[WIP][UDK] Circular Building

dawson_john

Been working on this in my spare time for a week or two, and have come to the point where I'd like to get some tips on some aspects I'm a bit stumped on, so hopefully folks can help.

The basic idea of the building is just a building that uses lots and lots of curves, and is overall circular in shape. Didn't do much concepting outside of just blocking out shapes I liked.

Inspiration came largely from the spherical tropical exhibit at the California Academy of Sciences...
http://seedmagazine.com/slideshow/california_academy_of_sciences/img/6_rainforest_exterior.jpg
http://slowmuse.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/cas5.jpg

This is the frame without the glass facade...



And something from within

dawson_john

So the first issue I'm having is with reflections.






With these two you can see I'm having some issues with the reflection on some parts of the glass facade. Ideally I would like to get the parts in the center section that are angled down to obviously reflect what is (or will be) in the middle. But they don't seem to work quite as well as I'd like. This is where the reflectioncubemap capture actor is...



And my very basic glass shader



This also means the reflection I get in the little archway within the interior is obviously reflecting the wrong stuff as well...



I guess I don't have a good enough idea of how it's applying cubemaps?

Also, I'm getting some nasty squiggles in the reflections. Is this due to the UV coordinates, or just a quirk?

dawson_john

Lastly, and frankly a big part of the draw of this project for me was to have a torus water tank held above the structure, to cast some caustic water relfections down on the building. The water tank is here...



And well, frankly... I havne't a friggin clue on where to start. I tried doing a Fog Volume similar to what I'd seen on Hourences site (http://www.hourences.com/tutorials-ue3-fog/) But the result wasn't as convincing as I'd have hoped. So I could really use some help with that.

Orangeknight

This should help you
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/MaterialExamples.html
Look at Depth-Based Transparency and also Refraction.

ambershee

To cast the caustics, I'd actually vertex paint it into my materials.

salacious_Crumb

Looks good so far. Ambitious!
If you want a glass shader you might want to check out 3dmotives tutorial-the udk material series.
Good luck with caustics. Interested to know how you will solve that.

DennisGlowacki

This is interesting! I'm watching this.

Might be able to do caustics with like a gobo light effect.
http://udn.epicgames.com/Three/DevelopmentKitGemsUsingLightFunctions.html

or some material effect and you vertex paint it on/off in the proper spots.

DennisGlowacki

also it does look like uvs have some effect on the reflection. Less then I expected though. It seems to compensate well but not fully.
http://screencast.com/t/VWgRlnm7f47j
here is a closeup of the third one with the really messed up uvs.
http://screencast.com/t/qy4mYuPsj

so if you do some sort of auto map it should fix weird distortions.

systemic

Very cool idea... here's hoping UE4 will make a lot of these things much easier for us. I've never been a fan of cubemaps, it's hard to get what you want and even when you do, it never looks right to anyone who's paying attention. From what I've read about UE4, though, it sounds like everything will be real time reflections.

I'm curious to hear how you solve these problems and what the final product looks like. Keep up the good work!