During the last few months of classes I found this strange place in San Zhi, Taiwan .. sort of a retro-futuristic ghost town. I decided to make it a little more interesting by changing up the environment to match the dilapidated appearance of the buildings .. this was my take on it in UDK.

shot 1

shot 2

shot 3

I tried using the insert image function but mebbe I'm too new for it to be fully functional just yet.

Please let me know what you think, I'm still growing as an artist and will take any critiques with me onto my next projects. Thanks for looking!

So I posted this 8 days ago and it just appeared today, don't hate me for replying to my own thread? :p

ha cool! nice subject matter and the execution is pretty decent too. I think some better material definition might make this look a bit better. I know in the ref, none of those pods look that shiny but I think having a slight shine to them would make this pop a bit more. The broken glass for example would look more believable if you dropped an environment map on it so it looked like it was reflecting the surrounding area. the same environment map could be used for the pods as well, but with a lessened effect.

lastly I feel this would be more impressive if you used these modular looking assets to completed a whole scene, kind of like this
all of that debris really tells a story (is that blue stuff an old water slide?). currently you have a lone building standing in a field. It just seeme like you could have pushed it further imo.

I'm glad you like it, and your critiques are very welcome.

Originally Posted by konstruct

... I think having a slight shine to them would make this pop a bit more. The broken glass for example would look more believable if you dropped an environment map on it so it looked like it was reflecting the surrounding area. the same environment map could be used for the pods as well, but with a lessened effect.

lastly I feel this would be more impressive if you used these modular looking assets to completed a whole scene, kind of like this
all of that debris really tells a story (is that blue stuff an old water slide?). currently you have a lone building standing in a field. It just seeme like you could have pushed it further imo.

TBH I've always had a hard time adding more specular to my materials, once it looks realistic I always stop .. so I'm still learning to keep adding it beyond the real without making it look ridiculous. :p But yes I did completely forget to set the reflection for the environment, lol, thanks for the reminder.
The single building in an empty field was a last ditch effort to get it done on time, the original concept idea was to build the whole lot of them and just vert paint them all slightly differently. I ended up spending way too much time UV'ing over and over again before I finally got the texture quality I wanted. Perhaps in the future when I'm not completely sick of staring at this I can revisit it and push it further .. and add the office building at the end of the lot as well.
I know those are all just excuses, but I wanted to let you know a little of the process that happened in the making of the lonely little building.

Here's some of the buildup process from maya to udk:

maya

maya w/early textures

udk w/early textures & non-functional windows

udk w/light function clouds & linear grass

Oh and yes, that blue thing is a water slide! Apparently the property was supposed to be some kind of fancy vacation homes .. like time share or whatever .. and down the center of the property you can still see where they were setting up some pools for some type of water park. I read somewhere that's the only reason why it's still abandoned is that everyone thinks it's haunted and refuses to work on it.