[WIP] 70's Abandoned Motel

polygonfreak

I have always been inspired by the abandoned world we live in, and I hope to create a little of that in this scene. The walls, floor, and ceiling all have tillable texture, which worked pretty good until the it got to the borders around the doors and walls and the ceilings tile is off(maybe I should not use a tillable texture?). The rest... doors, fire extinguisher all have their own uv. So in total there is 4 tillable textures at 512x512(floor, ceiling, and two for the walls) and three unique uv textures (doors, hole in floor, and fire extinguisher)
I am not 100% sure if this is a good way of doing things, but its one way I figured out.


Although I may not be the newest noobie, I still have a lot to learn and would love to hear what everyone says about my project.

Side note: Technically this is my first WIP,don't go harsh on me, I need to learn and I need to be told if I am doing something right or wrong.

Thanks ahead of time and I look forward to hearing what everyone has to say and finishing this project with a better understanding of environment art.

LateWhiteRabbit

Well, first off, your scale is wrong. The doorways look a little wide, but that could be best for game play - however, that fire extinguisher, as it is now in the scene - would be almost 4 feet tall.

And no, the tile-able texture for the ceiling tiles isn't working. The texture needs to line up with your holes and fallen tile pieces.

What is going on with that yellow filter? Get it to look good without any post-processing or color correction first, then mess with that stuff to finalize the look and feel.

You also need to get rid of the two black dots or "knots" on the door texture if you are going to be repeating it on the other doors - they stand out as an obvious repeating effect.

The floorboards and crown molding textures look stretched and blurry - obviously not as high resolution as the wall and floor they border. They look bad.

The wallpaper itself has too many repeating elements. It is easy to see it repeating itself.

You should look into using vertex painting with custom shaders for using tiling textures and showing damage and wear. Decals will also let you add more wear and stains without obvious repeats.

Also, try and do more with your textures than just photo-sourcing them. Using a photo is a fine starting place, but you need to give them more love after the fact. For instance, it is clear that your door texture is a photo of a sheet of plywood, and your wallpaper is a pattern photo with a grunge texture overlayed on top. Neither of these is a bad way to START a texture, but more detail and work is required.

Specially on the wallpaper texture, I take it you want it to look like peeling wallpaper. But if it is peeling wallpaper, why can I still see the wallpaper pattern in the damaged areas? If it is meant to just be water damage, the edges of the grunge layer is too sharp and irregular.

Also when taking screenshots of your environment to show, it may help to hit '~' to bring up the console and type 'togglescreenshotmode' and hit enter. This will hide all that weapon and radar and HUD stuff cluttering up the screen.

Zipfinator

It's an okay start. There's a lot of room for improvement though.

On the wallpaper it looks like you were going for a peeled sort of look, yet in all of the places where it's peeled you can still see the wallpaper pattern. You need to make it look like there's some old rotted plaster or wood underneath there.

The ceiling tiles that are hanging are UVed pretty lazily. Take the time to model the tile so it's the same size as the tiles are on the texture and UV it so the edges of the texture match with the edges of the modeled out tile. Also when the tiles are hanging from the ceiling you should carve out an area above to show some pipes/crawl space or whatever would be above it in a place like that. This isn't 1999. You can afford to model out details like that.

The texture resolution also is pretty uneven throughout the scene. The wallpaper looks pretty high resolution but the doors and trim are blurry. Try and have each asset have a somewhat similar density of pixels.

polygonfreak

Thanks latewhiterabbit and zipfinator, for all that good info. Both of you commented on the wallpaper. I was trying to go with a look of mold and water damage, but it does look like I was trying to go for a peeling effect. That is going to be my next thing to fix.

In this update I fixed a few things such as the lights and removing the hud, but mostly I spent my time fixing the ceiling. I am pleased with how this looks, but its now almost doesn't fit for this scene as if it belongs in an office. SO I may go with a standard textured ceiling.

As far as the walls which I will be tackling next, white rabbit you mentioned vertex painting with custom shaders, not sure what custom shaders are... couldnt find any info on them either. I found a vertex painting tut and will be looking into that.

I will try and post some more stuff tonight.

LateWhiteRabbit

Custom shaders are just any special material you put together in the Material Editor. In this case, I was talking about making a shader that blends between different textures depending on your vertex paint color. Here is another good tutorial on it if you haven't seen it.

If you are willing to pay some money, 3DMotive.com has the best tutorial on the subject I've ever seen, and really shows you the power of the method. (It's sometimes called mesh painting rather than vertex painting.) It's done by Ryan Smith, one of our fellow Polycounters, and his shaders are always super impressive. It has basically changed the way I do environments and plan them out.

The ceiling looks much better, but it should have more damage and fallen tiles to match the rest of the environment. Also, tiles with water damage tend to sag downwards - vertex painting can help with this too.

When you move on to the water damage on the walls, be sure to put thought into how the water damage got there. Was it from the roof, rain water leaking in and running down the walls? Was it a flood, where a pipe burst or rain water flooded the hallway? Then the water would be along the bottom and sucked upwards in blotches. Also, be consistent with the damage - any water damage on the bottom of the walls is going to have affected the carpet and doors too.

I notice you aren't using normal maps. Any particular reason? They could really help you sell the ceiling tiles and peeling paint on the molding.

polygonfreak

Latewhiterabbit - Custom shaders, I get it now. Yesterday I put together a basic vertex shader, and next I will make shader that will give me that harden edge. My skills in UDK are very basic and as I am finding out is its a very powerful engine.

So this is what I figured out needs to be done... First off, my walls are way to long. I am going to shorten them and be more modular, this will also help organize my uv's so I am not getting this high res and low res shit. I found this cool little trick Mesh position offset, and I will attempt to use this for the overall decay detail and maybe a water level damage. And for the peeling paint, I am thinking of making 3 or 4 decals. My only problem with using multiple decals is overall look of the piece and the performance of using decals inside of udk.

As the normals go, I only used normals on the fire extinguisher and the tile details on the ceiling. The ceiling's normal map is basic and I haven't got to optimize it. I plan on using more normals for the wood trim, and the decals.

Unfortunately, I have to go back to work and wont have a lot of time until this weekend. Go ahead and tell me what you think of my plan.

Also please forgive me if my problems seem remedial... my mind thinks I am better then my hands do.