One of the burdens / blessings of the environment is the high level of detail and fantastic looking assets. When it comes to texturing however it becomes a little difficult. When trying to make something clean and neat in a game engine look real is a challenge. Its hard not too give something too much of a grungy texture but yet you don't want to give it a bland boring texture. The approach I have taken is to keep things clean looking but add a very slight layer of dirt and a few scratches that might be caused from dropping objects or dragging things. The specular then brings out most of the metalic detail.
Something which will make most of the assets is getting reflections to work. Now not everything is reflective but certain assets and floors are which is very clear in the film. In the Unreal Editor last year I managed to make a doorway with slight reflectivity which gave the illusion that it was made with a reflective metal. I am debating whether to use this scheme (box map HDRI) or real-time reflections (never touched).
Camera 1: Lighting is nt set-up yet due to playing around with emissive lighting settings
.Camera 1 (Annotated): I've highlighted a few extras that need to be altered plus the ring light in the middle isn't switch on yet (but does work as stated!).
I know you are probably thinking the lighting looks really bad at the minute but I know which direction I need to go and if I can get emissive working throughout it should look rather impressive.
After getting the collectors edition of the movie a few days ago, I rewatched it all with new scenes. It turns out that there is a large lit area in the ceiling which explains what gives the room most of its light. You only get to see the ceiling for the space of about 5 or 6 seconds in the whole film but I have a feeling its going to really help the lighting and solve the darkness issue.
One issue I was saying before was getting some objects to reflect. A friend of mine helped me create a shader for the central air conditioning unit which sort of worked but didn't. It was only a test but it would be a suitable canididate. I'm tied between using HDRI box map and apply that to the object but unsure of how to control the value of reflectivity at certain points on the object (some objects are not 100% reflective all over). The other option would be to develop this shader a little more which takes the real-time reflection fro the environment and projects it on the object. Only problem with this is objects that are circular are difficult to project on to. Any ideas of hints would be great...
That shader looks like this (thanks to James Langstone):
Using...
As you can see a flat plane projecting on to a curved object is hard especially as its meants to not have seams.
Here is a weird error going on with lightmaps / lightmass. Whenever using emmissive lightint it tends to create this blotchness. These objects have only got a simple AO applied and no texture for now it could be having a texture might fix this... But for now its a highlighted issue.
Tomorrow I am getting everything in the middle textured and finished to see if this solves the lightmass blotching problem. Sunday or the start of next week I am going to bite the bullet and make those computer screens. Once I've made 1 it shouldn't take too long to made the rest. There only needs to be three made as only two are needed in the middle (which can be dulplicated around and one beside the link machines. Once they are created thats it for techical stuff and its 5 weeks of texturing and lighting!
LETS GET THIS DONE!
