Looking through the online museum there was a lot of interesting planes for me to draw, so it was pretty hard to choose one from so many, at last I decided on a plane to draw, it was very difficult to do this drawing as the museum was pretty well lit up and as this was metal there was not a lot of different value on the plane and the value changes on the plane was all very minor.
Because my room is somewhat in the middle front area, there isn't a lot of magma in my room, so I created some simple particles to make the scene more lively, because there won't be a lot of magma I made a dripping effect.
Then I made some complementary particles such as smoke and dust/debris. For the smoke effect I made a variation of it where the smoke comes out a big thinner and less frequent.
For the conveyor belts I didn't just want them to be for show, I wanted to actually make them work, so I quickly made some random meshes in 3Ds Max and applied the metal materials from my trim sheets on there, to act as scrap metals. Then I created a blueprint that will randomize the size of the scrap metals every time it spawned lastly I then made another blueprint to generate the previous blueprint, so it can keep generating random metals along the conveyor belt. Lastly I set the lift time of the metals just long enough to disappear at the very end out of the player's sight.
However, when the BP was first created I had trouble having the generated metals to react to the conveyor belt, it will recognize the conveyor belt is there, so the metal will fall on top, but it failed to recognize the panning BP of the conveyor belt. So the metal was not being transported by the conveyor belt.
With the help of my tutors the root of the problem was that the default root for the blueprint had to be the scrap metals not the default setting.
When setting up the lighting I really wanted to show off the emissive shaders on the character, so I chose a darker overall environment so the emissive can really shine. However, I don't want to have the scene too dark where you can't see the textures of the actual texture.
The fill light I set up I wanted to make sure the texture of the jacket to really show, and I think I have achieved that with the jacket catching some highlight but not over exposed, and also it fills in the shadows created by the key light on the side.
If I had the chance to redo this project I would make the hair a lot better as I feel like the hair is a huge weak point of this character, I feel like a combination of modelling the hair and hair cards will be a huge improvement or making the hair out of thick and bit planes of hair cards.
The textures worked out fine when I put them in Unreal with a slight change as the original jacket was too dark to the point it wasn't showing much information when it came to the roughness and normals, but by increasing the values slightly fixed the issue. I'm very happy with how the gold turned out I feel like it really works well with the overall colour scheme, is also a nice contrast to everything else as everything else is quite rough and the gold is pretty shiny compared to the rest.
The bake worked out just fine, there were no obvious problems with the bake, however I did run into a defect behind one of the ears where it looked like the smoothing group was not working properly or some sort of baking issue.
However, I didn't understand the reasoning as the other ear was not affected what-so-ever, furthermore, the UV unwrap is the exact same as the other ear too, so it was very confusing on why this happened. At the end moving the ear to somewhere else on the sheet firxed the issue.
I highlighted here where the original place of the ear UV was.
After the pipes then I started to place all the other procedural assets in the scene, the main change I made with the room is deleting the original corridor floor, and replacing it with some metal plate floors, even though the floor is still there and the area underneath the floor isn't really going to be used or be any of importance it makes the scene feel much more open and bigger, as there is more space visually, kind of like an illusion.
This is with the proper lighting, I tried to find the perfect balance of this dark and gloomy closed off factory, but I didn't want it to be too dark, as I want to show of all the small details textures of the scene.
Alongside there are quite a bit of gold which is very shiny, so I couldn't make the ceiling light very bright as it will over expose the metal, so the solution of this was to "fake" the lighting, I made the light as bright as I could without over exposing and then applied more lightings acting as fill lights in areas where is very dark to create the illusion that the ceiling lights are hitting the entire room.
After applying all the textures I'm very happy with how the scene turned out and how the textures worked out, even though majority of the scene is made of only 2 texture sheets, it does not look boring or repetitive, furthermore I feel like the colours worked really well together, the colour of brass, gold and green-ish dark metal.
These are the tiling textures I made for the scene.
This is the floor grill that I will be using for the middle part of my metal floor. I made a grill just so the player can see through the floor and see the space underneath the floor, this is the same logic as removing the floor, as the player can see the space through the floor it creates an illusion of more of an open space.
This is the brick wall texture I will be using for the wall, I made the exact same texture but with damage on top, I will be vertex painting the broken wall on top just to break up the tiling a bit.
This is a concrete texture, after looking at the wall, with how tall the room is, the walls looked very "odd" and boring, so I decided to use another texture for the bottom half of the wall just so I can break up the wall texture and add more interest in the scene overall.
Finally, this is the conveyor belt texture.
These are some of the textures I made for some procedural assets of the scene, for these trim sheets I wanted to make sure I can still use them for something other than what they were initially made for, so I didn't want to make them too specific looking. This means I can use these textures on multiple things if not the whole scene, this way is a cheap way of texturing the whole scene with just a few textures.
Even though this texture was made for the pipes however I was able to use this texture on a lot of different meshes and assets, combining this with the trim sheet, I was able to get a lot of use of these 2 textures.
Lastly I added the assets I made for the scene, with the assets it's really starting to look more like a factory, it also really fills up the scene, with how much object there is in the scene I feel like removing the corridor floor has really helped with the making the scene look less cramped.
I wanted to start building the scenes after some main assets have been made, of course, there will probably be more things to be added, but I have a good amount of assets to start building the scene, I started off by placing off the pipes, I wanted to make sure I use all the variations equally as much as possible.
After placing the bigger pipes and the small pipes I wanted to mix them up as it looks somewhat boring, so afterwards I tried combining the bigger pipes with some smaller pipes, the overall scene looks more interesting with them both makes it look more interesting
I changed the designs of the furnace when I started to texture the scene. I feel like having the furnace as the focal or the hero asset of the scene is lacking in interest, it is too plain and blends into the background with all the procedurally generated assets, furthermore I will also make this a unique texture sheet as everything I have been using so far is being done by trim sheet or tilling sheets so having this as a unique texture will also make it stand out more.
The new design I came up with has a lot more interesting silhouette compared to the last one and has a lot more interesting things to look at with the tubes and cables and such. The overall look of the furnace is just much more "aggressive" looking than the previous.
Furthermore, after setting up my scene in unreal I decided to remove the ceiling crane asset as I feel like it made the room look noisy and clustered
And these are the larger unique assets I have created, the big steam furnace, conveyor belt, a smaller measurement tube and the hook.
There maybe more assets I will create but for now these are the core assets in my scene.
During our group discussion we decided that our theme was going to be Steampunk Victorian style factory mixed with magma/lava, the room I was assigned to was room 3, and we decided that this room is a room that transfers metal to the final room, room 6. So the first thing that came to my mind was a conveyor belt, instead of thinking how it will visually transport the metal to another rooms instead I just made it so that originates from the wall and goes into the wall, this will save me a lot of time on thinking about the logistic ness of the transportation.
This is my mood board for this project, there are a lot more images that I use for reference however they are similar in what is shown here.
As our themes is a steampunk factory, I looked up a lot of factory references, after looking around I had the idea of having a lot of pipes and some sort of control panel, to suggest that it is controlling the conveyor belt in the scene. Another asset I wanted to include was this steam powered machine feeling. I will also include some cogs wheels as to further enhance the steam punk feeling.
These are the coloured media with black media, I chose the do the male and female separately so I can focus on each individual drawings ...
