Barlowe Square - Skyline Art Pass
Barlowe Square - Skyline Art Pass
Once we started polishing Barlowe Square it was clear that our 3d Skybox was out of date. Our skybox props needed a serious overhaul. There were a few minor issues we needed to adjust further as well. Here's an excerpt of a document I wrote about the matter.
Building references and guidelines
I went over all the props and have written this document to help the environment artists with overhauling the existing props, such as fixing trims, fixing windows from clipping and other optimizations
remove the bland white windows.
Avoid windows feeling repetitive.
make every building feel unique.
I searched online for a number of reference photos for inspiration and points for guidance.
Skyline Reference
We needed to focus on the overall look of what we were trying to achieve. So taking a look at the above image we can easily notice a few key elements that we must take into acount when we put together all the individual assets and put them together to paint a broughter picture regarding our skyline.
As you can see above, most of the lights are turned off. This obviously depends on the time of day. Our focus is on night time, so when it comes to residence buildings which lights are turned on inside the homes varies a great deal which offers a lot of potential for diversity. Inside office buildings most lights are turned off to save power and the fact that no one is working there.
Also notice how many different tones in colors you see in this image. Most lights are a warm yellow, but others are more sterile blue, while even others may vary from green to orange. These colors create a diverse contrast when put together. This is more true for resedential buildings then for offices, which seems to tend to have a more universal tone. Using more sterile (light blue-ish) colors.
Below you can see a better close-up for reference of a residential building with lit up windows and the
use of multiple color tones.
Another use of lights might be from simple wall lights, placed on the outside of walls. Technically this can be done withing the engine, but why waste aditional resources when this effect could be easily achieved using the same illum effect using a material script.
Now let's take a look at thecurrent prop below
There seems to be a lack of repetition in this building's lit up windows, but it still looks very bland, let's spice it up a bit with multi colored windows.
Now that's starting to looka lot better. Mind you this is a simple mock-up, but the effect is already present. Also notice how not every window is equally lit. This further increases a more realistic looking building.
Now let's use the wall light approach, typically found on older buildings or office building.
That looks pretty interesing as well. We could actually remove the lights from the windows if we'd want and the building would still feel more “alive” then usual. So, let's combine the two and see how that looks like.
Now this sure looks way more interesting then the bland look from the first picture !!!
Let's take a look at one of the office buildings.
As you can see, the usage of lights is more uniform in these buildings. Whole sections are lit up due to a certain department or firm taking up one or more floors. The color tone of the lights are also a lot more uniform, basically, one color throughout the building or department, etc. We should take this into acount when we add lights to our offices in our props.
Now, this works fine as it is but it doesn't look like it's being lit per department or firm, or company. Another issue I see is that there are too many lights turned on. At night, there should be a lot less of them. This also depends on the time of day ofcourse but I would say that this is debatable. For the sake of having a reference here is the same building with two sides of that building.
This concludes my guide to help create a high quality and more unique looking skyline, thank you.
Joure
