Rewind Brief: Update 7

Throughout this week I have been using Substance Painter and Unreal Engine to bring the modelled environment to life. So far I have had to rely on my knowledge attained from past projects to create effective lighting within Unreal Engine. I used a range of static lights with lightmaps baked at a resolution of 512 pixels. I have posted some screenshots of the unreal engine scene below:

Creating my colour scheme:

I studied various concept artwork of sci-fi hangars and found this piece created by Seoul based artist Tae Won Jun. I love how he has used a strong contrasting yellow throughout this piece:

Tae Won Jun. (2012). Concept Ships. [Online Image] Available at: www.igorstshirts.com/blog/conceptships/2012/tae_won_jun/tae_won_jun_05.jpg [12/03/2018].

My environment was completely grey until I decided to try and add some yellow to my crane model:

I drew inspiration from real world industrial apparatus. I noted that construction cranes are normally a bright garish colour for safety reasons, and this was something that I felt could make my environment pop. Once I had created the textures for the crane, I started incorporating additional splashes of yellow throughout the environment. I think this certainly adds more visual interest in the scene.

Faking volumetric lighting effects:

Because I am using the university's version of Unreal Engine 4, volumetric lighting is not supported in version 1.4.15. This led me to experiment with creating my own volumetric lighting effects. I ended up creating geometry that I would texture map to simulate light rays:

You can see the result of this in Unreal Engine below. It may not be overtly noticeable but I feel this subtle effect adds a lot:

 

Overall I am rather pleased with the environment so far. I'm going to be spending time up until the presentation at rewind, refining the textures and playing with post-processing settings in Unreal Engine.