The interesting thing is that this scene is using Global Illumination (GI) as the lighting model. In the interest of getting it to look more diverse, I’ll add a yellow/orange and a blue planet. That will also give the gold material on the station something else to reflect apart from black space. GI so far has been no problem to work with, and I hope the feature will be enhanced more and more with future builds of Unreal 4. Love this engine :)! I’ll keep you posted on updates (planets and shuttle are next). Hope to see you again
I like the details! I would try movable directional light, and a skylight with the cubemap of stars plugged in the cubemap slot(and dont forget to disable cast shadows in skylight settings) to see how it looks like that.
I see what you mean. You are right, during testing I have seen more interesting light angles and shadowplay on the station. I will rotate. As for the cubemap - perhaps you can help me here. I am going to put in some planets, so the cubemap might come after that, if all other ideas for reflecting the environment don’t deliver.
REFLECTIONS:
I don’t get nearly as much reflection on the Gold as I want to. If you get close up, you see the rest of the station get reflected in the station, but I need that effect to be visible from far away. I tried placing reflection actors to capture the nearby geometry, but either I’m doing the settings wrong or get no effect with Global Illumination active; I believe GI cannot really be the problem here, though.
As this is still WIP, expect improvements and further additions (I think it could use some more solar panels, don’t you?). If however, you have any ideas about reflection and how to get them to look better, please let me have your feedback! God knows this is the first time I am doing this kind of thing, and Unreal made a lot of stuff easy. If only I could say the same about reflections in this scene. Well, Planets are next, let’s see again then! Thx for commenting, it helps!
Here is the station with a bit more lights added to it. The Gold still won’t reflect. I’d appreciate some help on improving the reflection. Ambient Cubemap was one idea. How would I start with that? Thanks!
Also, any ideas how to make a nice “glow” material for the planet that doesn’t get too opaque when you make it more emissive? Kinda like a screen layer in Photoshop. This is fun, but I feel with the gold working (reflections) and some better planets the scene would look awesome! All replies are appreciated!
You can’t rely on the planet for metallic reflections unless you bring the station as close as ISS is to the Earth. If that’s not possible then use a skylight as i suggested.
Jesus, I had no internet for more than a month (thanks to my fantastic provider, Telefonica…). So I couldn’t post any of the updates, yet. And the updates are major! The inside is almost finished now, too. And I’ve made tons of concepts, which I’ll hopefully be showing someday soon, too. I’m working on props to populate the interior, now.
This scene used to be lit by GI, but of course refections couldn’t work properly that way, so I went and baked everything with Lightmass after all. And it worked really well (so far everything in U4 worked really well for me. I’m superhappy!). The Earth has an emissive map, which will show, as soon as an area is in the shadow (I’ll post some of that too, or maybe a video). The clouds are a translucent material (masked was too harsh) and use a simple panner, but it looks very nice in motion.
I promise to keep updating this thread, since Interiors are probably interesting to a couple of people here, too. And the exterior ist not finished yet, either. There is ample room to tweak the visuals, this is just my current setup. It’s a blast working with U4, and I’m having the time of my life with the station. Hope you like it, too!
Hi, nice model, maybe would you be interested into make an space simulator game? I would like to get some help for my little project, you can take a look to what I have done in my signature: (space ship vehicle)
Hello,
really nice work but as a trekkie it made me think too much about ds9 even if the look seems more “nowadays”, (ok 2001 too and even spacestations with gravity maker rotator) maybe you could add some modular parts to have it a bit more chaotic which would make wonder what did they built there ?.. But great job ^^
Hey guys, thanks for the comments. I am making this model for an adventure game and this map is for a cutscene ( an extraction of the personel with an orbiter). The coder of the project is already impatiently waiting for me to be done with the interiors, since the exterior is really just for the cutscene and not for gameplay. I can’t work on any other games, sorry.
And yeah, the 2001 connection was intended, since the game quotes a lot of different movies from the late 70’s, early-mid 80’s (The golden Child, Indiana Jones, 2001, Hercule Poirot…). So every now and then you will feel reminded of one of these classics, hopefully. It’s not taking place in space all the time. This is just the example mission we are making for a prototype + KS.
BTW, I’ll double the resolution of the Earth, so it will look smooth. Unreal can cope with it and it seems important to have a smooth shape. Scale and distance will probably change anyway and most likely the Earth will become a lot bigger in future updates.
