(WIP) Super-quick Environment - Hyrdoponics Lab (CRITS WANTED!)
polycounter lvl 13
Going to try and pull together a simple scifi environment piece in UDK by Monday to stay vaguely in practice. It's yet another corridor, but I've only got the rest of today and chunks of Fri-Sun. I'm shooting for "complete, polished, and sharp" rather than "eye-searingly new and innovative".
Here's a super-quick concept scribble, mostly to shake the dust out. Please - PLEASE - tear it apart.
I'll take pretty much any and all input here and fold it into things as I work, ASAP.
Here's a super-quick concept scribble, mostly to shake the dust out. Please - PLEASE - tear it apart.
I'll take pretty much any and all input here and fold it into things as I work, ASAP.
Replies
The walls/floors/ceiling are pretty barren, and aside from the curve of the one wall they're all pretty square/boring. Definitely spice it up with some angles and interesting details.
Also, I'm not too big a fan of the hole in the side. As is, the scene looks pretty 'business as usual' so it sticks out. I think if you're going to keep it I'd add more distress to the rest of the environment, more hints that something has gone wrong.
The scene is pretty well lit, too, i think more dramatic lighting would help push the 'something's not right' vibe. It looks like the light is supposed to be coming from the room with the plants, but you haven't exactly sold that point yet.Look up some references where the sole lightsource is light from a window - I think the results would be much more dramatic than what you've got so far.
Anyway, could be pretty cool, and I like the idea of the foliage in a sci-fi setting, and there's lots of potential for cool-lighting here. Keep at it.
I've got some sketches in my sketchbook to add detailing to the floor and ceiling with grated panels, and some cabling snaking out from the edge of the floor at some openings. The floor and ceiling and even the walls are pretty blah right now in the concept because I haven't put them in there yet, but yeah, you and I are on the same page there.
I definitely will push the cast lighting from the plant area. At one point I was thinking of having the plants themselves be bioluminescent, but I doubt I can do that without everybody instantly thinking "oh, hey, Avatar ripoff."
The last think I was thinking about was having the plants coming through the window area there, kind of growing out of control. I don't want to burn a lot of time on shattered glass panels and lots of tangley vines, but I'm thinking about a way to try and make it work more simply. I definitely want to come up with a better alternative to the cliche hole in the wall if I can swing it.
Right now I'm fighting a couple of weird UDK glitches, they seem to only show up when AO is enabled.
I have a floor panel modeled and baked to start replacing my blockout, but right now most of the floor is getting blacked out once I build lighting. :poly127:
Anyway, here's what I've got so far. I feel like my texture work has improved significantly from what I was producing a year or so ago. Still fighting a love-hate relationship with zBrush, however. I spent about three hours trying to figure out how to transfer the polypainting I did on a highpoly model to a decimated lowpoly. Why didn't I retopologize? Because zBrush's topology tools are a holdover from the torture chambers of the Spanish Inquisition. (I'm on 3.1).
The other thing I'd love some suggestions with is the lighting. I've been fussing with the lights and rebuilding over and over again, but I can't get it to produce the kind of sharper cast shadows like the ones I sketched out in my concept. Any tips to push the lights would make me most grateful.
There are a little more than a half-dozen more objects I modeled but cut from the project to save time, and they would have helped break up a lot of the tiling. I also wanted to make alternate textures for some of the wall tiles, but ran out of time. I snapped a quick screengrab of the blockout / map in 3dsmax to show more of what I was originally planning before I hit the 36-hours-without-sleep mark.
Like I said, please, give me both barrels.
The wall outside the hydroponics tank is completely lost - totally black. Are you using Lightmass? If so, you might want to turn up the number of light bounces or reposition your lights. Right now that wall of windows could be untextured and we'd never know it.
The paneling details on the walls around the rest of the room are looking kind of flat, and are obviously just painted on the texture instead of looking like they physically exist. Try adding a BumpOffset node to your material to create a parallax effect or push the Normals more.
Add I think the giant pod plant could really sing if you added in an Emissive map for the red semi-translucent parts. You could then set UDK to use the emissive map as a light source and get a better looking effect. Right now it looks like the red lighting being projected by the pod is wrong. It is projecting a strong red light on the wall behind it, but nothing on the floor in front of it.
And if you want sharper shadows, you need to increase the size of your lightmaps.
Wait - don't go anywhere. I want some detailed instructions how to do that.
Right now that's just a small red point light snugged up between The Blob and the wall. Originally I wanted to make those red spots semi-translucent, so you could see bones floating inside where it'd digested somebody, but I like the light source idea better. Can you walk me through setting the e missive as a light source, or is there a tutorial?
Once you have an emissive map set up in the material editor, select the static mesh with the material applied (your pod) and hit F4 to bring up its properties. select StaticMeshActor -> Static Mesh Components -> Lightmass -> Check the box that says use Emissive for Static Lighting. Rebuild lights and rejoice.
This link has all the tutorials you'll ever need for UDK. 3DBuzz tutorials
Scroll down to the section labeled 3D Buzz Video Tutorials and download the zip file containing the videos on making a Simple Level. One of those videos in the zip file is called 02_-_Simple_Level__04_Lighting__003_EmissiveLighting and will walk you through the exact steps. How to set the emissive to be a static light in a scene is covered in detail.
Good luck!
Anyway, I wanted to touch back on the BumpOffset shader stuff. I tried it and got it working but the results were grotesque - distorted and blobby, like a gummed-up layer of clear rubber cement over everything, instead of sharp and clear. I'll try and post a screenshot from my shader networks later. Between now and then, did I fall into some kind of really common mistake with them or something? I was just using a grayscale height map for the offset values.