Home› 3D Art Showcase & Critiques

[Finished] New Earth - a space habitat interior room in UE4

TheGabmeister
interpolator
Offline / Send Message
Pinned
TheGabmeister interpolator

Finished Work:


Original Post:


I found this captivating concept art by Tom Schreurs and instantly wanted to recreate it in UE4. I feel like the concept captures this idea where Earth has become overpopulated, and people are sheltering in space habitats. Somewhat similar to the film Elysium.

My goal is to improve my lighting setup and material creation in UE4. I'll be posting more updates in the next couple of days and share with you the stuff I'll learn along the way.

· Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
Tagged:

Replies

  • TheGabmeister
    Offline / Send Message
    TheGabmeister interpolator
    Matching the perspective and blocking out the scene. I decided to create the simpler objects first and do the more complicated ones later.

    · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
  • TheGabmeister
    Offline / Send Message
    TheGabmeister interpolator
    Imported the scene to UE4 and played around with baked lights. The primary light source is a Static Rect Light just outside the window. I slapped a few basic materials and adjusted the colors accordingly just to get an idea on what values I'll be using during the texturing phase later. I also turned off SSAO and turned on baked AO. Baking the lights introduced a visible seam on the wall. I'll fix this later.


    The walls and ceiling were interesting. I assumed they are all metallic, which might cause some issues with reflections. I did a lot of tweaking with the placement of the lights and the reflection capture to get the desired look as well as adjusting the intensity of the Screen Space Reflection. I also used a 25% Desaturation on the post-process volume since the original reference seems to be pretty desaturated. Alternatively, it might have been a good idea to adjust post-processing later and not this early.

    I placed some light blockers around the room just to make sure to no light bleeding occurs from the outside. The setup I have might have been overkill since there are no skylights or directional lights on the outside. It's just my habit when preparing scenes like this :)



    · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
  • TheGabmeister
    Offline / Send Message
    TheGabmeister interpolator
    For the skybox, I made a simple starry sky using a tool called SpaceScape (the site seems to be down at the moment). This tool can do some pretty interesting things when you put more time into it.

    · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
  • TheGabmeister
    Offline / Send Message
    TheGabmeister interpolator
    Finished most of the props over the weekend. Just a bunch of books, paintings, and a plant. Objects like these are easily obtainable from ArchViz libraries with a few tweaks and optimization here and there coupled with some texture atlasing. Luckily, there was a House Plants package during the UE4 marketplace monthly giveaways. I grabbed one of the plants there and placed it in the corner of the scene.

    Worked on the wall textures and played with the window glass shader. The reflection on the window is kinda weird at the moment. Will fix that later.




    · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
  • Sinister Exaggerator
    Offline / Send Message
    Sinister Exaggerator polycounter lvl 10
    Interesting little project and off to a great start.  I appreciate you sharing the run down on how your making it and what software your using alot of which I can take into account myself.

    Theres a few things i think could be improved upon over the concept art itself that got me wondering if you are going to keep the metal materials close to the concept or add a bit of variation to the materials as the concept in my opinion could do with a bit variation between metal materials or maybe even different colour painted surfaces. Also the concept looks quite surreal as the room appears to be just a metal box even more sterile than than most sci fi bunk rooms. Even the floor looks to be the same steel type metal as the floor which doesn't give the room a very lived in feel. If the floor is going to be that kind of metal then perhaps experiment with putting a rug down might add some colour to the piece so that the overall colour doesn't blend into one another.

    Eitherway technically its looking good keep it up.
    · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
  • TheGabmeister
    Offline / Send Message
    TheGabmeister interpolator
    Sinister Exaggerator said:

    Theres a few things i think could be improved upon over the concept art itself that got me wondering if you are going to keep the metal materials close to the concept or add a bit of variation to the materials as the concept in my opinion could do with a bit variation between metal materials or maybe even different colour painted surfaces. Also the concept looks quite surreal as the room appears to be just a metal box even more sterile than than most sci fi bunk rooms. Even the floor looks to be the same steel type metal as the floor which doesn't give the room a very lived in feel. If the floor is going to be that kind of metal then perhaps experiment with putting a rug down might add some colour to the piece so that the overall colour doesn't blend into one another.
    Thanks! Yeah, the walls and floor need a little bit more work. I'll experiment with the roughness map and perhaps play around with some grunges. I'll try matching the concept for now and make changes later. After completing all the assets, I plan to adjust the colors as you've suggested, take 3-4 screenshots, and post them all here so you guys can compare and critique.
    · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
  • TheGabmeister
    Offline / Send Message
    TheGabmeister interpolator
    For today, I worked on the exterior of the room. I recycled an Earth model I used from a previous project and tweaked the shaders to suit the scene's needs.





    The asteroid belt seen through the window is made from rock mesh particles spawned along a cylinder. I placed them in a separate lighting channel to make it easier to control the way they're lit. It's definitely more optimized if I used flat planes instead of meshes, but doing that would somewhat make it harder to tweak the way they look.


    Here's a quick GIF on how I spawned the asteroids. I added a translucent plane to represent the dust particles.


    · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
  • TheGabmeister
    Offline / Send Message
    TheGabmeister interpolator
    Added more props and the female character in the scene. I have no experience in character modeling, so I just grabbed a free female avatar rig and posed the character. I'll add some hair and clothing later.



    Interestingly, I found a skin shader in the UE4 Content Examples. With some minor tweaks, it actually does a pretty good job as a tiling skin material as long as you don't place the camera too close. Moreover, I placed a couple of lights over the character and the pillows to put some emphasis on them.


    The pillows and blanket were made using Fabric Brushes in ZBrush. They look too shiny right now. I'll try to study some fabric materials and see how the shader is supposed to be assembled.

    A friend of mine suggested that I check out Marvelous Designer for cloth simulation. I tested it out after watching some tutorials from Flipped Normals and got very interesting results. This can definitely make it easier to create complex fabric models in the future.


    Finally, I added some grunges along the walls, ceiling, and floor, tweaked the color of the primary light source, and adjusted the contrast in the Post-Process Volume. The scene is looking pretty good.


    · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
  • TheGabmeister
    Offline / Send Message
    TheGabmeister interpolator
    After researching, it turns out that creating real-time female hair is an entire topic by itself! The process is covered in a bunch of 80 Level articles: here, here, here, and here. It's great that Epic provided some hair shaders in their sample projects. I studied the hair assets from Paragon and found Shinbi's hair to be the closest fit for the character in the scene, with a couple of adjustments.



    Another helpful tutorial I found is How to Make UE4 Look as good as Marmoset. In the last part, Jack McKelvie shows how to setup a Sharpen post-process material. This is very helpful for screenshots since you don't have to do a Sharpen Filter in Photoshop every time you prepare an image for your portfolio. Temporarily disabling Mipmaps on all of your textures also helps preserve the details.


    · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
  • TheGabmeister
    Offline / Send Message
    TheGabmeister interpolator
    Here is the (almost) finished scene! I did a little bit of color grading and got the result below. The left is the original. Which do you think looks better for you?

    · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
  • HarlequinWerewolf
    Offline / Send Message
    HarlequinWerewolf polycounter
    Looking really cool. The colour grading definitely gives it a more natural feel. Also, thanks for all the breakdown stuff, it's super helpful for newbies :D
    · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
  • TheGabmeister
    Offline / Send Message
    TheGabmeister interpolator
    LeahM said:
    Looking really cool. The colour grading definitely gives it a more natural feel. Also, thanks for all the breakdown stuff, it's super helpful for newbies :D
    Glad to help :)
    · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
  • TheGabmeister
    Offline / Send Message
    TheGabmeister interpolator
    After consultation with several artists, I have decided to stick to the original color grading on the left. Here is the finished scene!










    · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
Sign In or Register to comment.