My first scifi environment (C&C please)
Hey everyone, long time stalker, 2nd time poster...
Currently, Im a games student in my last year of study. Until my last year I was primarily concept art and 2d stuff with the majority of my contribution being textures.
Ive been building this for about 8 weeks but due to other subjects I have only just started working on it in any consistent form...anyway...
Ive been stalking other threads and have notice the awesome C&C going on and would really appreciate any form of feedback, especially in regards to my modelling.
I'll update the thread to where I am atm so excuse the huge post.
Using PS, UE4, Ndo2, Blender (not a maya fan :P)
I started off with some 30 seconds paint overs of what I wanted...These had to be quick and rough and I was really focused on my game project at the time so not much was done...
After the concept stage I had a firm idea of what I wanted to do and that was pretty much model and get as much practice as possible in. I wanted to create a section of a ship that had crash landed on an alien planet. I envisioned some sort of transport ship holding some kind of characters...
A lightbox fitting...
Some power couplings...
Some grates to hide and support cables, pipes etc...
An incubator...
Over the last few years Ive worked quite a lot in Unity. This year me and my team decided we wanted to expand our engine knowledge and thus opted to start using UDK....until UE4 came out. We ended up porting our whole game over to UE4 and I started learning textures, materials, lighting and particles...Thats why I chose to build my environment in UE4...also my uni assignment demanded it be made in a real time engine...
Started to piece things together to make sure they all fitted well in engine. I found the scale in blender to be kinda weird so it took a bit of fiddling to get it right...
Here i started to plan out how I wanted the lighting...always jump ahead...
some layout stuff...
lighting overload...
Incubator in engine...
As far as models go, this was about it...I used all of those assets and a heap of wires and cables to fill out the environment and I really think I should make a seperate post for the textures and materials...
Mind you this stage was about 2 weeks ago so Ive come a long way which you'll find out if you read on.
Currently, Im a games student in my last year of study. Until my last year I was primarily concept art and 2d stuff with the majority of my contribution being textures.
Ive been building this for about 8 weeks but due to other subjects I have only just started working on it in any consistent form...anyway...
Ive been stalking other threads and have notice the awesome C&C going on and would really appreciate any form of feedback, especially in regards to my modelling.
I'll update the thread to where I am atm so excuse the huge post.
Using PS, UE4, Ndo2, Blender (not a maya fan :P)
I started off with some 30 seconds paint overs of what I wanted...These had to be quick and rough and I was really focused on my game project at the time so not much was done...
After the concept stage I had a firm idea of what I wanted to do and that was pretty much model and get as much practice as possible in. I wanted to create a section of a ship that had crash landed on an alien planet. I envisioned some sort of transport ship holding some kind of characters...
A lightbox fitting...
Some power couplings...
Some grates to hide and support cables, pipes etc...
An incubator...
Over the last few years Ive worked quite a lot in Unity. This year me and my team decided we wanted to expand our engine knowledge and thus opted to start using UDK....until UE4 came out. We ended up porting our whole game over to UE4 and I started learning textures, materials, lighting and particles...Thats why I chose to build my environment in UE4...also my uni assignment demanded it be made in a real time engine...
Started to piece things together to make sure they all fitted well in engine. I found the scale in blender to be kinda weird so it took a bit of fiddling to get it right...
Here i started to plan out how I wanted the lighting...always jump ahead...
some layout stuff...
lighting overload...
Incubator in engine...
As far as models go, this was about it...I used all of those assets and a heap of wires and cables to fill out the environment and I really think I should make a seperate post for the textures and materials...
Mind you this stage was about 2 weeks ago so Ive come a long way which you'll find out if you read on.
Replies
As you can notice with some of these textures, they aint finished. For the assignment it is required that I only submit a fly through which means i can hide a lot of things from the camera. Ill do this for the assignment and finish it off for my portfolio work.
Diffuse
Normal
Spec
Emmisive
and here is the bottom door...
Diffuse
Normal
Spec
Emmisive
Diffuse
Normal
Spec
Emmisive
I see you have "Spec" maps but no Roughness maps. Be aware that a spec map in UE4 is something different that you are maybe used from Unity. I'd suggest reading about PBR on polycount or the UE4 docs if you are not aware already
Hi Xasas
Yeah I have read a lil bit about them but atm my master material is just setup to input a constant for roughness at this point. Most of the spec maps we have made for our game have been colour but we realised that UE4 only takes in greyscale spec maps...
Ill have a read, thanks for the heads up
and lastly, this is what my scene looks like to date...
first revision
2nd revision
Floor is almost complete. Found I need to redo my walls because I made a super noob mistake of exporting the UV as 1024 and didnt notice until i had finished it...oh well..
Sorry about how dark it is, the lights flicker and I captured it during a dark section.
It also works a lot with gloss maps and metal but by metal atm is just a constant parameter.
Ill take a SS of my master to show you
The Divided: Thanks. The idea is all mine, I dont really like to make other peoples concepts and usually come up with my own, this however is my first environment in 3D.
Now that Ive had a chance to work on this project, the textures have taken about 2 days in total. Hardest part was choosing a colour scheme. I come from a 2D background so texturing for me is the easy part, modelling on the other hand still gives me some grief.
Also curious to see how your materials are set up...your textures do look incorrect for UE4's PBR workflow. You probably shouldn't be using spec at all. Just metalness and roughness for specular response.
You'll want to make a Metalness map, and use a roughness for all those shinier/less shiny bits. 'Spec' is now just a value for reflection, while roughness defines how rough or glossy a surface is. Therefore, you have it backwards a bit-- Spec should be a constant value except on metal (thus metalness maps, which define what is metal and what is not in order to separate the constant values for each), while Gloss should have all the scratches and spills and surface roughness value.
...More or less. Anyone who actually practices PBR often should correct me if I'm spreading misinformation, lol. I do know for a fact, though, that Spec is only there for legacy purposes and does not work the way you're thinking it does.
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I only found a out a few weeks ago that UE4 doesnt use colour spec maps and the like. I have red through all the PBR docs I could find but couldnt really find any info on how to layout roughness and metal maps. Also there are a heap of content examples that I have but I feel they are more of a showcase then a good way to learn. So much technical stuff thrown in to make the scene look nicer but they dont do really well in teaching the engine or the pipeline...IMO
The Divided: [/FONT]
Yeah. Ive been drawing since I was a kid and have taken up digital painting around a year ago. I am primarily a character designer and a designer for games but wanted to branch out and found making this environment very rewarding and new. Im currently studying in a games degree.
Gsokol:
I was literally just looking at the above image and thinking the same thing. I might tame down on some of the emmisive sections of the walls and doors. Like the UE4 examples, Im finding it hard to compromise between tons of detail and composition. Thanks for the input.
BagelHero:
Am I right by saying that I could use my spec map Ive painted as a gloss/metal map because I kind of have. Most f my materials have a spec constant value of 0.5 with the spec map in a gloss/ roughness texture parameter. Ill have another trawl and see if I can find some info on a pipeline for these maps.
Thanks for the input guys, appreciate it and keep em coming please
P.S. The quote button wasnt working for me?
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?13453-PBR-Implications-for-texture-creation
Tons of links so Ill spend the day reading about this
I second the creative critiques GSokol gave ... it looks sort of "cool", but its noisy. There isn't any real composition at work, no hierarchy, my eyes don't know where to go, and the lighting isn't leading you or telling a story. It's sort of just some cool looking lights shooting around for effect. Think about each one and what their purpose is.
Ive had a bit of a trial and I cant seem to find the difference between gloss and metal, I mean the terms are of course, different but I can seem to see the difference...for eg...
I get the same result regardless of input of metal or gloss/roughness, spec set to 0.3.
This is a map i tried on a robot im texturing and i inputted it into a gloss/roughness and then tried the metal and it worked the exact same way...there is next to no details on painting metal maps...most just use constants...
Any one shed any clarity on this?
Is it just me or does gloss and metal look very similar?
At this point Im finding it very hard to tell if I really need to use the PBR system. Ive had a look through the UE4 examples and they literally have spec maps on half the environment (scifi hallway) to name 1 and gloss/roughness maps, no metal to be seen.
At this point in time Im thinking its more of a personal preference and saying something is wrong because it doesnt follow the pipeline 100% seems kind of limiting to me.
I did paint this for the metal map (for the above character) and it looked 100% the same as gloss so...just ignore the grey sections as it was a main trial for the body to see the difference.
The only thing a metalness map and gloss have in common is that they are black and white, but they are so in different ways.
A metalness map is a plain black and white (binary black and white, not a scale between black and white) map that defines whether or not something is metal. A binary "yes" or "no".
Gloss is a full greyscale map that defines how rough or glossy the surface is.
The only thing they'll have in common is if your metal is perfectly polished AND perfectly pure, you might have a value of 1 on both the gloss and metalness for all the metal parts of the object... but rarely is something perfectly glossy, and moreover you should actually be using Roughness, not gloss (in UE4), which is inverted.
I implore you to do some reading.
PBR in Theory
PBR in Practice
Physically Based Rendering Bible
Can someone explain this Metalness/PBR thing to me?
Edit: And in case you're still hanging onto that "but epic still uses spec" question, read through all this as well.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/PhysicallyBased/index.html
I also need to become very familiar with channel masks and need to figure out how to incorporate all this into a streamed pipeline...at the moment Ive been working on something that may be on the right track?...
Thanks for the reading material mate. Ive been looking at stuff like the marmoset stuff and I get it all but they all go over how it works and what it does and not really how to implement it...even the UE4 PBR page goes on about what it all does but doesnt have any info about making materials in the editor to suit and since I have no experience with marmoset (apparently they have a similar PBR layout), all I can do is look at the UE4 examples which are highly overcomplicated for beginners.
I have been trying though....
Im thinking this is along the lines of what PBR is is its most basic form.
Sorry Im so hard headed, Im just pissed because I just learnt how to texture well, managed to do 60% of my scene and then might have to change it all (or not, I like how it looks tbh)
ScottMichaelH: I think I understand the how and why...just gotta figure out the do...lol
Are we saying that if you use UE4 you have to use the PBR pipeline or is it just something that should really be learnt for a certain process ie metal spaceships with metal everywhere...lol
-- Use metalness to mask off what is metal and what is not (easy as pie-- identify material (eg, plastic, steel, skin. Is that a metal? Yes = mask it off with white, No = Black).
-- Make sure your albedo (color) contains no lighting information (no painted in lighting or shadowing, no AO, just flat color as true to what the actual color is as you can make it). This will have wear and tear, built up dirt in cracks, smears of paint, etc. Just no actual lighting or shadowing.
-- Since you have no spec map anymore, use roughness to define what areas are glossy or matte and control the specular highlight. This is where you get to have fun with sticky patches, scratches, fingerprints, spills etc, after defining physically accurate materials (there are measured values for common materials around the place, use them as a starting point). Do not include lighting information in this-- light doesn't make a surface more or less glossy/reflective, so it has no place in this map.
-- Put AO bake in AO input in the shader.
-- Done. Add any other things you need like detail normals, fancy shader stuff or Emmissive like usual, but otherwise just put your maps into the pre-defined slots.
It's honestly just like the Diff/Spec method, only you now have better guidelines to author your maps to look "correct" in all lighting situations and environments, not to mention metal is now 10000x easier to get actually looking like metal without the fiddling.
Once this really clicks for you, you'll have nicer textures that are more versatile and take less time to do to get a decent result. So keep it up.
Thanks again for the input peeps, ill have a walkthrough soon.
A side note, try another image hosting site that lets you post the big image here on the forums instead of making it a hotlink, please! Getting to be a pain to have to go to Photobucket and zoom manually to see what's going on. I use Imgbox (just make use you use the "Full Size" option to get the proper image links for embedding), but there's a lot more that work just as well. Imgur is also good (but has an image limit...). and I've found postimg to be reliable for Polycount as well (the images here tend to get a fair amount of traffic, and some hosts will remove them for it).
Yeah photobucket is super shit to upload as well, its just I had an account with them...
Ill get steppin on finding another image hosts, cheers
The roughness seems to wash out my Albedo map (see if learning already :P) but I guess thats just tweaking in the roughness map or i can use a constant to control the strength of my map.
Still no AO map but thats next, Im feeling that ill have to redo my scene textures to suit but tbh, this is the hero piece so maybe I can get away with it..I really want to finish this one and start on my next project but we will see what happens...no one said you cant mix PBR and traditional techniques :P. Ill post the maps if requested.
BagelHero: Sorry about the photobucket image, i was learning all day and didnt have time to research image hosting sites...lol
BTW, more links for future endeavors.
http://artisaverb.info/PBT.html
http://artisaverb.info/PBR.html
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=135776
(P.S., just do a metalness+super basic roughness pass on your existing textures if you want to move on. Fair enough that you do, but I do think that'll really improve the scene, even without altering the diffuse content much).
Like I said, that's my workflow and it's been doing well for me since.
Can't wait to see more.
Since its not super hard to change, Im gonna go ahead and alter my scene for PBR....(DAM YOU!!!...lol)
Practice makes perfect and it seems this pipeline is the wave of the future...
Mr Grimm: Thats a great idea! Problem is that I actually make my normals from my textures. Since Im kinda new to modelling and not very good I dont really make high poly stuff yet. For my next scene though ill be doing some zbrush stuff so ill keep this in mind, thanks
This is the page I earlier recommended you read and watch everything on:
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/PBR
Ive been using trial and error all day to try and wrap my head around painting maps for roughness...Im doing ok but I cant seem to get the darker colours to not look black?...note the really dark checker plating in the bottom of this image..
Anyone yell at me and tell me what the hell Im doing wrong...
Additionally, could you outline what part of your map that floor is on? I don't see it.
Sorry BagelHero, The dark are is on the bottom of the image, its meant to be a dark grey diamond plating texture but the roughness keeps making it all black. Same with white. Ive found that I could not ever have just a mirror polished white section, it had to be a grey or off white to work...
I am doing it in greyscale, I just posted a progress shot of how I was going and I was trying to do a section at a time to get a better understanding of what greyscale shades had what result.
Im super tired now and I have myself a headache so Im gonna go sleep...since I havent in 2 days.
P.S. Hope you like the imgur pics :P
Here are the final screenshots of my environment:
https://vimeo.com/109360477
Throughout this process Ive learnt a ton of stuff and I really appreciate the C&C everyone gave, especially BagelHero and ScottMichealH for their PBR help.
Ill be starting my next environment soon and since I officially graduate from uni this week, it will be time to improve my portfolio more and find a job.
Ive got a game in the works (since i am primarily a 2D artist and designer) and will also be starting my next environment...it will be up shortly in a new thread so please keep an eye out and lemme know what you think.
Thanks everyone