final room the player will enter before completing the game demo. We're calling it X14's room at the moment, as it is where the player will find the clone X14 and complete their mission.



I exported the greybox into Maya and tidied it up a little bit so i could see what was going on more clearly. Then I started taking screenshots and working out the different dimensions. This probably isn't necessary but it makes me feel like i understand the 3D space better. Tomorrow I'm gonna start planning out the different modular pieces.

MaraRA

So i'll preface this post by saying I wasted quite some time by completely over-engineering at the beginning my modular kit. I was so focused on trying to make it as modular as possible that I forgot it's supposed to be easy to use too. I'll put all the planning and stuff I was doing here to remind myself and anyone else not to go down the same rabbit hole.



anyway, realised i was being silly and came up with these modular pieces instead. They snap to a 1m grid (mostly, 2 window pieces snap to 0.5) and I've tried putting vertices at 0.25m intervals, because I'm hoping to use vertex painting with this kit.





I started blocking out the smaller windows but ran out of time today. Here's the reference i was given for the windows and also I'll include a screenshot of how it's looking in unreal so far.

MaraRA

Modular pieces are on their way now, I haven't beveled them yet because I'm still not sure what the best way to texture them will be so I'm also holding off UV unwrapping. I did a basic unwrap just so there was something there to test with. I was hoping the pieces could just be planes that face in towards the room but that gave weird lighting issues so I've made them all about 0.25m thick. I assigned materials in Maya and I'm pretty happy with them. A bit annoyed they took so long but hopefully the next modular kit will go a lot quicker now.







But I've been really struggling to texture them. I've been trying to combine triplanar projection and vertex painting in one master material and it works on the default unreal content meshes but not on my own modular pieces which is very frustrating. The only thing i can think is that I'm not exporting them from maya with vertex colour data? I'm getting the feeling I've spent too much time bashing my head against this issue so I might move onto modeling the props for this room today while I wait for the answer to present itself.

MaraRA

Started modeling the desk which will be in the X14 clone room. Our concept artist mocked up a sketch for me and provided some reference images, we built a block out together. Our Art Director decided that we should ditch the neo-futurism and lean more towards brutalism instead, with a splash of retro-futurism, according to some of my lecturers' feedback. Here is the sketch, refs, and blockout.



I've cleaned up the topology and made a few shape changes.




here it is in unreal