Hey Everyone:)
I just wanted to write yet another blog post to show you some updates on my train project. I still have a lot of work left but the project is now really coming together and I can start to see the end result that I had in mind. The last time I updated you all on the project, I was working on props to fill out the scene, since then I have continued to add a whole lot more props and mainly I have added a world aligned snow texture on the props.
The snow has made a massive difference to the level and has made the project feel more complete, I have added the snow on the red channel and on the green channel I have added some frosty puddles like black ice that I will paint around in some areas of the level. You can see more of this in a later image in the blog.
I have chosen a few main compositions from my video and started roughly placing some props around and doing a bit of dressing which you can see in the images below. I plan to do a overall placement pass of the level once I have completed all of the props.
Now that you have seen all of the exterior shot updates above, I will talk a bit about what I still have left to finish on this area. Currently, I am making some snow mounds that I will be able to put in some places to get build up of snow that will then blend in the vertex paint of the snow texture but using mesh distance fields and dither temporal AA. I will then be adding more trash to fill out the scene such as garbage bags, coffee cups, pizza boxes and so on. I am also thinking of adding some foliage but I am on the fence about this one, in some reference images I have found some scenes have snowy ivy and some dried grass, I will try to put them in the level but if they don't look right I will get rid of them.
Once I have finished the pass of generic trash I will be working on the stairs area that you can see above, I plan to have this a bit flooded so that people won't want to venture down there. I then have a list of small tasks that I need to complete such as making dirt decals that should take me a bout a week to get through the list.
At the the end of this month I have a week booked off work to complete some of the more difficult tasks such as finishing my graffiti generator so that I can place graffiti all the over the trains and add a bit more colour that way, creating the telephone hero asset and making sure all my master materials are set up for the train so that people will be able to change the colour and dirt amount of each train.
Once all this is done, I am going to make the final cinematic video that will be the end result of the project, I will also be putting this project on the UE4 marketplace and other stores as I have set up the project all modular so you can get a lot of reuse out the scene. I plan to have the project complete by the middle of November and far it's looking positive if I stick to my Trello time plan.
I have also changed some bits on the interior of the train, the main thing was is the lighting. On my old images, the contrast was way to much and it made the train feel more bright than it should of been, now that I have fixed that the train feels way more moody and fits the overall environment more!
I plan to scatter some of the generic trash inside the train and dirt up the chairs and walls a bit more, once I have done this I will decide if I need to add any more props into the interior to help tell the story of the environment, such as someone living in the train.
Thanks for reading and I hope you like the images!
If you have any feedback or ideas for interior of the train please let me know!