"ROBOTO" - Train-centralish area with shitloads of robots.

Wahlgren · Mar 2010

PLEASE NOTE: First post will always be updated to show the latest progress-image.

Ive been showing this around for awhile on a few 3D forums but felt I should put it here aswell since you guys usually give a different kind of crits. As the title says, Im doing a piece for my portfolio and general knowledge-boosting. Instead of writing to much here I will just start posting some goodies instead.

Latest enviro-shot:

Latest Youtube-vid:
[ame]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rSsNdS0QYA&feature=player_embedded[/ame]

Random Art: (Not necessarily in UDK)

Older shots:
http://pigged.net/images/work/roboto/big6a.jpg
http://pigged.net/images/work/roboto/big5c.jpg
http://pigged.net/images/work/roboto/big5a.jpg
http://pigged.net/images/work/roboto/small4.jpg
http://pigged.net/images/work/roboto/small1c.jpg

gamedev · Mar 2010

Scene is starting to take shape. Ground is looking nice. Few crits / questions;

- Scale seems a bit off. IE the shelves are massive in scene, as are the bricks. Try placing a human for ref and scale accordingly.

- Light asset looks great.

Any thoughts on the focal point? A train? Also, maybe break open some of the glass in the ceiling to add some different light colors and dramatic lighting.

Serp · Mar 2010

You're developing a kickass portfolio. It's inspiring. You've got levels and you have props from those levels shown in seperate screenshots.

I guess you can work on select props on the level, giving them extra polish and show them in seperate screenshots like you're doing. Rather than developing props on their own. It's a good way to maximise the work you can show in your portfolio.

Vrav · Mar 2010

Robot head reminds me of Machinarium. I bet you could take some decent inspiration from the scenes of that game.

yiannisk · Mar 2010

looks pretty good so far! keep it up!

3DLee · Mar 2010

The props are looking terrific, but there's far too much green lighting in your scene. I think the scale of your brick texture may be a little off as well.

I really like the overall shape and design of the station as well as the camera angle. Keep those!

Wahlgren · Mar 2010

Gamedev. Yep. A huge ass train + area around one of the platforms. Think I got a pretty good idea. Don't want to ruin the surprise though. I hear ya about scale. I usually do a box unwrap on the walls every time i reexport / change something so the scale and unwrap is really never finished.

Vrav. Taking alot of inspiration from it. Although machinarium has a very noisey / detailed art style. Trying to pull it back a little. Think machinarium meets bioshock.

3Dlee: Yeah I suffer from the green sickness. it's the emissive lights from the windows that make it so green. Will tweak it alot later. Probably gonna spend a week on lighting.

---
Just a general update. Been cleaning the meshes, cutting up the main structure and stuff like that. Makes the renders alot quicker. I'm gonna start filling up the environment a bit now. I have quite a few ideas in my head.

I realize the lights are shitty right now but we'll make it work. Going to add a few assets that cast light. Then I'll play around with it a bit more.

Also. The ceiling textures are still not done. Much like everything else.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/469564/Roboto/wip1c.jpg - Light only view.

Baj Singh · Mar 2010

My only crit.....dont call him R.O.B. Nintendo already did it.

Bal · Mar 2010

Good start, I love the robot head.

Monkeynutz · Mar 2010

Are you keeping the eyes of the robot as they are now?

You can give him more personality by adding some kind of eyelid.

Adding a glow to his eye will make him look more alive, plus you can play with the lighting to add more vibe to your scene.

Monkeynutz · Mar 2010

Just remember i made this along time ago. Simple eyelids do the job.

Karmageddon · Mar 2010

SasoChicken wrote: »

I like the environment, but the cartoonish robots seem a little out of place to me...

have to say I agree. The environment and the robots seem to be going two different directions.

madmuffin · Apr 2010

The first robot felt Machinarium, the new one is like that Robots movie.

nrek · Apr 2010

The first robot felt Machinarium, the new one is like that Robots movie.

I like the environment, but the cartoonish robots seem a little out of place to me...

Am I the only one who noticed that the "cartoon" robot was not posted by the OP and is not really related to the project?

Anyway, the environment is looking sweet P.I.G! I really like the dank moldy feel of the scene. It might be cool to see a large robot that is built into a train car be part of the train thats sitting in the station. I look forward to some updates.

Wahlgren · Apr 2010

Heh. The first robot was mine, second wasn't. Thanks for noticing nrek and yeah that's a cool idea. Still not sure about how to go about designing the train.

Monkeynutz. Yea i agree about glow. Currently. Most of the robots will be dead though.

Hopefully the enviro and the robots will work together once you see them in the scene otherwise I'll just take em out. I'm aiming for a kind of desolate, "what happened" kind of scene. Anyway. Did a ticket booth (Robot is temporary.)

Wahlgren · Apr 2010

Some test. Haven´t bothered with final ceiling textures yet. Just a quick tint-thing.
Just posting the small ones. If you want bigger just go here and change the ending number, up to four.

http://pigged.net/images/work/roboto/big1.jpg

Zack Fowler · Apr 2010

Cool idea, and a great start. UE3 is great with somewhat grungy metal surfaces, so you have a lot going for you here. I'll be keeping an eye one this.

Wahlgren · Apr 2010

Thanks zack! Started to feel like the black sheep of polycount.

Im having some issues with getting the specular to really pop though. Don´t really know why. Hmm. I got a scalarparamter in power and the map in specular. This wrong?

Zack Fowler · Apr 2010

Going off your description, a lot of times you will want metal in UE3 to have a specular intensity over 1.0, so I would try plugging your spec map and a scalar parameter into a Multiply that plugs into the spec output. Depending on how bright your texture is, try values around 1.5-3.0 And don't put your spec power up to too high, for most dullish metals you will want to stay around 7 to 12 spec power. Hope that helps!

edit: Don't trust the material preview window 100%, most of the time it will have less spec in the map than in the preview. Materials in the map update in realtime, so try to set up your shaders on objects that are already lit with static lighting in the map rather than the dynamic-light material preview veiwport. Don't be afraid to go over values of 1.0 for light intensity, either... generally speaking the brightest lights in a UE3 map can be around 3.0 or 5.0 intensity.

One thing I just noticed, the light meshes you have right now wouldn't have a focused volumetric spotlight beam effect like you have them. They would emit more of a hemisphere of light. The volumetric cones are always a nice effect but for them to make sense you would need to revisit the design of your light props.

Wahlgren · Apr 2010

The specular thing worked wonders. Thanks. The interesting part though is that the specular-value doesn´t always make sense. For example, you say dullest values is around 7, if i do that some props become super shiny. Might be because of the spec map though or the way i connect the nodes (Sometimes i vary between add or multiply depending on the effect i want).

Yeah the volumetric cones are a bit bad. Didn´t want to get bogged down with effects this early so i used them mostly as placeholders but i fully agree. Even my grandfather is commenting on them. I´m removing them as we speak

Wahlgren · Apr 2010

Heading the right way? I think so. Changed lights from spots to omnis aswell and started playing with the layout.

http://pigged.net/images/work/roboto/big1a.jpg

http://pigged.net/images/work/roboto/big1b.jpg

http://pigged.net/images/work/roboto/big1c.jpg

Zack Fowler · Apr 2010

The thing with spec power is that it just controls the falloff of the highlight, basically how dull or focused it is. So if you make it a broader (duller) highlight, that can have the effect of seeming "shinier" at first because more specular light is visible across the surface. If you are seeing how something looks with a duller spec power you will probably need to dial down the intensity (via that new parameter you added) to balance it out. In the same way, if you crank the spec power up you'll probably need to nudge the spec intensity up also.

I feel like with the new update you are pulling the light coloration in too many directions, and it's becoming more difficult to get a quick read of what's going on in the scene. Also, don't be afraid to crank the intensity of your lights significantly higher. Keep in mind that the "lighting only" view mode always looks brighter than the actual scene, you can almost think of the result as being like overlaying all your diffuse information as a "multiply" layer in Photoshop on top of the textureless lighting-only layer.

roosterMAP · Apr 2010

maybe a little too dark. perhaps if the sun was up, you would get some cool lighting effects. also, there's no real focus on the scene. no one thing to look at.

3DLee · Apr 2010

I think I liked the last lighting from your previous post better, but I'm really liking the feel of this scene. Having a series of lights that run along the tracks (small individual lights down the side of the platforms) might look good and give some interesting lighting for your tracks.

SHEPEIRO · Apr 2010

push the lighting more, i would say on a grey box env the lighting should go from slightly blown out hot spots to nice areas running off into shadow, pretty much everything in your scene is in the middle section of the colour range, if your using LDR it should use the whole range from black for the very darkest corner to white for highlights....

if you take the untextured image and do a quick levels on it so that it covers the range it really starts to pop more...

i would also add variation to the lights using slightly dimmer ones away from the centre of the scene to give it some natural vignetting, and make a couple of variations of the shader with slightly different emissive values

Wahlgren · May 2010

Still gotta tweak the lighting but today was a "getting interesting things into the level and learn alot of new things"-day.

Shep: Lots of good ideas in that post. Im gonna do as you say i think

[ame]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFq_CnD4NCs[/ame]

mkandersson · May 2010

Very nice environment! I especially liked the lighting from the train as it arrives and leaves the station. So simple but yet so nice effect.

Edit:
When I looked at your first picture I noticed some wierd lighting stuff on the tiles up on the cieling. Looks to me like some kind of strange coloured spec or reflection.

Bal · May 2010

Nice work.
I think you should tone down, or unify a bit, the colours of the lights you have around your scene at the moment, there's yellow, green, red and blue, makes it look a bit messy.

Wahlgren · May 2010

Thanks guys. I´ve looked into most of the things you said.

Been concerned mainly with the lighting today. Also made the train stopping a bit nicer aswell as making the roof transparent, guess its not overly apparent right now but eh.

[ame]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rSsNdS0QYA[/ame]

And as i wrote on youtube

"Did some lighting tweaks, put more love into the roof. Finished the garbage bin. Extended environment a bit so you can see the train go off in the distance.

Gonna add some new content over the next few coming days to fill it up. Baggage, newspapers, garbage, a big center piece instead of having benches there (like a statue, monument thing). Stuff like that.

Gotta work on the train soon too!"

carlo_c · May 2010

Really loving what you got so far. Like said before the green lights are a bit distracting but I like how they add variation to the scene I'd just tone it down a bit.

You could make the shadowed areas a bit darker, get more contrast between the dark and light areas. Those spinning fans add so much to the scene, quite inspiring so far can't wait for more progress

Snader · May 2010

I'm wondering how it'll look with the tunnels glowing red/yellow. It should provide a nice contrast with the blue. It'd also signal 'don't go here' and it would be a sort of stop/go light when the train arrives.

Wahlgren · May 2010

carlo_c wrote: »

Really loving what you got so far. Like said before the green lights are a bit distracting but I like how they add variation to the scene I'd just tone it down a bit.

You could make the shadowed areas a bit darker, get more contrast between the dark and light areas. Those spinning fans add so much to the scene, quite inspiring so far can't wait for more progress

Thanks carlo. Yeah I'm always playing with the color of the lights and I seem to have a serious fetish for green so it always ends there. I will keep it in mind the next time I touch the lights. About the shadows though, I'm a bit unsure on how to get that effect, maybe I need to play around with the shadow exponent in the settings? I think it's because of lightmass that the lights are so "spread out" now.

Snader: Hmm. I can experiment and see but i kinda want them dark aswell.