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Old IBM Datacenter Environment Piece

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supaclueless polycounter lvl 12
Final Shots + Fly-through:

(Unreal Engine 4) IBM 1980s St. King Datacenter








Finally decided to make a topic about it to post high-res shots. I started working on this for at least for a few months (took way longer than intended). This piece is based of the IBM datacenter in Toronto in around 1964. Found this image and decided to make this for my main portfolio piece. Was fun (and sometimes frustrating) to find reference images for each of the various machines used for this piece.

Planning to go through most of the 1400 Series machine assets and do a 2nd texture pass on them and than I will most likely call this one done. Was an overall good experience in practicing different stuff but one thing I should have probably tried here was to have a set of material layers instead of having each asset have unique textures for each of the hero assets.

Will probably post some breakdowns once I'm done with this. As always, critiques and comments are welcome.





Replies

  • Eric Chadwick
    This is great! I'd love to see some more closeups, plus breakdowns, wireframes, texture flats, etc. What did you use for rendering, is it in a game engine? Typewriter looks ace.
  • gfelton
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    gfelton polycounter lvl 6
    Holy shit, this looks fantastic! Those colors are really nice, as are the reflections. And the assets, those are fucking rad too! Can we get a closeup of some of those tape systems?
  • supaclueless
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    supaclueless polycounter lvl 12
    @gfelton @Eric Chadwick This is all made in UE4. I also do plan to take more better closeups, I just need to finish polishing some stuff like buttons and missing logos. Also need to get tighter lighting bakes as there's some minor bad bleeding in certain closeups I want to have.

    All the texturing is done with Quixel DDO.
  • PatsuKiki
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    PatsuKiki polycounter lvl 6
    This really looks nice, the textures definitely give it a heavy feel

  • mystichobo
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    mystichobo polycounter lvl 12
    Cool stuff, I've had the ref image for this set as my wallpaper at home for a while.

    My only crits are with the Selectric, the key profile looks like just smoothed boxes, whereas in reality, it's more of a hollow spherical shape; see: 



    The font is a bit off too, this one is a pretty good approximation of early typewriter fonts.

    Other than that, it looks fairly good; are you going to colour grade it to be more like the reference image?
  • supaclueless
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    supaclueless polycounter lvl 12
    @mystichobo I did not notice the indent for the keyboard, thanks for spotting that out! Also used the your referenced font and indeed it looks more accurate for the letters. Heres how it looks now.

    As for color grading I'm currently not fully set on my current LUT, but I'm more than likely to stick to how it looks like right now, I'm not sure and I might play around with it somemore. There are actually a few variants I've seen for the main reference image I'm using but the main I probably would not go full-orange like the original reference.


  • supaclueless
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    supaclueless polycounter lvl 12
    Did a second texture pass on the hero assets. I might have overdone the rust for some of the pieces but I definitely am much happier with how the meshes look now compared to my first texture pass (was still getting used to Quixel, but now i have a much better grasp of using it). I only have a couple more things I need to finish up and than I will most likely call this piece done and let it be my main portfolio showcase

    edit: oops, image was too widescreen...


  • supaclueless
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    supaclueless polycounter lvl 12
    Well, I'm finally done with this piece. I Will get some breakdown shots soon and upload a video fly-through of the scene soon. Hopefully this will be considered a good portfolio piece.

    Images also in artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nNvJo



  • Carabiner
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    Carabiner greentooth
    Beautiful work!
  • supaclueless
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    supaclueless polycounter lvl 12
    Added video of the scene for the top post. Time to do some quick breakdowns
  • vertex_
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    vertex_ polycounter lvl 7
  • Slozhny
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    Slozhny polycounter lvl 5
    Oh my..... Simple and juicy! Love this!
  • gfelton
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    gfelton polycounter lvl 6
    Such a unique piece, I absolutely love it! :)
  • supaclueless
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    supaclueless polycounter lvl 12
    A quick and most likely final update from me in regards to this scene. Textures and marmoset viewer breakdown for the 1402 card reader and the Selectric typewriter are available in my artstation profile: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/J3k3D

    I will try to highlight some things I did for my scenes that might not be noticed easily. I apologize if my explanation seems cumbersome. If you want to know more information on something in particular for the scene just let me know and I'll do my best to either explain or show it further for you.

    The scene: (relatively straightforward)
     

    A quick general view of the wireframe for the meshes



    For non-hero meshes I decided to use looped edges so that I do not need to have normals made for them and still achieve a nice lighting result and have them use only a single smoothing group to make them have nice visual edges for them (At the cost of increased triangle count I sped up my process to achieve "nice" edges for random parts of the building)


    I baked my lighting for this scene using bounce lighting from light card. Using this method and achieving good results relies on good UV lightmaps that are stitched together for the edges to get good shading and I needed to crank my lightmap resolution to about 2x pass the general resolution (red color in lightmap density view) to remove some unsightly shadow bleeding (not really necessary but I wanted to make the scene look as good as possible).

    I cranked up the world lighting settings based on an archviz guide (I can't seem to find my source link at the moment :X ). I did not need to change my lighting production bake setting as Koola does for his scenes (the improvement for my scene in particular was minimal while increasing my bake time by about 5-7 hours).

    For my material setup I used one master material that controls more or less everything I need for the assets, a glass shader, and a shader for the ceiling lights. No crazy shader math going on in here, most of the stuff used for my material just allows me to easily tweak and modify how my assets look like with instanced materials.

    Master material controlling almost everything in the scene:


    Light Tube Material (does not use any textures):


    That's about all the major things I wanted to point out in regards to what I did in the scene. Thank you for reading this and comments and questions are gladly accepted.
  • Stu2Prof
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    Stu2Prof polycounter lvl 6
    Dang, the light tube material image is tiny :( Can you post a bigger one?
  • supaclueless
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    supaclueless polycounter lvl 12
    @studtoprof Sure no problem. I just posted them as tiny images because I personally thought most of these materials aren't anything amazing to look at (mostly just simple switches and mult/pow with some lerp).
  • Stu2Prof
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    Stu2Prof polycounter lvl 6
    Nah I really appreciate it. I really love your scene and am also a real beginner interested in materials/lighting so it helps me get a clearer understanding for myself.  

    .....any chance you could post a bigger screengrab of the master material? :P
  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    Having a sphere reflection capture actor in front of each box in the back row is giving distorted curved reflections, have you tried using a box reflection capture actor for the entire room, and using extra sphere reflection capture actors where they are needed? 
  • supaclueless
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    supaclueless polycounter lvl 12
    @studtoprof Here is the Master material. Honestly I could have optimized it a little (not needing cubemap reflections and standalone emmisive material but I had them because I needed them for a few assets and I did not want to make another master material just for an asset or two). Because I can Offset/Scale my UVs in my master material I was able to have both the environment (walls,pillars,floor) and mesh materials be interchangable. (it might be better to split up tilable generics vs. standalone assets but I did this for overall convenience sake)

    @ZacD I actually did try to use box capture actors for the 729 unit (the elongated box mesh with the window on top) especially since that one has a flat planar window so the distortion from the sphere actor is noticeable. I never got the box actor to play nicely though, as box reflection blended horribly for me. Because of how close my meshes were together, I either got box distortion, terrible reflection seams or even bad prioritization over which box reflection gets drawn over. Working with box actors was a colossal pain for me and I decided to trade off some slightly sphere-warped reflections over just general functionality. It could be that I just suck at using Box actors I guess, but I never got them to work decently.


  • Stu2Prof
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    Stu2Prof polycounter lvl 6
  • supaclueless
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    supaclueless polycounter lvl 12
    @gameweb478 Because I added support loops, I can have one single smoothing group and not have any smoothing errors and not actually chamfer the edges (good for snapping geometry). I basically did a fake bevel where instead of actually chamfering the edges to make a smooth corner, I added support loops and had one single smoothing group. There are some obvious downsides to doing this but I did this just so I can get away with not having to create normals for those meshes and I did not use any tiling normal textures which would be another alternative.

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