Thank you everyone for the kind words and feedback, much appreciated. I shall take on board all comments! I’m still chipping away at this, not had a great deal of time on it since my last post though.
@Breese + Digitalfiend - I’m modelling everything in 3ds max, and trying to use as many tiling materials as possible at this stage. If it proves too expensive, I’m going to bake this down later. Just doing my materials in photoshop, but haven’t done too many yet really! Baking everything down in xnormal 
@Bazmod - Yeah Unreal really does make things look great. I don’t want to make everything super shiny though, I do want to keep that to a minimum. PBR looks amazing, but does not mean we should all be making everything out of chrome 
I do want to grime this scene up with decals later on.
@anonymous_user_fcb7afa8 - Personal items and all that dressing stuff will definitely come later, I’m still detailing all these modular pieces at the moment. I want to get all of these wall pieces done, then move on to some of the more unique stuff like the doors/frames, and the ceiling/floors.
@Bino - Good luck on your space station game! Would love to know more about it
I have thought a little more about the story behind this scene, and will be working to incorporate elements of this into the environment. Here goes!
Orbiting Planetary Engineering Facility
Summary: An orbiting space station above a planet in the beginning stages of being terraformed. The space station is a base for the research scientists and engineers involved in the terraforming. They primarily live on this station, but also go on excursions down to the planet for weeks at a time in order to seed the planet with algae and other microbes, with the end goal of making the planet hospitable in generations to come. The station generates it’s own gravity via its spinning superconductors below the station, and has the technology to create food (as well as having large stores from Earth), and also generates and recycles it’s own breathable air.
A large group of scientists and engineers left Earth 40 years previously, aboard a giant interstellar space station, in order to travel to the nearest star system to ours and start up a human colony in a different star system.
However, Earth received a distress signal 5 years into the terraforming process. A single garbled message was received, and no other contact has been made since. Fortunately, since the departure of the original crew, technology has been developed that has reduced the large amount of time required to travel across space, but the time required is still fairly substantial.
You are one of the crew members sent to investigate the cause of the distress signal. After waking up from 10 years in stasis, you are approaching the station, eager to find out what caused the distress signal.
Purpose:
- Primarily to learn Unreal 4 rendering techniques.
- Learn basic Unreal blueprints (opening doors, turning on light switches etc)
- Show a scene from beginning to end, showing all stages of production.
- Release online for other people to learn from.
- Investigate environmental storytelling.
Inspiration:
Alien, Bioshock, Ringworld, Halo.
And here’s another shot of a kitchen area in the bunk room. Not quite sure what I think of the white cupboard doors/drawers. Might change that to the same wood, but don’t know if it’ll blend in too much! Might try putting in some metal frames.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7557268/Unreal/SS2/Screens/screen_13_08_2014_a.jpg
After this, I’d really like to make the airlock you first enter, if this were a proper game. I love the idea of you coming out of stasis, donning your spacesuit, docking to the space station, and finding out what happened onboard.