SpaceShip UDK
polycounter lvl 6
Hey guys,
This is a map Rafael Perez, Felix Burgos and I were working on for class. We had a month to complete the assignment.It ended up being a lot of fun. Let us know what you think of it. I know someone mentioned on a different post to change the slurpin cola logo. I was going to change it but we were crammed on time
I will still make a change to it in the future! 
We ended up using UDK, Maya, and the Quixel suite for all of our assets. Quixel suite helped us a lot by speeding up workflow by a ton!
This is a map Rafael Perez, Felix Burgos and I were working on for class. We had a month to complete the assignment.It ended up being a lot of fun. Let us know what you think of it. I know someone mentioned on a different post to change the slurpin cola logo. I was going to change it but we were crammed on time
I will still make a change to it in the future! We ended up using UDK, Maya, and the Quixel suite for all of our assets. Quixel suite helped us a lot by speeding up workflow by a ton!
Replies
UE4 would likely help make it look a lot better. You should consider moving it over if you want to use it as a folio piece (reflections and great lighting do A LOT for this type of environment).
There's one really big thing you should watch out for next time. You are using a lot of grey textures, which leads to rooms looking very boring and samey. Your floors, walls and ceilings all use a very similar color and texture (grey with smudges of other grey). The scene being very dark doesn't help. Generally you want ceiling, walls and floor to look distinctively different enough from each other (preferably in color and texturework). Even if it's just a bunch of dark blue or red pipes that run along a corridor.
Basically you want to try to make a dark ship that uses a color scheme you'd expect on a ship engineered by humans. Cables would likely be color coded, panels would be clearly labeled and a lot of style in terms of colors would be used. I'd expect some white paint in places (maybe a lil' used if the ship is older). Section markings are also likely (remember the long color bars along the walls in Half Life?).
Do a bit of texture work to clean up those things, move it to UE4 and you got yourself a really nice thing you can toss up on a folio, I'd say.
You have all of that beautiful detail and 80% of it is covered in darkness. I'd probably take a look at a few of the games mentioned by Xaragoth to see how they lit things. If I recall correctly bioshock 1 and 2 had a pretty dark feeling but there was alot of contrast in light and shadows.
I think I read somewhere they studied a lot of theater lighting. IE silhouettes, stark shadows contrasted against bright spot lights, making global illumination do it's thing, warms vs cools, rim lighting etc.. could be your friend.
On that note, I like the dead space/alien vibe. Keep it up!
If the composition of any of your renders leads the eye to a focal point (hallways and landmark items) through the use of shapes, directionality (in your shapes or textures) and repetition I think this could be much, much stronger.
I believe BringMeASunkist is saying most of the materials/texture work has the almost exactly same amount of scratches/dirt/beatup edges/ "noise" leading the textures to look rather unclear or muddy when used in the environment as a whole. In this case muddy isn't necessarily saying that scratches and dirt or bad, just that everything is kind of uniformly covered in dirt and scratches.
Basically all of your details are the same amount leading to too much competition for our eyes to handle. It could use a few moments of rest and larger solid shapes for our eyes to rest upon amongst the smaller details here and there. Doing some black and white screenshots of your environment to see if there's enough difference in value for you to separate the walls from the floors and the like can help as well.
I also find setting the view to "Lighting Only" when your doing lighting helps a bit as well when trying to figure out the best way to light a piece and make sure there's enough interest going on.
Don't get me wrong it's a lovely environment, it can just be so much better with the correct time and adjustments.
Subtlety is key. Have your painted metals look clean (except for shallow normals and dirt trextures) and have your scratches really rough and obnoxious. That way your eye is drawn to the details but rests on the surface. It's better composition.
Also I'm not into the dust particles in some of those images, and the screenshots don't look as crisp as they need to me, but overall it looks sick!
Try to make each area very easy to distinguish. Either with color or architecture. It's very important for the player to be able to orient themselves. See System Shock 2 for an older, but very good example.