Abandoned Theater - Portfolio Building
polycounter lvl 4
Hey everyone,
Right now I'm in the last 4 months of Full Sail's Game Art program (Online) so now I'm starting to work on building my portfolio. For this months work, I'm doing an abandoned warehouse shot, so I figure I'd try and get some feedback from the awesome people here, because I really want to push this project as far as I can.
Right now I'm just going past the blocking out the shot in Maya stages, and moving on to getting the different assets for the shot modeled before starting to go and bring everything into UDK. Hoping to have most of the work done for modeling sometime tomorrow or Friday.
As always, critiques are welcome on what you're seeing, and looking forward to seeing how far I can push this, my goal is to try and get something close to PS4/Xbox One in terms of final presentation.
Update #1 Just posting some adjustments I've made to the blockout/working on some of the windows. Going to take in some of suggestions made by Polygoblin, and look at adjusting some of my reference.
~John
Update # 2
Update # 3
Update #4:
FINAL
Right now I'm in the last 4 months of Full Sail's Game Art program (Online) so now I'm starting to work on building my portfolio. For this months work, I'm doing an abandoned warehouse shot, so I figure I'd try and get some feedback from the awesome people here, because I really want to push this project as far as I can.
Right now I'm just going past the blocking out the shot in Maya stages, and moving on to getting the different assets for the shot modeled before starting to go and bring everything into UDK. Hoping to have most of the work done for modeling sometime tomorrow or Friday.
As always, critiques are welcome on what you're seeing, and looking forward to seeing how far I can push this, my goal is to try and get something close to PS4/Xbox One in terms of final presentation.
Update #1 Just posting some adjustments I've made to the blockout/working on some of the windows. Going to take in some of suggestions made by Polygoblin, and look at adjusting some of my reference.
~John
Update # 2
Update # 3
Update #4:
FINAL
Replies
As of now, I've gone in and started to figure out how I want to flesh this out some more, because to just copy the source image isn't enough, need to find some ways to breath some life into it. Decided to add another section of seating up at the top, before it was just a blank space and didn't really know what to do with it, decided ultimately that it'd be nice to have a theater seating section.
Figuring out where to place exits for the guests, and starting to plot out other stuff that I could bring in to help flesh out the scene, stuff like exit signs and the like.
Since I'm planning on trying to go for that next gen look, I'm probably going to try and model as much of the detail into the meshes as I can, where I'd normally use a Normal map to bake the detail, stuff like the ridges in a rollup door, or since I've gotten the go ahead from my professor, maybe experiment with Tesselation to save on the polycount for that kind of stuff.
The variation that Polygoblin suggested, I'm going to ultimately create a few variations of the seating to alternate when I'm placing around the level, using one of the individual chairs as the source for all of them, and going from there.
Cibo, thanks for the feedback, I'll definitely keep doing some playing around with placing and size as I start to bring this all into UDK. Thanks for the input, it's greatly appreciated.
A couple of other things that I've noticed are that the windows on the side walls seem to be a lot smaller than in your reference and also look a bit higher up. In the reference they seem roughly centred on the lower section of the wall with the rectangular windows tiling above. I'd also make your windows wider, looking at the windows on the left of the image they seem less square, the perspective is distorting the look of the windows on the right.
Another piece I noticed are the support beams on the ceilings, in the reference they are higher in the centre and slope down as they reach the side of the room, making them more triangular than rectangular. I'd look at doing the same with yours to add some interest.
Keep it up!
Thanks for the feedback, I'm definitely going to take that into consideration as I start to piece this all together inside of UDK. I definitely think you and Cibo make a good point with the windows, and I'm going to explore the scale of it.
As for variation, yea Variation is something I know is key when trying to sell realism, nothing in life is ever perfect, otherwise it just looks mechanical, so I'm trying to bring in some variation (i.e. going to have probably 4 different sets of chairs to place around the shot.)
Another thing i'm going to be doing, after my meeting with the professor, is actually put the theater on a slope as it heads further back towards the wall to add a little more interest in the floor, as opposed to having it be just a flat surface.
Yea, those beams ATM are more or less place holders, going to be heading in today and refining those, the rails, the posts a little bit more, and the exit doors, so aiming to have that update up tonight, and possibly the first UDK pass as well. Deadline for the assets is Tuesday, but aiming to have it done much sooner because I know that the biggest thing that's going to need to be focused on, to really sell the scene, is probably going to be the textures. Having solid models is a good start, but to really make this shine it's going to be on my lighting and my texturing probably.
Hope everyone's having a good weekend!
~John
Aiming to have textures 80% done by tomorrow night, with my meeting with my professor, been busy with work so all I've really been messing around with is the lighting, though I've started to work on getting the concrete floor texture rolling. Needs a lot of refining, but wanted to see how it was looking so far with the scene.
As always, looking forward to feedback and hope everyone's having a great week so far.
~John
~John
Still have a lot more to do in terms of nailing down lighting, tweaking some problematic stuff, adding in some other assets, but with 2 weeks still to work on this, I'm feeling pretty good. Hope everyone likes what I've got going on.
Lighting is an amazing tool and one of the strongest for environment art. I highly recommend this book here: [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Color-Light-Guide-Realist-Painter/dp/0740797719/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1391445461&sr=8-1&keywords=james+gurney+color+and+light"]Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter: James Gurney: 9780740797712: Amazon.com: Books[/ame] It is AMAZING and will really help with lighting.
Yea if I had to say there was one thing I felt really REALLY needed work it was the lighting, it got better as it went along, but it started to become pretty clear I need to work on it some more as I got closer to a finished product. Thanks for the tip on the book, about to look it over now and see if I can't pick it up. I'm starting up on my next environments pre-pro as I type this, trying to figure out what kind of shot to go for this month.
Thanks again for the feedback.
Regards,
~John Ehresmann