Nurb

My main feedback is that the lighting is very bland.

It looks awesome m8 I really like how you have managed to make the electronic lights stand out in a semi-natural way even though the scenes are in daylight. Have allready given you crits on this so gonna settle for praise this time

I think it looks like a random bunch of platforms and stuff thrown out in the desert. The environment doesn't merge into a unity and there doesn't seem to be a clear vision with the level design either tbh. Sorry if this all sounds harsh, but you should really attempt to atleast group meshes into larger structures or something so there is a contrast in scale (right now there are only smaller structures which seem just "dotted out"). Basically do a couple of strong visual objects that stand out. This would make both the environment and the gameplay seem more interesting at glance. And you should do something about the cliffs imo. Atm they have a very plain and bland texture. I know it is hard to texture large props without having them look tiled, but since they are far away you dont really need a high texture res on them and also you can alphablend between a couple of materials to break the surface up a bit (same thing goes for the ground!). Keep it up. Oh btw, why does the ground terrain stop at the edge of the level (outside the fence). Keep the desert going until it dissapears in the fog or behind a cactus or something :< Your scene will be more believable for it..

Yeah I agree. I think it could help if I break up the transition between the walkway and the wall in the back because it looks very crisp/digital atm.

More work on lighting and textures:

Thanks for all the comments Peri: It's funny because I recently complained about the UE3 dof in someone elses work. Guess I don't practice how I preach? But I do like the effect it has in this scene, cause it produces a cozy misty feeling which I wanted as a contrast to the theme of the level. I can perhaps tweak the values down a bit, but generally I think the UE dof works with quite dense fog (because it simulates how fog looks in reality). I definitely want to go another pass on the arches texture, because it was the first texture I did in the project and the texture style has changed since then.

That's a good idea Pericolos0, I hope I will have time to put some more detail stuff in there. Here are some new screens: Tweaked the light, sky, atmosphere and some old textures to generally get more color variation into the scene. Also added some of the missing textures (not quite done there yet) and some vegetation.

+1 one the more deep blue. But also get the brown/red material colors in there as a contrast. It's starting to look truly awesome

Just a small update, a wip untextured elevator. Atm I'm trying to piece in the models that are absolutely needed before the level can be called "complete". After that I will get back to making things look better

Thanks for the warm comments all I'll update with more screenshots soon. The level will be finished over the next month. PhilipK: I'm going to add a round red glowing window texture to the glowing surface which might help enhance the effect.

Figured it was time to start my own thread for this project. Many surfaces have still yet to be textured (they only have baked lightinfo on them) in case you wonder about the strangely plain diffuse textures in some places Atm I am trying to catch up on the texturing as modelling has pulled pretty far ahead.

It's very quick to make a specular alot better than what crazybump can produce. When I want a quick specular I just make a layergroup over the diffuse in photoshop and in it I put one desaturation and then one masked levels-layer for each different material in the diffuse. Then just adjust the levels depending on the material that is masked. Usually I also put some desaturated photomaterial on top on overlay to get some added detail. 3-5 mins tops and always a workable result.

Wow, that's an awesome scene

Thanks for the comments all KungFuSquirrel: Thanks, I am very happy about that PhilipK: just a "btw"; sent you a pm

+1 Thanks for the comments. I think I have a couple of ideas on how to make the tank stand out more.

A couple of new screens from my UT3 project. First I wanted to make the big tank and the pipes stainless and more shiny, but imo it manages to be a main focus point in the environment even with more blended materials, but I'm open to opinions.

The dof is over the top, but I think a very small amount of dof can be good to make a dense atmosphere come to life. Even irl, a dense fog will give distant silhouettes fuzzy edges and a static distance dof can simulate that effect aslong as it isn't overdone.

rofl, getting it now image Seems like a slow download. Progress bar isn't moving

I don't much like Unreal's playerheight of 96 units. A room height of 128uus is much too low for UT's jumpy gameplay and 256uus is often too high for 1-story rooms, and I usually prefer pure ^2 roomheights to make texture alignment easier :/

Well I can try. The diffuse started out stylized, making the grouts (aligned to grid) and doing some basic edge definition. Then I used about 4 concrete photos in overlay to create the base texture for the tiles (different concrete to different tiles to create some variation) and I also put a base texture into the grouts using the same method. After that I took a rough concrete and masked it in to make the edges of the blocks worn. Then I made some more edge definition using just a small brush and I kept going like this for a while, half painting and half adding photomaterial. I also use the healing brush to paint in som unique details from photo references. As for the normal map I just made a basic normal bake from the diffuse in crazybump, then I painted the grainyness away manually with a soft brush using the neutral 128,128,255 color. I also did a second crazybump iteration where I made a heightmap using the grouts layer to make those more defined. The resulting normalmap I overlayed over the other one (remember that it's usually good to uncheck that blue channel when you overlay normalmaps). The specular is just desaturation/playing with levels/adding a grungetexure on overlay. Hope that helped some atleast

Thanks dudes

Made some small tweaks, mostly tried to get rid of the grain in the normal map.

Looks good Quakis. Though it might need some more detail perhaps. The TF2 style is "paintery" more than "cell shaded" from what I've seen. -- Just a somewhat quick one I made with photoshop and crazybump: I'm not really happy with it yet. Think I wan't to lighten up the grouts a bit or something, and it feels somewhat grainy in places, dunno. C&C welcome.

Educational and nice. Made me understand the basics a bit better.

Thanks, yes you are right. However, I'm trying to become a professional environment artist so I always make my own assets for my levels. This time I choose a theme that is in a large part already present among the retail assets, but to me that doesn't matter, I still want to make my own. The alternative to this would sort of be to just make the textures and models and do renders in Maya without putting them into a game engine. I like to be able to show that the assets can be used together in a game environment and that they are visually coherent. Hope that makes sence >_<