Update 26th

Update 26^th October

It’s been a while now, so it means that I can update with a larger amount of information.

At the moment I’ve been focusing on trying to complete the environment with as little unique textures as possible so that I can have a more modular texture set. Looking at Tor Frick’s technique of creating modular textures, he uses strips of the texture within a 512 by 1024 (or the other way round) and revolves the scene around them. While I have been trying to replicate the process within the unreal engine, there are some elements which need to be unique, for example the sink in the kitchen aria. However I do believe that for the next environment I shall try to replicate the process more efficiently, as well as combine the grayscale texture for roughness and metelness into one single RGB texture to save on texture memory within the game engine.

I have also been looking at other peoples techniques on Polycount and have realized that it is more efficient to work on one object at a time until completed until detailed. I shall try this technique out and see if it works for me in terms of productivity. If does I shall move towards that workflow, and continue with that.

At the moment the scene has a moving TV, windows, walls, tables, re-furnished kitchen, and shower base. Right now I am going to furnish out the Kitchen aria completely, then move into the shower section to flesh out the place, and so on. After which I shall decide on the next aria to move into.

Here are the screenshot so far of the place.

the Radiator will need to be rescaled but that can be done within the editor.

Update October 8th

Have been around and about lately, ben told that I need an operation on my right eye which could leave me blind, and it’s happening on the 30^th or later, so hopefully I won’t become partly blind.

Anyway apart from that, I decided to do some research to see what other Environmental Artist have been doing on the market place. So I downloaded a scene that Quixel showcased nDo and dDo with. The Sci-Fi Hallway gave me some valuable information as to how I should be going about my scene. And I had realized that I had made some mistakes for the scene.

One of them was that I was using blocks of 3D models instead of planes, which would allow me to use higher resolution Light maps and a consistent amount of texture tailing for the objects. While I have no intention of changing the models right now, for the rest of the scene I have conducted a cull against polygons which cannot be seen by the viewer.

I am also creating the radiator under the window of the apartment. All I need to do is normal map it and texture it and it should be good to go. I’ll be manually texturing this object as I wanted to get the most resolution out of the texture as possible, so I shall be using this technique from now on for any interior environments.

I have also managed to get Maya 2015 LMU.exe to work, after uninstalling internet explorer it managed to get through and get itself up and running, I’m assuming it will work with programs such as 3DS MAX 2015 now too, but for the moment I shall be sticking to just Maya, and possibly will go into Mudbox for future terrain.

Anyway, here are the progress shots so far.

In this I have updated the Material to be animated slightly with another masked texture to give the screen more life, I would like to do more, such as an animated news logo but there does not seem to be an optimal way of achieving such a look with the program. The Scene is also Gray-boxed out so I have a better feel of the final scene.

 

Update

Been a while since I last updated, although I might have been a little obsessive with almost dayly updates, so I think I might dull it down into larger updates less frequently, or it will look rather boring and uninteresting.

Anyway, moving on, at the moment I have been researching into what I need to do to make my scene more efficient in the game world. I found out that I can literally use the geometry brush to create most of my scene, and convert them to objects; this pretty much solves the time problem, as I do what to get this scene done pretty soon. Mainly because I have spent a while on it now and it should start getting more complete by now. Ill also have to look into mesh/vertex painting to make my scenes more vibrant with life, as in, more realistic and less obvious that the scene is modular.

I’m not feeling ready to present the rest of the scene at the moment as nothing is archly placed in there other than the table since I’ve been doing some research into various tools that I should be looking into. I’ve also been looking into tutorials on making the most out of my materials in UE4, which is necessary. So for the moment ill show off the table and the TV screen that I'm working on.