The only thing that annoys me is the fog ends too quickly, it should be a lot more subtle and perhaps have some thin, slowly moving swirls at the bottom.
e-freak: yeah, that was my issue with it aswell, should maybe do a revised version with proper animated DOF instead, and fix all the feedback i have now.. hmm.
adam: whats wrong with fly-throughs? :] I dont like pans, they are so static
looks awesome! The center machine area has a great feel when the camera is on the ground looking up at it. Love the color scheme, has a great vibe.
If you do more techy stuff you should totally try doing some animated textures in Flash, and use them on the screens instead of building one material to put on them all One other comment would be that it may be worthwhile to try some more surface variety in the white with matte sections/panels to help break out some shapes.
moose: thanks Hmm, animated textures in flash? That sounds interesting! Any tips on where to start looking at that? Im making more techy stuff, I think deus ex pushed me over the edge, NEEDS MORE TECHY THINGS Oh, yeah... I was lazy with the shader there, should have used the diffuse to break up the reflections more, and multiplied it around a bit.
that goes into how to set up the flash environment, install the Scaleform previewer, and some other stuff. For static world textures you won't need to do any action script unless you want to time or loop your anims - and even then its basic.
The support for in-world GFx movies is not the best workflow in UDK currently, but you can do it, just need to do some massaging. Once you import your swf, you create an RTT, and can assign that in a material (which you can do anything to it you'd do to any other texture). Then, you need to open kismet and add a GFx load movie action, assign the RTT and GFx asset, place the material on whatever, and run PIE.
That looks pretty nice but the environment doesn't live up to its full potential.
- The reflections are waaaay too strong. They kill any specularity subtleness completely. I'd basically tone down the cubemaps to like 20% of what they are now and make specular variation more evident. This kind of specular gradients would help selling your metal material a lot better than the current reflections (this is not metal but you get the idea):
Maybe you could use a few reflective areas here and there, but not the entire environment!
- The lighting looks very flat and boring. All light sources have the same pale color and lights are placed in a very repetitive way. Why don't you try a more complex color palette for the lighting since your materials are so simple? You should also try to improve the silhouette of the main structure by using better lighting in that area.
- As others have said, ditch the DOF filter. It only makes sense when you are on ironsight or something.
- Every surface has the same brightness value and this makes the scene hard to read. Make the floors/ceilings a bit darker or maybe even use a different color. You can do this by using vertex colors + an alpha map.
- Why don't you try pushing the green on those monitors further? I think they could look much better if they were more saturated, or either more greeni'sh or more blue'ish. It's sitting too much between green and blue now, if that makes sense.
All in all I think this is a very nice exercise but it doesn't live up to neither its potential nor to the quality of your other works.
This is awesome! That clean and glossy sci fi look is my favorite by far. Very well done Did you use a custom post chain on the scene capture actors to get that blue tint?
Minotaur: I agree that the lighting is a bit flat, didnt manage the shapes in the middle to pop quite as i wanted. I tried using colors, both in the lighting and in the environment, but in the end i opted not to, I preferred the monochromatic look, fits what i was going for much more.
No need for vertexpainting either, i can do that with just the shader as it is :P There are some differences, but I think its just the lighting that is the issue, I tried making an environment that looked nice without the excessive (and frankly fake and silly) use of brightnessvarioation in panels etc. If you have a new and clean environment, made out of one material, it would not have variations like that, so I tried making it look believable with the rendering, but there is obviously a bit to go.
chris: oh, i have seen it, afterwards i was all like "I NEED THAT DRUG ASAP!"
kyle.rau: Cheers! no custom post chain no :] I did however clamp the reflection and add the highlights back on again, to fake a bit of HDR effect from the environment reflection.
I think I mention in every one of your threads that you're a monster! Very different from the rest of your work, I enjoy it very very much. Something about the large circular vents surrounding the core is so awesome. Not sure what it is, but they're my favorite part. Well done!! More more more!!!
hey Snefer, great stuff!... again!.. how do you find so much time in the day!?... and if you find some more I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like to see some kind of modular modelling & texturing tutorials, any chance of that?
Replies
adam: whats wrong with fly-throughs? :] I dont like pans, they are so static
Gorman: which fog do you mean? :]
If you do more techy stuff you should totally try doing some animated textures in Flash, and use them on the screens instead of building one material to put on them all
looks rad!
jeffro: red bull! (or..a cheap polish knock-off)
that goes into how to set up the flash environment, install the Scaleform previewer, and some other stuff. For static world textures you won't need to do any action script unless you want to time or loop your anims - and even then its basic.
The support for in-world GFx movies is not the best workflow in UDK currently, but you can do it, just need to do some massaging. Once you import your swf, you create an RTT, and can assign that in a material (which you can do anything to it you'd do to any other texture). Then, you need to open kismet and add a GFx load movie action, assign the RTT and GFx asset, place the material on whatever, and run PIE.
- The reflections are waaaay too strong. They kill any specularity subtleness completely. I'd basically tone down the cubemaps to like 20% of what they are now and make specular variation more evident. This kind of specular gradients would help selling your metal material a lot better than the current reflections (this is not metal but you get the idea):
Maybe you could use a few reflective areas here and there, but not the entire environment!
- The lighting looks very flat and boring. All light sources have the same pale color and lights are placed in a very repetitive way. Why don't you try a more complex color palette for the lighting since your materials are so simple? You should also try to improve the silhouette of the main structure by using better lighting in that area.
- As others have said, ditch the DOF filter. It only makes sense when you are on ironsight or something.
- Every surface has the same brightness value and this makes the scene hard to read. Make the floors/ceilings a bit darker or maybe even use a different color. You can do this by using vertex colors + an alpha map.
- Why don't you try pushing the green on those monitors further? I think they could look much better if they were more saturated, or either more greeni'sh or more blue'ish. It's sitting too much between green and blue now, if that makes sense.
All in all I think this is a very nice exercise but it doesn't live up to neither its potential nor to the quality of your other works.
No need for vertexpainting either, i can do that with just the shader as it is :P There are some differences, but I think its just the lighting that is the issue, I tried making an environment that looked nice without the excessive (and frankly fake and silly) use of brightnessvarioation in panels etc. If you have a new and clean environment, made out of one material, it would not have variations like that, so I tried making it look believable with the rendering, but there is obviously a bit to go.
chris: oh, i have seen it, afterwards i was all like "I NEED THAT DRUG ASAP!"
kyle.rau: Cheers! no custom post chain no :] I did however clamp the reflection and add the highlights back on again, to fake a bit of HDR effect from the environment reflection.