Alien Resurrection Cockpit (Environment Art)
polycounter lvl 6
Hey guys. First post. I've been a semi-lurker here for a while now. Finally thought I would post up as I am working on something pretty cool. It's for portfolio/jobs, so crit would be appreciated.
Currently working on the chairs:
The leather texture is finished. The rest of the chair is getting near done, texture wise. I'm starting to think I should have built a high-poly version of the chair for baking normals. It seems almost pointless when it's all made out of strips of metal, but some of those sharp corners are bothering me now. I might try adding some bevels in photoshop - if anyone has any tips for doing this, shoot.
Here is some more of the cockpit interior. Some stuff modeled, some blocked out.
One of the most time consuming parts so far is just getting all the scaling right, since all I have is basically a load of screenshots from the movie as ref plus a few set pictures and one blueprint of the ship (which was useful but not accurate). Still some scaling problems as you can see here, either I make the biped bigger or the chair smaller.
Some refs:
Currently working on the chairs:
The leather texture is finished. The rest of the chair is getting near done, texture wise. I'm starting to think I should have built a high-poly version of the chair for baking normals. It seems almost pointless when it's all made out of strips of metal, but some of those sharp corners are bothering me now. I might try adding some bevels in photoshop - if anyone has any tips for doing this, shoot.
Here is some more of the cockpit interior. Some stuff modeled, some blocked out.
One of the most time consuming parts so far is just getting all the scaling right, since all I have is basically a load of screenshots from the movie as ref plus a few set pictures and one blueprint of the ship (which was useful but not accurate). Still some scaling problems as you can see here, either I make the biped bigger or the chair smaller.
Some refs:
Replies
Also worked on the chair texture a bit more:
I can finally start working on the rest of the scene soon.
Not (quite) finished yet, still needs a few more wires and a bit more work on texturing.
But this is great
Work on a material pass, lighting pass, and maybe some post process too and work on your presentation a bit more, and this will be news worthy good!
Materials. Add some cubemaps, hints of reflection, do a really nice lighting pass on this.
Look at the shot from the movie and how dark it is. The pools of light focus your eye on the cool elements while letting the not so fantastic stuff sit in shadow.
Right now it's great but a few small adjustments and this can be spectacular. Def worth that extra bit of time and love.
HP + Jesse - I'm pretty new to environment art and very new to UDK, so I'm not 100% sure about what you mean when you talk about a material or lighting pass. Do you just mean that I should work on the materials and lighting more, or are you talking about a special render pass technique? I get what you're saying about the lighting composition though Jesse, will work on that.
I have a cube map on the windows for some subtle reflection, but it didn't look very good on the other objects because they are all normal mapped, which makes the reflection look kinda horrible. Again I'm kind of new to UDK and the material editor (learned UDK during this project) so there might be a better way. The weird fake specular that lightmass adds is very hard to control. It's probably the main thing letting the scene down, but I kind of need lightmass.
One thing that's putting me off a bit, is the amount of random detail and noise on those textures, I would tone them down just a bit, because at the moment the whole scene is fighting for attention, and there's loads of high frequency shit everywhere, but that's not exactly your fault, as the original movie is more or less the same.
What I meant by lighting pass, is make it fall under the same tones, for the good or worse, that's what hollywood is, so you need to make shit a little bit more monotoneZ
- Never use white lights, tint them yellow, and put a slight glow on them too.
- Desaturate your scene a bit, and push for the dark yellows, like the in the movie.
- Increase the contrast a lot, whereas still try and stay away from pure black. (Black should be very dark grey)
- Tint scene of yellow a bit.
Like this, very quick and dirty tho, sorry)
(Obivously these are only some pointers, and advice on how I would do it)
I'm considering this 100% finished an portfolio ready now. Of course there are probably small improvements I could make, but I would rather move onto other work than endlessly tweak this scene. Crit is still welcome of course. Thanks to everyone who gave me help and advice!