Hi guys, I'm Marc Thompson, 3D Environment Artist. Here's my thread for documenting my portfolio environment art projects. I want these pieces to be as good as they can be, so critique and advice is more than welcome. I'll be updating this first post with the most recent images.

LATEST:




Low Poly Bake:

Hi Poly:

Here is the concept art that I'm following, with permission from Pete Amachree:


I just loved the look and feel and setting for this place. I feel like we don't see much of this kind of scene/time period in today's games, and it got me excited to make something a little unique.

Here are some exploratory sketches and reference I found. This is just a small portion of my research:


Here is a quick breakdown of some of the static meshes I have so far. As you can see it's very modular and allows me to make tons of variety. So far I've kept the texture use pretty low; I've generally tried to re-use existing textures before deciding I need to make new ones.


This is just the early stage of this project and I have a ton of work yet to put into this; keep an eye on this thread!

Hi Marc, the first thing i would say is that the road needs to be defined a bit more. Its too shiney and can't tell if its meant to be water thats doing that. If it is water, think about how water would pool on a surface. It usually fills dents in the roads surface so i would hint at that. Also pump up some of the normals a little to show the cracks in ground surfaces. The other thing i would also point out is to watch out for scale on the balconies compared to the crub on the road. They are looking a little too low. Its a great start, and i'm liking the mood so far.

Thanks, mryogesh123. The funny thing is I actually made a nice shader to paint puddles on the street, but I left a giant puddle of water in the foreground and it looks terrible . That's fixed now. Here's a better shot with some interesting puddles:



And you're right about the height of the curb, I suspect it's at least twice as high as it should be, so I'll fix that.

Rough paintover to get a better idea of the rail station. I'm trying to get that contrast of the steampunk elements mixed with the huge victorian architecture. I'm also using this opportunity to push silhouette here.

Looks good now mate, I wouldjust add a few small buildings on the left side of the image to balance the image a little. Is this going to be the final composition shot?

Oh wow, I'll be following this for sure. Looks great so far!

Looking really good. A cozy night scene is coming to shape. A bit overkill with all the water on the cobblestone but it's a nice touch so just needs some balancing.

Thanks guys.

mryogesh123: Something like this will be my primary composition, it'll definitely change a bit as I progress. I'm keeping an eye toward getting a few good shots from different areas of the scene. As for the buildings, yea for sure. Actually I've been thinking a bit about how to approach the skyline. My main concern is that the buildings in the background will need to be unbelievably tall, but it might work out.

If you feel the need to keep the skyline, why not drift away from the concept a little and make the right side a plaza with an obelisk or a monument or such in the middle to balance the composition?
Btw, diggin' this! I hope it will get much better still!

//edit: well, actually, in the concept you don't even see the right side. But I'd even dare say that the concept artist wanted it to be a plaza...!

This is looking really great so far! I especially like how the ground has some cobblestone poking through the puddles. I'm sure once you add a rain effect and more wetness all throughout, it won't look out of place.

Here's an update:




Not the prettiest update but I wanted to show a bit of progress.

I've been building modular elevated rails and blocking in the station. I also copied around some towers to give a better sense of the far cityscape -- I'll be building some more interesting unique assets for that farther down the line. I have a few other building sets in the works to add more variety.

In the meantime I've been giving thought to what to do with the middle of the large street. Large open squares like that weren't uncommon, but I don't exactly have dozens of interesting people to fill it with, like in the concept. My first idea is to turn the street into a round about with the middle being a sidewalk/park area with a few trees and benches. It would add a fair amount of production time if I start developing foliage though, I'll see how things go.

I also tweaked the colors a bit, I think they work a little better now.

I really like that you go for rainy reflections. I like them in real life very much and so far it looks you'll made a very cool image

How did you made such a cool reflection?

I did the puddles with some lerp vertex painting using the cobblestone height map and DX11 reflection shader magic. Other than that it was just a matter of making the specular power of the puddles alot stronger than the wet bricks so that the puddles are more of a mirror and the stones have a more blurry reflection.

Here's a good tutorial link about material blending for those interested:
http://www.chrisalbeluhn.com/UDK_Adv..._Painting.html

Alright, I have a technical issue and I'm looking for a bit of experienced advice. It's about lightmap UVs; I've got these girders and railroad wood pieces and, as a result, I have a ton of UV islands and it's obviously not at all ideal for lightmapping. Below you can see it rendered with a 32x32 lightmap, and below that are the UVs. This mesh will be used 15-20 times in the level, so I also don't want to crank the resolution up or that will get out of hand quickly. Are there any clever solutions or do I just need to take the texture memory hit?

The way I understand it, each face needs to be at least one pixel wide and each edge of each face should be snapped to the edges of those pixels for the best results. Then after taking into account padding, I'm not sure I can pull it off at a reasonable resolution. I may just have to grind away at these UVs for an evening and hope for the best.

If I were you, I'd break the model into more modular pieces.
For elements that are large and you can't do anything to break them up without creating seams in the lightmap, increase the lightmap resolution.

Like Marchwarden said, be sure that every separate surface has its own pixels. Overlapping on a pixel mixes the information.

Good luck!

This is looking good so far

What is the square shadows on the street? What light is causing those?
Also, for your lightmap problems: You say you want to use 32x32 for the one you posted, but that's way too small. Just take that image of your uv's you posted and scale it to 32x32 in photoshop, you'll see that there is never enough pixels to give each island space .

I personally would either crank it up or simply use vertex lighting( you might be able to get away with it, there isn't too much lightmap detail on that particular mesh I think) Perhaps it's worth a try?

Good stuff and gl.

Originally Posted by osman

This is looking good so far

What is the square shadows on the street? What light is causing those?
Also, for your lightmap problems: You say you want to use 32x32 for the one you posted, but that's way too small. Just take that image of your uv's you posted and scale it to 32x32 in photoshop, you'll see that there is never enough pixels to give each island space .

I personally would either crank it up or simply use vertex lighting( you might be able to get away with it, there isn't too much lightmap detail on that particular mesh I think) Perhaps it's worth a try?

Good stuff and gl.

Vertex lighting could be the solution I need, these meshes should work fairly well for that. Anyway, yea my wording was confusing, I knew I definitely needed more resolution, I was just afraid of going to, say, 256x256 or more on a mesh that's instanced dozens of times.

Thanks .

Lookin sweet! Can't wait to see more!!

Hey guys, here's an update, a bit more substantial this time. I've been working on blocking out everything so I have a really solid idea of where I'm headed. The statue is of course a placeholder base mesh. I'll probably do some prop models for a change of pace, those lamps should be quick and will let me get the lighting for those finalized. After that I'll probably tackle that monster train station, but it shouldn't be too bad. Crit and advice are welcome, as usual.

woa loving this so far!
the only suggestion that comes to mind is maybe adding some plants, but i really don't know if they'd fit the mood

it looks pretty good. but i really hope that you'll model that builing with glass balcony and replace the generic one on the left with it.

also, it might be a matter of camera angle but on the concept buildings feel more overwhelming.

@Fnitrox: It's been a consideration. It would definitely add variety but, as you mention, it may not fit with the setting. I think adding planted trees and the like along the streets would make it look too modern.

@Blaisoid: Thanks for the feedback. I too really want to get that cool balcony in there, I just intentionally kept the more unique features for later while I worked on the pieces with the most re-usability.

And you're right about the height of the buildings. I honestly ended up being very conservative there mostly because the buildings I had in all my reference were only ever 10 stories at most. I had this sense that adding an extra 10 stories to these buildings would look wrong and unbelievable, but looking at New York skyscrapers from 1900 I'm more confident that I could pull it off. Conveniently it's just a matter of copy pasting a few floors and updating the prefabs in my scene.

Thanks guys .