I wanted to experiment with the camera settings via the post process settings, and with the lighting, and to see how hard it was to get all my geometry and textures in there. The new photometric lights feature is fantastic, I was able to put in my IES profiles without any problems.
I was going for a stylized output (like running your renders through RedGiant Looks on After Effects), so I applied some colour grading with a LUT, to lower the contrast and add a blue fill to the shadows.
I’m still trying to learn more about GI (dynamic or baked). And having a hard time with the materials. Converting them from mental ray architectural mats, or vray mats was a pain, I’m still not happy with the results, need to read up more on UE4 shader system.
It looks far better than anything I was able to do on UDK. I’m sure you’ll get better results once you get the hang on creating material on UE4
Those models are high poly or low poly with normal maps applied? The curtains, for example, look really good. It’s easy to find assets in high poly, but I can’t tell the same for low poly. And converting then to low pro is too time consuming.
Anyway, for a first approach I’d say you are doing really well. In fact, I can’t wait to get some time to start messing with UE4 now that I see what you did. Let us know any progress on this.
I haven’t started converting the high poly stuff to normal maps yet, I just wanted to get something up and running to see if it worked.
I did apply ProOptimizer in Max just to lower the poly count on the couch and curtains a bit but ya it’s still fairly high, so I’ll start optimizing the scene now, and learning the materials better.
Nice work. If I may make a suggestion, try turning the chromatic aberration either way down, or off. It kind of looks like pictures taken through a bad camera, since it’s a camera effect people try to get rid of.
I think your work is coming along nicely. I’d make a suggestion of researching the glass material for the coffee table. I remember a great tutorial back in the UDK3 days where the reflections were spot on. Adjust that a bit. Marmoset is also a program worth looking into. Master Xeon as you may know from Blender Concept Robot tutorials talks a bit about it and I was impressed by the reflective quality it can have on meshes.
@koluskomtu thanks. I have used Marmoset a bit, however their material system doesnt seem to match UE4’s phyisical based material system there was another thread here where he couldnt get metal to match what he had in Marmoset . That’s where I’m tripping up, the new PBR system, I’d be nice to get a tutorial on how to create some of the materials in the example video (like step through ideal settins in the PBR materials for glass, chrome, wax, concrete, etc) . If not then I’ll just keep studying/stealing from those samples till I get the hang of it ; )
Actually Marmoset is not too different from Unreal. However Marmoset offers higher quality in some things which obviously makes a difference (for example their renderer is forward which makes it easy to get reflections for translucent materials since all is done forward. In Unreal…everything is deferred but not translucency, which makes it difficult to get nice reflections and spec response over from the deferred pass, the screen space reflections in marmoset also have way higher quality and when you render a screenshot they get even higher)
The most important thing is not necessarily a fancy shader…it all comes down to good observation of the subtle details that make something look like it does and then get them into your textures and push them in the mat
