Factory Docking Platform

[Section_Ei8ht]

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.

[zaphod]

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.

[Drevlin]

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.

[Buddy]

It would look better rendered in X-Ray.

[Algor]

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.