Hello, I've been working on a new environment model for my portfolio. Please have a look by clicking the thumbnail.

these look crisp, love the color palette, and the reflectiveness of the tiles is something i didn't realize was missing from other subway environments i've seen. amazing results also from the lightweight wires and textures (as fas as i can tell...) great work! the garbage strewn about is also a nice touch.

might be a dumb question but how are you generating the light and shadows?

your nba environments are still some of favorites though, so i apologize if this comes off as fanboyish. [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img] a master class in environment art for sure...

Stunning work Malcolm. Max Payne eat your heart out!
It also seems pretty clear that youre using a GI solution for your lighting set to a low-ish sampling rate? Is this enviro supposed to represent a realtime scene, or pre-rendered? The low polycount and texture resolution indicates realtime but the lighting solution, unless baked out to a seperate set of maps & UV's seems unlikely for a realtime scene?

The enviro/cube? map you've got on the trashcan is a bit too intense or needs to be blurred I feel.

Your dirt & grime is great, but seems a bit generic & random at this point. The reflectivity, specularity of the tiles would be more inconsistant. Also I'd expect more grafitti and cracked tiles with such a high-traffic area. More signs of wear & tear. Areas on the pillar from 3'-7' in height where there a craploads of dirty fingerprints, etc from people touching & rubbing against the surfaces. lower to the ground 0-8" in height on surfaces scuff marks from shoes.

I would expect the stairwells to have handrails yes?

I could be wrong, I imagine you've got great reference whereas Im drawing on half remembered fragments from movie scenes in subways.

Thanks snowfly! Mentalgay render, point lights casting falloff shadows, an ambient light for the really dark areas, some touch up lights for areas that were not receiving light correctly and the ambient occlusion shader to get the fancy pants gradient shadows and add form to areas that are almost completely lit with an ambient light.

Scooby, nope, no GI or final gather I hate that shit it is so slow and very hard to tune. This would be for a baked solution, so I did not have any limitations as far as lighting is concerned. All of your following critiques are spot on, unfortunately I ran out of enthusiasm before I got to implementing all that nifty stuff you mentioned. Except for the garbage can it really does look that shiny in real life. The model is inspired by new york but references were taken from multiple subways so it is not based on a specific station.

I should mention the textures on the info page have been scaled down to fit into a collage, the info page is supposed inspire questions from potential employers as well as other artists, it is not meant to be a technical break down but more a piece of art itself with a bit of info crammed into one image.

Always nice to see environment worrk.. Especially really good ones like this [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Only grief i have with it is that the refelctivity of the tiles (and trashcan but thats already been pointed out) are a bit too clean and reflective.. I would blur and tone that down a bit.

Also on the 5th shot from the left its either the render or u got some texturedistortion on the wall at the stair

nice work, keep it up!

I think it looks great, but I'd love it if you could take that enviro as a base and make it look like an interesting enviro rather than just the typical subway scene (albeit well done) that we've seen half a hundred times.

question:

did you use the fight scene near the end of the matrix as reference for this subway?

Looks great. Ace as usual.

Looks awesome man, although that barrel is really reflective! My eyes went there before anything else. That is one awesome subway scene!

Looks great Malcolm.

I agree with egoncalo that the barrel/bin thing is really too reflective ... also if the wall tiles are that reflective then maybe parts of the floor should be too?

Nice sharp texturing though, good work! [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

I think it's crap.

That said, you know I like this dude :P As for the inquiries about the shininess of the garbage can, malcolm's reference image was even shinier, so it's pretty spot on to what he had used. I'm sure he'll post the picture of it to show you all.

I would have liked to see some bump information going on, and some more garbage, but what IS there is b. e. a. utiful.


good job dude.

Great stuff Malcolm. I agree with the reflectivity being a bit too hot. Bringing the lighting down a bit could really help that. Creating pools of light for the flood lights would work really well as well. Color scheme is nice, overall great work.

There's been a lot of awesome environment work posted lately. Makes me want to post some personal work to add in some bad work.

Very nice stuff.

Top stuff as always Malcolm. Really nicely executed. Aside from the other crits, maybe Im smoking crack but i feel like the font on the exit and restroom sign is squashed somehow?

Hey Malcolm, that is looking very spiffy! Love the lighting.

I have a question about the tile textures. Were those photosourced or made from scratch? I have been having a problem creating any sort of brick/tile texture from scratch. The thing that has been throwing me off is giving the texture depth, as in making it look like the tile actually pops out, without using a bump map to show this.

If the tile wasn't photosourced, how did you go about acheaving this in photoshop? Dodge, burn, bevel, etc?

Thanks man.

great exectution texture and model wise ! agreed about the trash can beeing too reflective . Makes me remember roscoe street station from max payne 1 eheh ! ( installing game eheeh ) maybe you could show us some textures or wires [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

Any chance you could put up a non-textured wire shot?

Really awesome work!

A+

motives, yeah I think you are right there appears to be some texture stretching there I didn't notice until you mentioned it.

almighty_gir, the subway model is inspired by new york subways, it is not a real station but the matrix subway was in the back of my mind when I built the model as I had just finished the path of neo game which gave me the inspiration to model a subway.

Here is some of the ref I used including the shiny garbage can, perhaps I could have blurred it a bit more.



Daz, yeah I think the sign may be a bit off as the size of the model does not match the texture so the texture is actually squashed and then stretched back out by the uv's.

Striff, no sorry I don't do any textures from scratch. There was no bump used though as there was not enough directional light to see it.
If you want to have a look at the texture you can grab it here.

Johny, If you want to wait for the 2meg download I've comped all the textures into one gigantor .jpg file.

JDinges, is this okay?

Hmph, I am getting an "unexpected end of file" error when opening that tile texture, Malcolm. I'm using CS2....maybe it got corrupt or something...

Try again, it seems to be working now that it is in .zip form.

That's the cleanest subway garbage can I've ever seen that's in your reference. So I suppose you were right on!

looks great!