Hey Everyone,
After the interior, I worked on some more exterior bits. Starting with windows and trims.
I first experimented with creating a grimy-looking glass surface. This is a glass Shader with a mask that gives it opacity and roughness variation. As it's mostly in roughness at certain angles, you can see all the way through the glass, and it only tends to be viewable when it catches the light.
Once I was happy with the glass, I created the window modules. These were modular pieces that snapped together to form the windows' shapes.
I also created modular trims intended to go on the top, underneath and bottom of the walls to add overall detail to the gas station.
At this stage, I looked at the gas station and wasn't happy with how the Octopus and gas pumps worked together. So, I decided to try a few ideas and experiment with how it all sat together.
This was the idea I ended up settling on. Keeping the weight of the Octopus on top and the supporting structure relatively thin to allow for breathing space and balance in the environment. I liked seeing through to the rest of the environment and not blocking the view to the distant mountains too much.
It was based on a Gas station I found online in Slovakia, the Atelier SAD gas station. I just really loved the shapes in this.
Next, I felt I needed to spend time on the terrain and forecourt sections as they weren't very functional. I started with a new blockout for the forecourt, just working out the positioning of the pumps and the logic of how cars would drive in and out. Figuring out the materials and the different spaces.
I wanted the landscape and the forecourt to mix a bit with soil and foliage creeping into the asphalt. Making it feel unused and rundown, so I also worked on blending the material and placing some foliage in these areas
I replaced my blockout road texture with a proper texture and added a grunge map and road lines. The road lines are temporary placeholders that I created in Designer.
After this, I created a few more assets that allowed the forecourt to function. The first was a curbstone trim I could run around the gas station. The actual asphalt floor sits flush with the road, but there is a step between the terrain and the asphalt that I needed to fill. I also wanted to have a modelled drain properly cut in as I started to switch the project fully to Unreal 5.
Gas stations also have many covers and drains. There are specific-shaped covers that allow people to access the gas pipes and workings underneath. I made the models below to give me a range of different covers I could place across the forecourt.
As they have depth, I also needed to devise a solution to cut them into the ground. I wanted this to be real-time, though, so I could move the drains around if need be. So, I decided to use mesh distance fields and opacity to create a shape that feeds into the material. This creates a hole in the material, and I can move my drains around quickly. It's essentially a cheap boolean solution.
I also needed to make a few assets that helped bring all the far-distant terrain stuff together. Barriers and assets that could separate different areas.
Here are some of those working in the environment.
Next up was the terrain and distant mountains. I used Gaea to create rocky mountain ranges that I could convert to static meshes to swap out my placeholder mountains. These were Mesa-style ranges with rocks and foliage baked into them to simulate the foreground detail.
I also updated the terrain in the foreground to create some surrounded low rocky outcrops to bed together the near and far detail. Here is how this looked at this stage. I placed the foliage using the procedural foliage volumes, and the material blending came from the masks that Gaea generated.
Next up was the Octopus. I started by creating a new blockout. I wanted the octopus to feel like one of those giant signs you see. On highways or sometimes shop fronts. Sinclair Gas also has a dinosaur that provides some nice inspiration. As it was large, I wanted to make sure it had construction seams and looked like it was pieced together in parts.
I created this by splitting it into a head and tentacles. I blocked out the shape in Zbrush for the head using Zspheres. I made a straight tentacle for the tentacles, placed splines where I wanted to position them, and deformed that mesh along the spline.
I created a proper Zbrush pass for the final model, which I baked down. Still, the head is unique, and the tentacle section is straight. I applied a macro normal map to the model. As this is such a large asset, I used a layered shader to texture it.
Now, he is textured and finished. Again, he is a bit grimy, which I will tweak later.
This is how it was all looking at this stage. With all the updates.
For the next update, I will show a big prop push I did when I was out of work for a few months.
Thanks
Ben