New Project!!

I haven't posted up here for a while, not because i have forgot, i have been busy sorting out my new project and doing bits of research :)

As last semester i was researching into believability and realism within video games and other media. My main project for this semester will be to create a simulation for a nuclear regulations company based on a nuclear plant. The use of this simulation is for training purposes for employees that work withing the nuclear industry. 

I have to create a 3D environment of the nuclear plant so people will be able to walk around the environment and pick out hazards, so this could be wires of the floor, or spilt liquid and so on.

People might be reading this and be going so what as this got to do with what you have been researching into in the last semester :P Well basically when i am creating this 3D environment, I am going to see how believable i can get it but by not using very high resolution textures and high poly models. As the companies computers arnt that powerful, that is my main limitation so this will be a great challenge for me to see if i can limit resolutions and so on but still create a nice believable environment. First of all though i need to do a couple of tests to see how much detail and so on i can get into models in order to still achieve believably and realism within this environment.

I am firstly going to create a simple little environment of some pipes and other simple machines. I will then create the textures for that, giving the models normal maps and so on. Once i have this high res awesome looking scene, I will then start to 1. the poly count of these models and 2. reduce the texture size of the texture maps. 

I will continue to do this until i have a broad selection of the same scene but with different poly counts and texture resolutions. I believe this will give me a great outlook on how far i can lower these two things in order to still achieve a believable and real looking environment. 

My texture maps will be as follows :

• 64 x 64
• 128 x 128
• 256 x 256
• 512 x 512
• 1024 x 1024
• 2048 x 2048

I am hoping to achieve good looking results by textures maps that are either 256 x 256 or 512 x 512 but we shall see :) I will be concentrating more on the texture maps as i can get a lot of detail into models without modelling it directly onto the model. 

First to get a little drawing down of what i want my scene to include :)  

Berry Giant Test

From the last test, people stated that the environment indeed looked real and believable and they thought the place was based in Canada or Australia.
I then showed them a comparison of the real photo and my digital scene photo and they believed that the real photo was the most unbelievable and that my digital scene was real.
I then wanted to push this scene and see how unbelievable i could make it. Here is the comparison:

People now said to me that the giant doesn't look like it could be real in our world but a couple of people said they would not rule it out as there is lots of sculptures and carvings around the world of people etc. With this i though maybe i haven't pushed this scene far enough in to the unbelievable side.

Berry Giant Complete

Here is the final Scene of Berry Giant. I will now ask some people if they now think this environment is believable.

Berry Giant Process #2

I didn't need to model anymore assets as i had my foliage and rocks from my previous scene. I put a little face onto the giant and duplicated some rocks in order to look like a beard, this gave the look that is had been carved into the rock. 

My main concern now was making the water look more real as the water material i had wasn't working. 

Berry Giant Process #1

As i decided to do make berry head arch into a stone giant, I modeled out a basic shape for a head, torso and some arms. It didn't have to be neat or in proportion as rock isn't but i wanted to keep it so it did look like what it was supposed to be. I then imported the mesh into UE4 and put the rock material onto it. This is how it looked:

I did some vertex painting on it to give it a more varied look and i started to add some trees.