Titan Moon Base
polycounter lvl 9
This is part of a large corporate scientific facility on the surface of Titan, a moon of Saturn. It has a very thick atmosphere, strong winds, liquid lakes, and a surface temperature of -170C, so it's not very hospitable. I'll be going for a used, slightly dirty look, but not ill-kept. Sending anybody into space is expensive, so I figure AmoralGenericTriMegaCorp won't be sending too many janitors.
This is my first Unreal engine scene, so I'm going to have many questions for you guys, I'm sure. Also, it's very work in progress; many of the meshes are block-outs, and some of the baked objects (like the pull-down ceiling things) have temporary bakes that will be replaced. There are no textures beyond some normal maps and AO bakes. Once I have the scene mostly textured, I'm going to build a few more functional props like computer consoles and whatnot.
In the outdoor shot you can see the inverted half-cylinder I used for a procedural windblown dust effect; it's built so that it can scroll very quickly to the left, but with compounding masks and different pan rates so that it doesn't repeat.
Here are a few of the pieces I used:
Question: why is the normal map on the power box to the left so ugly? I have no problems with flat stuff like the pillar, or with stuff like the tote crate and the heating vent, so why does that particular thing have that hideous crap along the vertices? It's not a flipped green channel, I've checked for that. I've enabled the setting in lightmass that takes into account normal maps, which has eliminated some of my problems (like seams in pipes), but I'm not sure what the deal is here.
This is my first Unreal engine scene, so I'm going to have many questions for you guys, I'm sure. Also, it's very work in progress; many of the meshes are block-outs, and some of the baked objects (like the pull-down ceiling things) have temporary bakes that will be replaced. There are no textures beyond some normal maps and AO bakes. Once I have the scene mostly textured, I'm going to build a few more functional props like computer consoles and whatnot.
In the outdoor shot you can see the inverted half-cylinder I used for a procedural windblown dust effect; it's built so that it can scroll very quickly to the left, but with compounding masks and different pan rates so that it doesn't repeat.
Here are a few of the pieces I used:
Question: why is the normal map on the power box to the left so ugly? I have no problems with flat stuff like the pillar, or with stuff like the tote crate and the heating vent, so why does that particular thing have that hideous crap along the vertices? It's not a flipped green channel, I've checked for that. I've enabled the setting in lightmass that takes into account normal maps, which has eliminated some of my problems (like seams in pipes), but I'm not sure what the deal is here.
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Keep in mind that the normalmap is based on the faces of your lowpoly mesh, if the mesh have wierd shading the normalmap will try to counter this (this is visible in the normal map in the form of gradients) and this will give you the result you have.
Try using hard edges or bevels on egdes that are very sharp in the low poly. If the lowpoly shades nicely the normal map will work as intended. I made a paintover, some of these edges can probably be smooth but just to give you an id
Nice work
But I like it a lot so far; really calls back to Doom3, which is quite a good thing. One thing, though - perhaps make it darker and rely more on artificial lighting for some mood. But that is just taste, I suppose!
One thing that needs major work is your smoothing groups. Everything looks so round and low poly! You can try to add support edges here and there to make the edges look chamfered. That will also help a lot when you texture this scene. Specular maps look pretty good when you have your mesh in one smoothing group and add support edges on 90º angles. That will always look better than setting different Smoothing Groups on 90º angles!
Joopsen: Doom 3 is definitely an influence for me. I'm don't think I want to make this as dark as that game though. I do want nice shadows though, so I'll be playing around with the lighting for sure.
Minotaur0: Thanks for the advice! Pretty much everything you see which has that low poly look is a stand-in object that hasn't had any work done on it yet. Those specular edges are super important, I agree.
I've done more work on both air vent types, the big machines, some of the walls, and the large pipe terminators on the ceiling.
I also have more questions!
1) My trim meshes on the second floor have hideous edges which go to black. Why is this? The lightmap UVs aren't wrapping, and there's no overlap. I've messed around with the lightmap resolution and that hasn't helped either.
2) Why is the light map so ugly on the walls opposite the big machines, on the first floor? They looked fine before I added normal maps, but now they have obvious stair step striations. The lightmap resolution hasn't changed at all.
Since they aren't lit very well in the above shots, here's the hipoly:
The mesh modules are definitely great looking.
My only concern were lighting colors. The blue-orange interior lighting looks beautiful but there is no lamps to explain this kind of colors. There is also a slight mismatch between exterior colors and light hitting the floor from windows. The sky is kinda yellow while the light on the flor is quite white.
In any case the ambient/bounced light inside would be yellowish/pale orange only.
But since your current interior lighting is so cool u could just add blue and orange lamps to justify it
Keep it up, great work so far
Matroskin: Man I keep forgetting to make lights for some reason. The orange and blue lighting was originally just to give the otherwise monochrome base some character, and I'm now kind of torn because I want to keep it but it could look terrible once I texture this thing. Also, good point with the window lighting. I set it before I had a skydome built and forgot about it.
edit: lol my normals were inverted in the last picture how did I not notice?! fixed
I'm pretty much done with a first pass of this prop. I'm not sure it's dirty enough, but it's an indoor prop so it really shouldn't get that bad, I don't think. Once I've figured out the optimal level of grime for the whole level I'm going to come back to this. I'm also not sure if I want to keep the iridescence in the feed pipe.
i'm sorry that it upsets you enough to post about it. Im sure if something's made out of metal you make a picture of it made of metal. Same idea but a bit more thorough.
A bit of an overused color scheme there. But otherwise keep it coming!
Urbanmelon: it definitely needed more work on the grime and specular. I'm not going to put fingerprint sized details on it though, because it's like 20 feet tall and it's using two 512 maps, so there isn't enough pixel density for that type of thing.
ENODMI:Thanks for the advice!
Harry: I'm actually a pretty big space geek too, tbqh
locater16: The orange and blue lighting was temporary since my scene has no color yet. Since I've started texturing architectural details, as well as the big machine, it's completely fallen apart.
Harry, I didn't mean to upset you, I was just kidding ! :poly122: You comment reminded me of a friend I have who thinks about every single detail. One time I was drawing a mecha, and he was telling me that without toes, my robot's agility would be limited in a combat situation. I just thought it was funny, so I apologize if any harm was done.
Anyways, great job Pat, your machine looks great. What's gonna be your lighting/color scheme ? I imagine it's gonna be on the warm side ?
I'm used to people saying stuff like that man, so i gave a canned answer to a canned comment
It really will help in creating original ideas if you focus on details though.
I think I'm going to redo the bottom of the bent window pieces; They are kind of lazy and not very interesting.
I'm having serious lightmap issues with several meshes, which I didn't have until I started using lightmass. Here's a screenshot with only lighting information. Why is it so blocky and terrible? There are no problems on any BSP surfaces (in this shot, that's the grate floor and the sections between bent windows in the back).
As for the shadow issues, have you set a separate UVW channel with a non overlapping unwrap for UDK to bake shadows onto? and have you set the resolution of said UV high enough? You can do all this in the mesh settings properties window thingamajigger. Been a while since I was in UDK but I THINK that's how you do it, good luck further on. This place looks as cozy as a cabin
here's another shot of it being cozy.
In any case, saving this thread and some of the pics so far to the inspiration folder, keep up the great work
Check in the Static Mesh Editor :
Also check in the StaticMeshActor Properties to see if the override is activated and bypasses any settings you made (it should be off by default) :
In your scene, double-click on your mesh, or select it and press F4.
I think a 128x128 lightmap should be high enough, but if that doesn't work, try bumping it waaayyy up (like 1024) to see if that makes a difference.
If that doesn't work, take your mesh, put it in another place in your scene (like in the middle of the room, facing the sun), run Lightmass, and see if it makes a difference.
If it does, that means your mesh is just in a place where Lightmass' default settings just don't cut it and you're gonna have to tweak them...
If none of that works, try generating automatic UV's from UDK (in the Static Mesh Editor). It's not recommended, and I doubt that's your problem, but
You've got some nice modeling there. I like that you've got some colour on the machines. I'd splash a bit more around as there's too many grey environments in games already
Urbanmelon, sprunghunt: Thanks so much for your help guys. The problem was definitely lightmap resolution. I ended up cranking it up to 128 from 64. I guess I was just surprised at how blocky and bad it looked, but after seeing epic's maps I guess that's just how the unreal lights stuff. It's definitely less noticable with textured objects.
Loving this thread and sharing it, would love to get a rundown on how you baked that red machine by the way, if you have time
I managed to solve the weird problem with some of my trim going to black on one side by fixing some wrapping lightmap UVs, but it doesn't seem to have worked on all of them, and I'm not sure why. Specifically, I'm talking about the dark trim pieces above my new wall.
Here's a look at the level sans lighting to give you an idea of what's going on with the diffuse colors. anything which is 50% gray is untextured. Also the pipes are just colored, they're not textured either.
Skamberin: I don't think I did anything special to bake it. Here's a view of the intact fully mirrored mesh, the exploded baking mesh (with mirrored bits cut out) and the uvs over the diffuse. It's split into two objects, each of which has a 512x512 texture. It's pretty simple so I just threw it into topogun, set the cage distance and hit bake.
Note that it looks kind of crap in the map because I haven't messed with the specular values to suit UDK, and because i haven't fixed the lightmap UVs yet so there's a little bleeding here and there.
Only thing i can comment on is I see no way of getting down to that lower platform.
Maybe add a ladder or something? Keep up the great work!