Cryochamber Facility Room
polycounter lvl 15
[UPDATE] 10-05-09
Overall Shot Rendered in UT3
Hey Polycounters,
I am working on a Military Cryochamber Facility Room set in the distant future. For this scene I plan to do a lot of Sub D modeling and getting the entire scene into UT3 for a real time preview. I will have this entire scene finished by the time GDC hits, that’s my goal and I will take however many monsters to accomplish that
This is the blockout and the main shot I plan to use for my scene. My Cryochamber is ready to have its high detail pass and is the asset I will be completing first and foremost. The large detailed side support columns are almost done with their high detail pass. They were initially for a different now scrapped asset in this scene that just never seemed to fit with the scrapped part as they looked more like wall columns. They will just require some tweaking and a little more detail.
The main inspiration for this scene is from the StarCraft 2 cinematic and I am going to try to get my scene to seem to fit into that universe while still retaining my own style.
I will not be able to get updates as fast and as much as I would like at the start as I still have my final and full load of classes before I graduate as well as my 40 hour a week internship at SOE. This will not impede on me getting my scene done though.
I am open to any all critiques on current and previous work. Nor am I shy about any level of harshness. If I don’t know what’s wrong or what looks bad then there is no way I will be able to learn and correct those mistakes on future projects.
Thanks,
-Anthony
Overall Shot Rendered in UT3
Hey Polycounters,
I am working on a Military Cryochamber Facility Room set in the distant future. For this scene I plan to do a lot of Sub D modeling and getting the entire scene into UT3 for a real time preview. I will have this entire scene finished by the time GDC hits, that’s my goal and I will take however many monsters to accomplish that
This is the blockout and the main shot I plan to use for my scene. My Cryochamber is ready to have its high detail pass and is the asset I will be completing first and foremost. The large detailed side support columns are almost done with their high detail pass. They were initially for a different now scrapped asset in this scene that just never seemed to fit with the scrapped part as they looked more like wall columns. They will just require some tweaking and a little more detail.
The main inspiration for this scene is from the StarCraft 2 cinematic and I am going to try to get my scene to seem to fit into that universe while still retaining my own style.
I will not be able to get updates as fast and as much as I would like at the start as I still have my final and full load of classes before I graduate as well as my 40 hour a week internship at SOE. This will not impede on me getting my scene done though.
I am open to any all critiques on current and previous work. Nor am I shy about any level of harshness. If I don’t know what’s wrong or what looks bad then there is no way I will be able to learn and correct those mistakes on future projects.
Thanks,
-Anthony
Replies
Good block in, some crits:
I'd ditch the steps and handrail. Looks like something you'd walk up to get to school not a cryochamber. Same with the vents, bit generic.
Might want to add wires later. Try to make the scene as cool as you can without all the generic stuff first. Wires and that stuff are easy to throw in later.
Top half of the cryochamer could use a lot of rounding off. Life giving sturctures are usualy round, soft, etc. I know i said to take out wires, but a cool arangement of more wires at the top would look cool here. I'd recommend tweaking the future arrangement of wires to trail to this piece. It'll give 'em purpose and make the overall scene look cooler. A nice texture on these tubes would go a LONG way. Nothing worse than seeing stale black tubes or wires in a scene.
Anyway, looking forward to more updates anthony
Looks detailed so far, though I question some of the modeling done for the inner extrusions, seeing as you might be able to get away with them using normals instead.
yeha i agree about the hand rails, maybe through in a console or something?
Thanks for the all the crits first, the things like the wires, stairs, vents and hand rails are all very temporary and most are just boxes or rendered splines to get the feel of the room.
Anyway due to some misplaced files on my cryochamber I decided to finish the HP of the wall column supports. Here are the lows with normal/AO + wires. Still need to clean some areas up and some parts were forgotten out of the compline.
Sitting in at 2.5k tris on a 1k map.
3/4th view and HP, gets really dark on one part of the LP when looking from the side due to normals, dont know why though.
Side and front view for silhouette purposes.
Cryochamber HP Wip. Took the advice to make it more round which at first I didnt think I was going to like but it feels a lot better. Got some advice that its a little too round now and needs some hard angles to fit with the other parts in my scene so I will be working on that.
Again thanks for the feedback and I should be updating this scene every day now. Also whats_true, GDC Austin is like 3 weeks away O_o so lots to do before then.
I also really like that blue glow effect you got going from your fill light at the bottem of the chamber in the tubes.
Lowpoly almost done, will do a quick unwrapp and bake, see where i need more/less geo then finalize the LP and start to texture this guy followed by the column.
Thanks for all the feedback, always appreciate it.
@ZackF - thanks for the feedback, although I dont know if i agree with you on the tricount being a bit high. Based on counts I have seen in UT3 and Crysis for a specialty wall support I dont think 2.5k is really out there.
@Pope Adam - thanks Adam, hope your loving it up at Cryptic, sure isnt the same at school without your crazy antics.
@PureWall - thanks man
@conte - thanks conte, big fan of your work, especially your Dom War 4 concept.
@crazyfingers - Yes there is a bit of different, worked on getting them more similar by utilizing similar elements but the Cryochamber was designed in mind of being notably different from the other assets. All others have lots of hard angles with some curves while the Cryo has lots of curves with few hard edge accents. I did this as I hoped to give off the feeling of a "life" object trapped by the harsh cold metal of its environment. Also to make it pop and stand out more.
@wester - thanks to my good friend wester who gave me a very helpful paint over pointing out some nice changes to tie the style in more together.
Enough talk your here for the eye candy. Note the wires coming off front it are tmp and just there to get and idea of what it would look like with them.
Cryochamber Main
Cryoreactor
Feed back as always is appreciated.
Nice progress! The designs have a chunkiness and blend of orthogonal and curved shapes that is very reminiscent of Epic's style. I'm not quite familiar with Starcraft's style so I can't really comment on how that's working out, but it's looking good regardless.
Anyway here is the Cryochamber and Recactor LP with Normals. Was real "fun" getting all the bakes done and fixxed >.> But learned xNormal so I will take it as a win. AO isnt done as that seems to take years to bake even with xN.
Sitting at 4,880 Tris for the whole thing. Using a rectangular texture. 2048 x 1024. Now to the fun of texturing
As always thanks for any feedback.
LP + Normals
LP + Normals + Wire
for serious its lookin real nice tony.
Anyway here are the final textures for the CryoChamber, CryoReactor and Column support. All in Marmoset which I
Want to buy more Monster!
CryoChamber
CryoReactor
Column Support
Only thing irking me is the really hard transition of the cryochamber. Did a quick paintover on the edges of the chamber, with a little color burning and desaturating.
Oh, quick addition. Some kind of dried up blood smear or somethin' on the front would add a bit of backstory, you could make it as subtle as you want but right now it looks like a blank canvas just waiting for a touch more character as I see it.
Love the way this is coming along. I has one suggestion. This is a cryochamber, but the glowing yellow hot hexy-glass does not say "cryo" to me. Consider doing some hue/sat changes on your textures to make the yellow a cool blue?
Of course, this blue would look awful with your current green color scheme, so maybe the paint colors would have to be hue shifted as well.
quickie paintover
I like crazyfingers' idea of the black buildup on the glass.. but I suggest perhaps frost buildup? let me know what ya think
I could say this was an attempt to take both styles into account, but really i just wanted an excuse to put Mr.Freeze into the cryo chamber.
Mr. Freeze: Ice to see you!
@Jeff - ROFL that Mr.Freeze totally made my day, hilarious. As for the darkened dirt that is something I have, it just got really lightened up when I gave the glowy parts an emissive look in PS. As for adding something more to the glass that is something I had planned. I wanted to have more dirt on the glass and smear marks where dirt was taken off by someones hands but I wanted to make sure I got everything into UT3 first to make sure I make it big enough to read. Plus I was thinking of adding a Cube map for reflections.
@Adam - Thanks for the paintover. If this were a stand alone prop I would defiantly go with a more frozen look. Blue is a color for the glass i debated with at the start but eventually turned away from it.
The reason for this is I wanted the Cryochamber to the one and only beacon of life within a cold dead metal caged environment. I am planning to go for a cool/dark lighting to give the environment that foreboding feeling. I felt that it will be a much more interesting piece if the warm/bright life filled cryochamber contrasts with the cold/dark metal environment. I dont want to have a monochromatic scene with a cold looking cryochamber in a cold environment. I want the life of the cryochamber battling the cold of the room.
Anyway thats just the way I saw this piece turning out. Also its really more of a Statius Chamber but that sounded a whole lot less cool then Cryochamber
Anyway after GDC if it still feels like it should be a cold cryochamber even after the entire environment is finished I will go back and rework it. But for now I have 3 days to finish off everything else.
was way to busy trying to get what I could get done for GDC. here are a couple of screen shots showing what I was able to finish for the conference.
got some positive and constructive feedback by the few artists that were at GDC on how to really polish this scene up. now that GDC is over and I graduate in a week I will have more time to finish this up, start on a new scene and get a job!
Here is an overall shots in UT3. Followed by an updated version of my Statius Chamber/Statius Reactor (changed the name to get away from ice feeling) and Extractor Column rendered in Marmoset.
As always feedback is greatly appreciate it, especially when its not sugar coated!
Thanks,
-Anthony
Also, there are no light sources outside of the shot...all of the lights are in the shot, which doesn't imply that there's more to the scene.
I agree about the cords. As strong as it is, it really magnifys the abundance of yellow throughout the scene. Very small crit, and i think its just personal taste on my part.
The other thing i just noticed was that the entire scene is symmetrical? I think you could have really broken up the scene by changing how the cords are hanging from the ceilings and floor.
Other than that, Ace work!:thumbup:
Have you run around it in ut yet?
I like the wasp feel , that might just be because of the strong yellow on dark which the others have pointed out as being too strong.
The stand alone prop renders look great too
I think it's a good idea to keep those concentrated near main area of interest, or tone down ones that aren't very important.
I agree. There are too many glowing things competing for attention. I would tone them down or remove some. I would shift the blue slightly toward green, away from a strictly complimentary color scheme. I would use the orange on fewer spots so it can become the focus with everything else as the background. Consider adding touches of a third color or maybe desaturate some areas.
If you do want that many glowing things then try to be more specific about how they are lighting the scene around them. It looks like there is one large orange light affecting most of the center area which causes the light to spill everywhere instead of looking like it's coming from the cryochamber. It might work better with several small lights and maybe a spotlight near the floor pointing away from the chamber. If your materials are set up well then you might get more specular highlights along the floor too.
Throw a little post processing on there. Bloom the hot spots to really make them glow.
Also, place some small lights anywhere the glowing hoses are near the floor.
On a side note: There is some detailed modeling that is getting lost in the noisy/busy texturing. It gives the pieces a more hand painted look but I'm not sure if that's what you wanted. Maybe ease up on the scratches and concentrate them only in the areas where the equipment would get the most wear and tear.
Quick paintover:
DLX has some great advice, in fact i used his touch up for my own paintover.
I still think those railings really clash with what could be a totally original scene. They also break up an already busy area and distract from the cryochamber.
The flooring is a bit plain and doesn't draw your eye to your main piece. I just took a bit of the grating from the top and distorted it to cover some of the tiles to draw the eye up to the scene. You wouldn't need to retexture it, maybe just add some really simple geo on top that has a grating texture or something on top. Breaks up the monotony down there a bit too.
Some fluid leeking down the stairs into a puddle below would really bring the scene together.
Anyway, touch it up more if you want, just some minor nit picks. It's kick ass as is.
although its not a particularly good, or well known game Haze uses the same color scheme (wasp) black and yellow for like all their armor suits and shit, and theres even some hexagonal patterns throughout the game, my brain immediately made this connection.
i'm not sure if thats good, bad, or neither, its just how my brain sees it.
Disagree with crazyfingers paintover, think the slime would ruin what you have here but on the other hand making the cryo tube stand out with lighting and a few effects would put the icing on the cake.
made a quickee paintover
edit: oops, used dlx's paintover without realising:poly135:
but my on little critique is, not ever edge on every prop has to have the paint wore completely down, where do people in the future store their equip? in a giant rock tumbler.
but over all the scene is pretty tight
I am actually a little torn on what lighting style to go with as I have heard things at GDC like push the lighting to make things more dramatic but also most company's hire based off work that looks more realistic. Not sure if I should go with the more desaturated colors to help show off textures and give a more "real" look or keep with the saturated colors and just push them farther for a more dramatic look.
Here is a paint over Bryan Cavett nicley sent to me. Has a more of a pop to it over the saturated ones but those look like they would fit more into a game like Killzone then the over tones of color.
Very conflicted, guess I will try both a bit and see what sticks.
I will also be ripping out a lot of detail from both props like scratches, paint chips off every edge and some HP detail, def over did. Was told it looks to painterly in parts and I guess I shouldnt have painted so much so I will also work on that to give it a more realistic look. I appreciate that some of you guys were liking it but from what I have heard it dosnt sound like that will land me a job.
Again thanks again for all the feedback, will be a little slow this week with graduation and all that junk but will pick up next week for sure.