Factory Docking Platform

Guys, hit the right click and save target as for the videos.

Nice stuff... Although, it looks a bit dark in the screenshots, maybe it would have been a good idea brighten it up with PS a bit?

But I guess It's ok, since you posted those lit versions.

I'm downloading the video atm!

Btw, no one uses 56k anymore, so don't bother mention it!

Ugh, I'm an idiot for asking this but how did you get the UE3?

Quote from JLea

Ugh, I'm an idiot for asking this but how did you get the UE3?

Roboblitz?

i cant help it, but somehow i am NOT impressed. this looks like a scene you throw together within a week. comparing it to what people usually post in finished work gallery this is pretty much nothing.

of course it doesnt look bad, but it doesnt look really good too. next time you should post into a wip thread and get feedback before you claim it final.

for the future:

- finish environments/levels

- dont make them too dark

- post your progress in WIP forums

- spend more time on the level itself than on the thumbnails you post in the forums!

greetings.

It's okay, but to me there isn't anything particularly eye catching about it. Just looks very plain and simple.

I agree with hessi. The actual level itself is fairly nondescript -- due to the lack of light I didn't even know it had a train in it until I looked at the unlit screenshots! In many screenshots the train carriage just looks like a slanted wall. Some of the pillar areas look quite nice, but it kinda looks a bit too clean, and some of the objects on the floor appear to be floating (no shadows doesn't help, but the floor is still really clean regardless). Maybe throw some decals around to add a bit of variety? I can't really get a good feel for what the area is meant to be, what it's used for, what kind of industry it plays host to etc.

I'm not trying to be overly harsh btw! I just can't really deduce what's going on just by looking at the screens.

Some mappers from this site can make more realistic scene in Source engine but still you make a lot of good work. It's very dark, ground is perfectly clean, ther is no special details... Wordk, work, work...

Well, I saw the video now...

I can tell you invested alot of time on small details, small rocks, etc. I like this, beauty lies in small details, imho. But the main picture is no less important... you failed in recreating a realistic environment.

But the biggest flaw of this scene, is specially the lighting, you could have achieve a much better result with this scene's lighting, played with fog, and so on and so forth... the scene just looks, too dark!

What's that covering the moon? And why did you covered the moon in the first place?

nevertheless, It's a good achievement, keep up!

Quote from MNeMiC

So the question is: Do you guys see the stars in the background on the normally rendered pictures?

I didn't the first time, but now that you mentioned it, yeah there's stars on the skybox, but one can barely see them at first glance! :roll: I can hardly see them at all...

This scene lacks awesome shadows

- needs an eye catcher

- needs an horizon. currently the scene seems to float in space

- needs better brushwork. it looks not very realistic to me and its hard to tell what its supposed to be or what happend there (use ref pics for inspiration)

- what is the stuff in front of the moon? seems very random

- the floor looks extremely plain and boring. make a better texture for it and use some decals to add variation

Pretty much what everyone else said. It's good, but its not great. Nothing about it screams UE3. It seems more UE2/Source-y.

Keep it up, though. It's got definite potential.

it looks like you spent more time taking screenshots and making videos than creating a good looking environment. Here are some tips:

Textures:

Spend a lot more time on your textures. The colors are ugly and jarring, and do not mesh well together. The extreme grit and dirt overlays are a lazy shortcut to adding real detail and structure to your textures. Also overall your textures are too dark and saturated. Your entire texture set should be of a similar brightness/contrast level, allowing the lighting in the scene to affect them in a uniform fashion.

Modeling:

Spend more time looking at photo references, and building things based on real functional examples. Lots of stuff in your scene looks very thrown together and not very well thought out. I can recognize the train, and the platform - but they do not seem realistic because many of the details do not look functional and thought out.

Lighting:

check out the lighting challenge forums on cgtalk to see just how many ways you can attack scene lighting:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/forumdisplay.php?f=185

there needs to be a lot more depth in your lighting than just a blue ambient and some white spotlights. Toning down your textures will also allow you to better light your scene because you wont be trying to use lighting to compensate for the dark textures. The spot lights in your scene appear as just a round bright spot on a background of blue, which is not visually interesting. mattepainting.org is also a good place to find lighting inspiration:

here are some nighttime lit scenes for reference. Notice the colors used in each. In each shot the lighting is highlighting certain shapes and faces of geometry that is creating a visually interesting shape against the dark background.

http://mattepainting.org/plugins/p17_im ... es/644.jpg

http://mattepainting.org/plugins/p17_im ... es/661.jpg

http://mattepainting.org/plugins/p17_im ... es/634.jpg

http://mattepainting.org/plugins/p17_im ... es/606.jpg

http://mattepainting.org/plugins/p17_im ... es/581.jpg

http://mattepainting.org/plugins/p17_im ... es/597.jpg

http://mattepainting.org/plugins/p17_im ... es/598.jpg

You obviously have the drive to become a better artist, and like presenting your work to others for critique, which is the most important quality an artist can have to hone their skills. Overall I would recommend you collect a lot of reference before starting to build the scene, and spend a lot more time thinking out the functional details.

To answer your question about not getting any shadows when rebuilding (i dunno if thats been answered already but i dont have time to read trough everything right now and i figure its better to have two answers than none:))

First off, make sure each mesh has a secondary uvchannel with no overlays, then make sure you set all meshes to use that secondary uvchannel for lightmaps in its properties and that you set the lightmap res in its properties. I was unable to make this work when using the Static mesh browser so i had to do it individually for all meshes in the scene.

For a tutorial on this, hop on over to hourences site:

http://www.hourences.com/book/tutorialsue3lightmap.htm

Hope this helps.

I would like to see more eyecatching stuff in this scene. Theres no drama going on.

It would look better rendered in X-Ray.

If you've gone through all the effort of making so many screenshots and videos to show off this work, making real camera movements through matinee would have really made this more presentable.

And 400something MB for a short movie seems really nuts. Are they compressed? Movie trailers (~2 minutes) running 720P are about 90-140MB.