Film Noir UDK Please Critique

00peteee00

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bzmlt9fBJaI"]Film Noir Lighting and Textures - YouTube[/ame]

Let me know what you think of this video please, concentrating on the lighting and textures thank you

Rurouni Strife

1. Way way too dark. I can't see anything.
2. Models look super simple and lack any real detail
3. Textures look like flat colors on most objects. No real details. Normal maps? Spec Maps?
4. Why close with a close up on the rope? Why not open with a great establishing shot and close with a shot that re-establishes the scene?

I'm guessing that this is a first project? You can take some of my comments and use them to improve your scene (look at more reference, create better textures, etc) or just move on to creating a few individual props to get a better feel for that.

Paul Pepera

Pick up some books on lighting for cinematography - I highly recommend John Alton's [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Painting-With-Light-John-Alton/dp/0520089499]Painting with Light[/ame]. You need to use lighting to shape forms and extract subject matter out of a scene - same principles apply to games as they do to film. Right now you just have some small point lights attached to some light fixtures on the ground, doing nothing. Just because you are trying to do film noir doesn't mean 95% of the scene needs to be black. Noir is about strong contrasts, atmosphere, mood, geometric shapes formed by shadow and light that complement principles of composition. Since you are just starting out you should perhaps simplify things by limiting the camera to a fixed position and lighting from there.

00peteee00

Yeah this is my first enviroment, i'm used to doing character design.
Not had much experiences in UDK before, this project is for uni and time has kinda got the bettter of me. but i do have some normal maps now need to plug them in correctly.

Yeah the meshes are from the internet the main goal of the project is lighting really and texturing

thanks for the feedback guys

Ace-Angel

Film Noir tend to desaturate certain colors, try that in post-process.

Also, the house looks really horrible without decent Normals or support edges. The smoothing group is giving them a spongy look.

So either break them up, support edge them, or make sure the normal take into account the edges.

00peteee00

http://youtu.be/6FlP78evN5Y

heres another video with some improvements still need to edit the camera will do that for the next video

I have tried playing with the post process desaturation and had some interesting results might inclued a video of that in this project.