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[WIP] Cyberpunk 2077 inspired Game Environment, Third-Year Uni Project

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MaraRA polycounter lvl 3
Hello everyone, this is my University third-year work thread. I am an aspiring 3D environment artist in a group of 7 students aiming to create a Cyberpunk 2077 / Detroit: Become Human inspired game demo. Thank you for taking the time to check out my work. Any and all feedback is immensely appreciated!

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  • iam717
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    iam717 sublime tool
    No images or links or anything, me thinks you pulled the post/trigger to quickly?
  • MaraRA
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    MaraRA polycounter lvl 3
    iam717 said:
    No images or links or anything, me thinks you pulled the post/trigger to quickly?
    Haha no, my lecturer told me to make a thread but I didn't have anything worth showing yet
  • MaraRA
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    MaraRA polycounter lvl 3
    So let's start with the game synopsis and a bit about the art direction. Homo Machinas is a third-person interactive-narrative adventure game where dystopian sci-fi meets camp neo-futurism. Think Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and The Fifth Element (1997). It's based in a future where the super-rich prolong their lives through cloning. Our game demo level will follow Kimmie, an operative for an extremist group, as she tries to kidnap and publicly kill the clone of a despicable politician.

    At the moment, we plan to make 2 types of environments that are both in the same building - Chromo HQ, home of the world's industry-leading clone company. The first will be a luxurious client consultation / lobby area, and the second will be the underground cloning laboratory. These two environments are intended to contrast each other in colour and atmosphere but share some neo-futuristic principles.

    We've decided to start production of the laboratory environment first, so here are some of the references I've been given by my Art Director.



  • MaraRA
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    MaraRA polycounter lvl 3
    The past week has been pretty slow, mostly watching tutorials and planning / discussing ideas. I was really inspired by this concept by Chris Doretz of what looks like a plastic quarantine tunnel running through a damaged hospital area. It looked like it would introduce some really cool opportunities for lighting and also breaking up the harsh brutalist shapes that our lab environment seems to be going down. The idea at the moment is that the tube can run through a biohazardous room where a cloning accident has taken place, so client demand is so high that they can't deal with the fallout at the moment so the area gets vacuum-sealed and production continues like normal. This will give the player the opportunity to walk through and be able to see (maybe partially see because of semi-transparency? will help decrease my workload) and get some environmental storytelling.


    https://www.artstation.com/artwork/dyoELK

    So I started researching examples of this kind of quarantine tunnel. I couldn't find many real world examples but i did find a couple in films like ET (1982) and 12 Monkeys (1995). There were a couple references of air purifying tubes and machines connected to the tunnels which would be cool to make too afterwards. All of the film screenshots I got from the website shotdeck.com, it's one of my favourites other than pinterest for collecting references!





    So I started by blocking out a segment in UE and importing it into Maya. Then I used a lattice on a cylinder and torus to deform it into this shape. Originally the "plastic" wasn't a plane and had some thickness, but this caused me problems down the line when doing the transparent material. The polycount is quite high because i knew that i wanted to turn this into a spline tool and didn't want any visible polygons.




    The metal material was nothing special, but for the clear plastic, I followed a transparent glass material on yt. For some reason in the tutorial, his material seems to cast its own shadow while mine doesn't, so that's on my list of things to investigate. Tutorial: https://youtu.be/PkLR8OqPzCA




    I wanted to experiment with displacement but for now using normal maps was easier. The segments aren't UVed so i wanted to try using tri-planar projection for the first time. I took the normal and roughness map from a tarp fabric material from Quixel Megascans (https://www.fab.com/listings/ca2bcb13-13c3-4fcc-8bfc-4ba863fd2de6) projected those onto the plastic material following this tutorial. Tutorial: https://youtu.be/r5CxcpxGe-Y

    I was really happy with the results! I think I might try to do a lot more triplanar projections in our game environments especially for the spacious and clean client areas. This is what the tube segments looked like now, pus the material setup.





    So next job was to make it into a spline tool which wasn't as easy as i thought it would be. I went through 3 tutorials before i found one which worked for me, but it still isn't perfect. Sometimes some weird artifacts or collapsing in on itself happens if the spline is an odd length. The tutorial that worked for me was this one. Tutorial: https://youtu.be/l5W8KdQYI7k




    and the final result was pretty good! i still have some issues i need to iron out like why the plastic doesnt cast a shadow and how come when playing as a third-person character the camera has no collision with the tube when the character walking through does. There's also other things like how to put an end piece at the back of the spline regardless of its length, and also I was advised by my lecturer that it should have some kind of connecting mechanism at both or one end where in the real world it would connect to a doorway or wall so it could create an airtight vacuum-seal. For now, here are some more screenshots and lighting experiments.






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