Hey all, got another update for my Detectives room scene. It's been pretty slow going on the project over the past couple of months and the scene hasn't quite progressed at the pace I would have liked, but I think the scene is progressing quite well despite some hurdles figuring out UE5 and Blender.
I've mainly been focusing on building master materials for standard assets, decals, tilables, glass, liquid, etc. It's been a lot of general scene management and set up like setting up movie render queue for screenshots, lighting, postprocessing, all stuff in a good place for me to tweak in the future.
I've blocked out most of the tiling materials for the main room and although they're looking pretty rough and dirty, they're starting to sell the vibe. The ceiling texture is currently just a megascans stucco as I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do for that. Because the game only shows this room from a locked isometric perspective, we never get to see the ceiling and I'm not quite sure what I want to do for it yet. I think my first step might be to play with the lighting to see if I can lower the bounce on the ceiling. Also, you can see in most of the shots that there is strange lighting coming from the ceiling fan, still need to investigate what's causing that to happen.
I decided to switch the lighting from Lumen over to fully ray traced. I found that lumen was causing a few lighting bugs with my current set up (which probably isn't the correct way of doing things) and switching over to raytraced lighting fixed them. I'm not entirely sold on the current lighting set up and time of day, it's all a bit too warm. I managed to disabled world partition and I can manually add levels to the scene, so I'm going to have a few lighting sublevels to try and get a few different time of days going. The game has a few different lighting states and it would be fun to try reproduce them.
I need to figure out a nice frosted glass solution for the exterior facing windows. I would like to do some really rough models for the exterior that just focus on primary forms that sell the exterior to prevent me from having to model an entire exterior. That said I could do some more detailed stuff purely off camera angles if the frosted shader doesn't really hold up, but I'm gunna worry about that at a later date.
I also did a bit of work on chaotic overflowing record player tape. I set up some splines, arrayed a plane across it, then applied cloth simulation to the mesh which helped it fall quite naturally. Because the planes had normalised UV's, I should be able to set up a nice tiling texture to make this all look like record tape too. It doesn't quite look how I imagined, but I've learned enough to start over and getting it looking better.
I think overall the scene is starting to get a bit more cluttered and busy, but is still lacking a lot of visual noise we'd expect to see in this scene, so I'm going to think of ways to get this place looking dirtier and more chaotic to really sell the vibe of the location in game.
That's all for the update for now, but to see how things have changed, I've posted a shot of where the scene was at about 2 months ago. For now I'm taking a little break from the PC and I'm off to Spain on holiday. I'm looking forward to coming back onto the project refreshed and ready to tackle some of the larger assets in the living room.
Thanks for reading!
P.S I have given up on trying to format my blogs properly, it's too confusing. They will be messy from now on.