Scifi Scene

I made a scifi corridor from scratch, with a small alien robot floating around. I did this scene for a project in school, and I really love the concepts of the video game Control and SCP, so I referenced on their style in this project.

I did the 3d modeling with Autodesk Maya, and textured them in Substance Painter. At last, I used Unreal for lighting and rendering.

Before I start doing anything in Maya, I went on pinterest and artstation to search for references. The references I collected included 3d models, game concept arts, sketches, real images, design sheets, etc. I also specifically searched for SCP and Control references, which are two IP that I really love and was the motivation for this project.

I modeled the hard surface assets and set up the scene in Autodesk Maya. For the wires, I used curves and sweep mesh and adjusted multiple copies of them to create differences. For minor details on hard surfaces like irregular indents, it's hard to model it directly inside the mesh, so I decided to bake the details into them in Substance Painter. I modelled the small details to a seperate mesh and place them in the place where I want them to be presented on the surface.

I exported a high poly mesh with the minor details and used the baking feature in Substance Painter to project the details inside to the low poly mesh. I made sure the max frontal distance is large enough to include the entire high poly mesh.

I assigned vertex colors to different parts of the mesh to make sure they can have different materials when texturing. I baked the ID map in Substance using vertex colors, which becomes very handy when masking for textures, where I just "add mask with color selection".

After I finished texturing each asset, I exported the texture maps with a custom version of Unreal Packed template, where the number of texture maps are optimized by combining occlusion, roughness and metallic into one map but assigning them with different channels.

I imported the mesh into Unreal with fbx, and created materials and imported the texture maps inside. I then connected them to each attributes of the unreal material. I used nodes like linear interpolate to adjust the overall values of certain attributes like roughness when I'm not satisfied with how it's looking in Unreal. During the set up of props, I also used some assets that I acquired from unreal marketplace.

I lit the scene using mostly rectangle light and spotlight. I also added fogs to make the whole scene more atmospheric. Post Process Volumes helped a lot in grading the whole scene and adding special effects like bloom and chromatic abberation. It was also used to create a volumetric fog for the entire scene.

I created a level sequence and used movie render queue to render the whole scene. I also added a camera rig trail to make my alien drone that I made in the past to move along a path throughout the sequence, adding a little movement to the scene. Finally, I adjusted some render settings like anti-aliasing and render warm up frames, and clicked render.

And here's the final result of this project! The experience of making this project encourages me to explore more in unreal, high poly baking, and trimsheets. Some details that I can refine is adding more particles in Unreal to make the scene a little more dynamic and try to add some nebula effect outside the window. Overall, I really love how this project turned out! Huge thanks to my friends who helped me through this process and the Autodesk Ambassador Program!