Bits and pieces (and a plank)
I finally replaced those cylinders I had at the very front that were supposed to be shrines.
There were still some crucial bits that I didn’t have even in greybox. Mainly because I was pretty confident that I know how I want them and it wont take that much to do them. Was I right? Well it took me 3-4 different iterations of doing the same balcony before I settled down on what I like, so maybe I wasn’t right after all. But I’ll tell you what - it felt refreshing and nice to do it after falling in the hole of “oh is this texture worth anything” yesterday and the day before that.
Props are still placeholders and some lack textures. Then there is the very long roof which is 3 shrunk huge roofs and thus the baked AO that has left marks as if from burnt. The bits that are not textured though I even UV mapped so it should be relatively quick to give them the wooden look.
I’m still working on the texture of the roof that you see on the big one. First version was very grey and dark, then I went into more of a brown warm wood look which helped a lot. The bits on the very top are gonna be metal and have oxidized green parts (bronze) that I hope will contrast nicely with the wood. Still I feel like it lacks a bit of variation and texture and as such I will go over the edges and add metal ornaments/rain plates and so on, that will hopefully break up the wood and make it more interesting.
Here is an ordinary wood planks texture I did in Substance Designer to go on the walls:
At first I though it was very boring and dull and is gonna look bad in Unreal. Turns out that wooden walls are very much ordinary, and maybe its for the best not to have anything crazy going on. I think i will leave it like that for now, see how it works with the metal and with the rest of the textures in the scene, and then maybe come back to it and add detail, make it actually realistic or completely change it.
Gif time
The GIFs remind me of one last thought that I have about my scene development. Most of the angles I show in the GIFs have the thinking of “what would be the best angle to fit everything in the picture and show my progression in the most transparent way”. Thus the far-away aerial shots from some of the previous posts. What I really should do soon though, is pick some specific angles that look good and make the scene justice. Then I will have to stick to those and make sure they above all look the best so I can use them as final images.
The idea behind my whole level and development here is that I want the scene to have a “game ready” look, where if you throw the player in, no matter First or 3rd Person, they can traverse anywhere and everything will look perfect from any angle. Will that work though? I might have to accept the fact that I might not be able to do that for the short deadline we have. Not with the quality that I want anyway. And if that is the case, then I need to have proper angles and bits where I can fall back to and know that they will work.
For now though, I’m sticking to the “game ready” mentality, no matter the size.
As always, comments are much appreciated and have a good night from me.