I reckon this Bi-weekly updates might be a good push moving forward! It gives me more time to develop the scene between posts and means that I can take these reflective moments for larger chunks of the scene. So I more or less did exactly what I mentioned I would be doing in the last post over the last couple weeks.
The major additions are:
- Revamped overhead wiring
- Added Stairway and railing assets
- Smaller tweaks to lighting
Adding Edge Decals for the Stairs
One of the techniques I wanted to play with some more with this project was mesh decals both for greebles on things like the door frames and the edge of the concrete parts of the scene. I did a small decal trim sheet for the door ways as I showed in my previous post and I've taken this further with the stairway. I made a set of 5 sculpted edge wear decals for the concrete/plaster to break the shape up a bit more, but I had a couple issues along the way.
I started running through the process creating a box and bringing it into ZBrush to sculpt appropriate edge wear for concrete/plaster and then reduced the poly count of these to get them baked down in Painter. This all went pretty well and the normals came out nicely, however the issue came when I got into UE4. The initial basic opactiy map was too big and causing issues where the entire trim washed out the steps beneath it looking odd (second pic in below). I had to return to the opacity and play with the normal channels to get some better information to build my opacity map from. I tweaked it with levels and painted over a few areas but ended up with something that was tighter (pic on the right).
The new opacity is considerably better and isn't nearly as destructive! I played with normal blending between the normal of the material below, which is using a world space texture. This came with a varying level of success where it worked at some angles but not for others. I decided to cut my losses and focus down on the opacity.
I'm planning on implementing the same edge decals with a bit of vertex painting to the areas the walls meet the ceiling & floor. I also noticed a few areas on the stairs that would benefit from the edge decals as well where it interacts with the floors.
Leonardo Lezzi's tutorial on Normal Edge Decals has been a big help in this whole process! (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/l3wwa)
Breaking down the Wiring
The original blockout wiring is using a spline actor in UE4 and for the most part it did the job, but I wanted to add points that fastened the wires to the ceiling and figured it would be easier to use splines in 3DS Max with these areas to get better areas of interaction. Personally as well I've found the splines in 3DS max seem to react in a more predictable controllable manner than the Spline Component in UE4.
I started by building in the splines in a basic blockout of the scene in Max considering where I wanted wire to interact more and trying to give the wiring a bit more of a noisy slapdash appearance than the more refined setup of the blockout.
Once I'd got the wiring added I looked to add in hooks and cable ties to ground the wiring and give it more weight. I created the cable ties and baked them down to a plane and then created the hooks with a basic low poly and face-weighted normals to get a sharper looking low poly with no need for a normal map. The textures of the wires were kept basic and created in Designer in a fashion that they could then be squashed into a single unified sheet and still look the correct size.
I tweaked the thickness of the wiring a few times, and after some feedback I feel I may have made them too thin. I'm going to be briefly returning to the wires over the next couple weeks to react to this feedback and push them further. :D
Minor Lighting Tweaks
I haven't really updated the lighting since the first couple of blog posts. I really wanted to aim where possible to use a majority of static lights and include dynamic lighting only where completely necessary. With this in mind another piece of feedback was on the lighting and that it was just looking a bit flat. I looked over the scene and made a few tweaks to some of the world settings, including adding things like AO. This coupled with making sure that some of the more unnecessary dynamic lights where either converted or removed helped to bring the scene up a bit more.
There's still a way to go with the lighting, but I want to add a couple more of the scene defining features before I tackle this properly. Things like the posters and the emissive pads will play a big part in the composition & lighting respectively of the scene. I'm going to prioritise getting these in and then have a go at tweaking the lighting further. I want to really see if I can get the scene light primarily by the emissives so this will be an interesting hill to overcome, but Polygon Academy's tutorial should be a massive help with this! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVPuvCAEz4Q)
Feedback to iterate on
I had a couple comments on the scene and what may need improving after posting it on the Experience Points Discord. Another set of eyes is always a godsend on a scene and hearing some of the issues from another person helps with scene blindness for sure! With that some of the things I'm either getting through tweaking or will be looking at tweaking over the next couple weeks are as follows:
- Break up the top border of the painted plaster more as it's too uniform at the moment
- I'll need to jump back into Designer and tweak the material to get this sorted, but it shouldn't be much work to fix!
- Wiring doesn't carry much weight and looks too neat
- The plan is to come back to the wiring, add in a few more wires and make some of the existing wires a bit chunkier. The additional wires will need to push more chaos into the wiring layout.
- The ceiling is pretty bare at the moment and the 'boxy' layout is easy to read.
- Wiring should help with this as bit, and the edge decals as well. I've got some plans to utilise some decal stuff from the Quixel library and textures.com as I wanted to play implementing premade information in my scenes a bit more. This should really help breaking it up a bit more, but may end up being a much later stage.
What's Next?
Lots to keep working on! Looking at adding a rough blockout of the poster designs and then spending some time on the Door pads as I have a much more different idea for these to what they currently look like. From there it's more open on what's next, but I'll fill ya in with how it went in a couple weeks time! :D
Here's the continuation of the development GIF:
