[UE4] Assembly Line

DVOR3d · Mar 2016

Hello Polycount!

I've been working on this project for close to a year now after graduating art school and finally managed to get it done.

This originally started out as a model-along with Tor Frick's UDK Modular Masterclass DVD. I finished my original one in UDK, but I just wasn't happy with it and I really wanted to push myself to just make something close to on-par with all the amazing art that's been coming out for the last couple of years. So I switched to UE4 and did the best I could!

I also made a little level fly-through!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-mmkYQTV4M

Short of the vegetation and grass, the entire environment is made from 2 1024x2048
textures with 512x512 Moss and Rust that compose the master vertex shader.

FreneticPonies · Mar 2016

You could really lower the exposure, the scene is entirely too bright, try to avoid all of the sunlight and sky being blown out, which just also removes a lot of the contrast from any shadowed areas.

Bruno Afonseca · Mar 2016

You got some good stuff there! But the lighting doesn't help it at all... Try to find out what's important to show and focus on that!

RobeOmega · Mar 2016

I have done a rough paintover suggestion for the lighting.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/i1/r8zzecls8sus.jpg

I have increased the contrast in your scene, lowered the brightness and saturation and tried to get rid of some of the strong bloom.

PaulWorster · Mar 2016

The lighting is letting this down. the good news is that can easily be changed to make this scene visually more interesting, its important to get the eye to focus on the important parts of your scene. currently the issue is there is to much going on, my eye does not know what to focus on as everything is illuminated from every angle. The scene lighting does not support the scene, by that i mean places like old abandoned warehouses / industrial area are generally dark places where as this scene is the opposite and is very bright.

it would be worth gathering some lighting reference and trying to match it

Image: http://i304.photobucket.com/albums/nn161/Tolaf/Warehouse_Concept_by_samburley-1.jpg

Image: http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/Warehouse13.jpg

it would be a shame to leave it here and not bring this scene to life, look at the lighting one more time if you can, i think it would really pay dividends to all the time you have put into the modeling.

nczuma · Mar 2016

Looks amazing. Lighting may be a bit overwhelming.
I've been curious about buying that video tutorial even though it's for UDK. Would you say it's still useful?

ActionDawg · Mar 2016

You've got a strong yellow wash to the scene. It really kills the depth and color, feeling like a thin film over the image. Below I've white balanced it to get neutral colors and then brought the image into a full black-> white range, adjusted the curves some and did a final gamma tweak.

This is important because our visual system naturally color corrects like this when we're in an environment. A human could never perceive this space in such a yellow way, even if it were very dominant. Not doing white balance conflicts with our visual system making images appear muddy. It's also limiting the dynamic range of the final image when you don't white balance.
http://renderwonk.com/publications/i3d2013-keynote/
I'd recommend giving this a good read

DVOR3d · Mar 2016

Robeomega said:

I have done a rough paintover suggestion for the lighting.

I have increased the contrast in your scene, lowered the brightness and saturation and tried to get rid of some of the strong bloom.

Holy cow thanks a lot! Looks great!
I really did end up waterboarding my scene with yellow and lost contrast and cast shadows big time. I'll go back to Unreal and fix it up.

DVOR3d · Mar 2016

PaulWorster said:

The lighting is letting this down. the good news is that can easily be changed to make this scene visually more interesting, its important to get the eye to focus on the important parts of your scene. currently the issue is there is to much going on, my eye does not know what to focus on as everything is illuminated from every angle. The scene lighting does not support the scene, by that i mean places like old abandoned warehouses / industrial area are generally dark places where as this scene is the opposite and is very bright.

it would be worth gathering some lighting reference and trying to match it

it would be a shame to leave it here and not bring this scene to life, look at the lighting one more time if you can, i think it would really pay dividends to all the time you have put into the modeling.

Hey thanks!

I certainly did wash out my lighting way too much, but the scene itself is not at all enclosed.

I've got broken windows all over the place, and half the roof is missing. So some ambient lighting would be ok, but I pushed it too much. I think at this point, I need to recover my cast shadows from the general scene color / washout.

DVOR3d · Mar 2016

somedoggy said:

You've got a strong yellow wash to the scene. It really kills the depth and color, feeling like a thin film over the image. Below I've white balanced it to get neutral colors and then brought the image into a full black-> white range, adjusted the curves some and did a final gamma tweak.

This is important because our visual system naturally color corrects like this when we're in an environment. A human could never perceive this space in such a yellow way, even if it were very dominant. Not doing white balance conflicts with our visual system making images appear muddy. It's also limiting the dynamic range of the final image when you don't white balance.
http://renderwonk.com/publications/i3d2013-keynote/
I'd recommend giving this a good read

Thanks so much for this!

I downloaded Naty Hoffman's presentation .pdf and will give it a solid read.
Also thanks for your great suggestion! I'll hop back into Unreal, and fix up my render. I also had an exposure setting in the post processing volume that I might just get rid of altogether.

DVOR3d · Mar 2016

nczuma said:

Looks amazing. Lighting may be a bit overwhelming.
I've been curious about buying that video tutorial even though it's for UDK. Would you say it's still useful?

It's certainly outdated by now, but I would say it's still useful.
The biggest takeaways are just being able to make an UDK/Unreal4 scene from scratch going from Modo -> Photoshop ->Unreal and back and forth. His vertex master shader using only 1 texture for pretty much 95% of the entire scene was also solid.

Biggest bumps in converting my half finished assets in UDK, at the time, to UE4 was I had to rework UDK's unreal units to UE4's unreal units/centimeters. And since some Materials nodes that were in UDK not longer exist in UE4, I had to rework my master vertex shader so it's compatible. Other than that, it's pretty smooth sailing.

mats effect · Mar 2016

I agree with that people have said about the lighting however I would not go for dull industrial type lighting, I like how colourful the environment is feels like something from the last of us or enslaved odyssey to the west. I think some contrast in the lighting will help a lot as everything is too uniformly lit right now. Assets are awesome

PaulWorster · Mar 2016

i wasn't inferring going to a dark industrial scene, i was purely making the point that in general scenes that are a bit enclosed are generally darker with more contrast especially in corners and area away from the actual light source. granted you have some open windows and gaps in the roof but the amount of global lighting in your scene just doesn't reflect the suns realistic properties with it being too bright. its good to have tone and colour in there. i wouldn't change that much really, just focus on making it a more convincing scene that would reflect natural lighting conditions to make it a more convincing environment.

DVOR3d · Mar 2016

Back with an Update!

I've been changing up the settings in my post process volume and got two results I think are an improvement. Both have better contrast, but both have different scene colors; green and red. While I did bring back white balance to its default value while testing, the result looked a little too...normal and not colorful enough. I was trying to go for a warm evening / sunset look.

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/c2/paawe7fhdt25.jpg

Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/5d/1y25p5msgznp.jpg

I also thought maybe I could stand the busted computer terminal back up rather than have it lie down on its side; it's unlit at the moment.

Also a big thanks to everyone. Your critiques and feedback are golden!

Vranvs · Mar 2016

Badass.

[UE4] Assembly Line

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