Tips and advice in creating a futuristic school environment

[culverjds]

So, Ive entered a competition. The topic was that I have to create a school. I thought about this and I want make a very… Mirrors edge/ futuristic athstetic type of school. so I have a very Basic rough draft of this and it has very basic to no texturing. but this is what I got so far and I want your guys’s opinions and critique.

Anything good or bad would be appreciated

^help desk

^stairs

^study Areas

[mister3d]

Why no greetings? Hello.

[culverjds]

Hello

[culverjds]

Do you have advice for me?

[mister3d]

It looks like 60’s style. Take several svreenshots of movies and study how lighting is done.

[cookepuss]

What you have is a good start. Here are my few-ish observations.

• When doing something architectural, always start with a floorplan. Rooms don’t exist in isolation. If such things exist in your world, detail out the various features of the layout including entry/exit points, windows, potential duct work, floor gratings, crawl spaces, furniture or electronics, and so on. For your world to look alive, it also has to feel as if it could exist.
• Specify key or support features. Just as humans have defining characteristics and anatomy, a scene has elements that are prominent. If the room is especially large, consider what support structures it may have and how they’re spaced. If it has doors, consider what the arch looks like, how tall/thick they are, how they’re framed, and what the doors look like.
• Scale is everything. Keep your scale consistent and know your units.
• There’s no such thing as a sharp edge. Remember that. Even boxes have rounded edges, however slight. To your advantage, beveling those edges means that light and shadow will both be caught better and elements will show up more clearly.
• Railing along the stairs can come in various forms, each with its own sub-elements. A regular run of the mill banister, for example, is rarely just a solid blocky form. You’ll have things like newels, balusters, cappings, and so on. Know exactly what type of railing you’ll be using before you start and make sure that it’s consistent with the world.
• Gather your resources. Even if you already know you’re going for a Mirror’s Edge vibe, find as many photo references as you can to support your vision.
• Decide on the focus of your image early on. Find the most visually captivating angle and framing. Work within that. Elements outside of the camera view might contribute shadows and reflections, but don’t spend too much time on stuff that will never get seen.
• In picking your camera placement, decide what story you want to tell. A zoomed out image might place the emphasis on the architecture overall whereas focusing more on the people might give us insight into what they’re thinking or doing.
• Make your people do something. Even a still image contains the illusion of motion. Hand gestures. Body shifts. Interactions. Expressions. Futuristic scenes run the risk of feeling cold and lifeless thanks to the artsy architectural design and modern materials. Infusing a scene with elements of humanity and even organic forms like plants can warm up a scene and make it feel less sterile. I’ll point you to the architecture in Deus Ex: Human Revolution as an example of what I mean.
• Pick a color palette and remember what it says, especially its temperature.
• Use shadow to establish mood. A super well lit scene is nice to show off your hard work, but it takes away from the atmosphere. How you fix this is up to you. A broken light? A hanging or standing object that blocks some light? Not a whole lot of environments irl are so supersaturated with light. Maybe if you’re in a hospital or something, but even then… Too much light and not enough shadow can make the environment feel sterile.
• Not everything that is “to scale” is “camera right”. For example, that curved wall defining the barrier the help desk might be thick enough for the real world, but it comes off as paper thin to the viewer. Sometimes, to get the dramatic effect that you need, you have to exaggerate some proportions. (That’s why some game character, for example, have larger hands or heads. They may not be anatomically correct, but they look much better on camera.) Figure out what can stay in proportion and what tells the story better.
• The protruding stairs are okay. You see that sort of thing in some modern architecture. They’re just a little boring. Consider adding in some risers and partial build-up. The former adds some stylistic believability while the latter adds some architectural believability, allowing the build-up to feel like connective tissue from one stair to next.
• Even if you suck at drawing or painting, block out a quick concept in Photoshop, Krita, or whatever 2D paint tool you might have access to. Bring those inspirations together. NEVER wing it. Archvis projects are all about the planning.
• Flat is boring. A certain amount is fine (and necessary), but you want to vary those long stretches of flat areas. Consider tile work. Consider wall recesses. Consider decoration, signage, or installations. Consider sunken/inset floor areas.
• Clean textures are a hallmark of futuristic scenes. Just be careful about making them too clean. At the same time, beware of the current trend of grunge/weathering. Don’t overdo it. Used in moderation, weathering can show that certain elements have age. Overused, it can sometimes look like a lazy way of adding in detail. Not every old element has to look overly rusted, cracked, chipped, or otherwise beaten up. Pick your clean VS dirty elements very carefully.
• Beyond the color elements of your world & materials, know your lights and when to use different ones. Area lights are fine for some things, but point/spot lights might be more appropriate in other situations. Know what color each light adds to the scene. Too many areas and you might end up with a faked GI look. Too many spots and you might make it look torch lit.
• Never underestimate the power of a good gobo. Large, complex scenes can drag your PC to hell with insane render times. Gobos can save your life, allowing you to fake everything from shadows to stained glass effects. They’re an old stage trick that’s totally adaptable to CG.

ANYWAY… Those are my “few-ish” comments. I can probably come up with more, that should get you started.

[culverjds]

Thank you so much for the feedback. I’ll post updated stuff when I implement this stuff

[culverjds]

So I have a question. my lighting is VERY dark and I don’t want to over do it on lights. How to fix? I’ve never done architectural design. Honestly this is probably the biggest thing I’ve ever tried to accomplish. But I was thinking window light but I have no idea

[cookepuss]

There’s a first time for everything, right? Okay. I think that the first, most important, thing to consider are the basics of lighting. Not every thing here might not apply to your scene specifically, but hear me out.

In the classic 3-point lighting setup, there are (you guessed it) 3 lights and each one serves a distinct function. The first is the key light. This is often the brightest light in the scene and the one that provides the primary shadows. Dimmer, but no less important is the rim light. This light (usually) doesn’t cast a crucial shadow, but serves to bring depth to the object by illuminating it from behind. The final sort of light in this setup is the fill light, of which there can be several. A scene can be illuminated using only the first two, but that often leads to a darker scene and loss of detail. Aptly named, the fill lights “fill in” the scene with a bit of extra light so that the whole thing isn’t so dark. As with the rim light, the fill light is dimmer and less influential than the key light.

To put that into context, imagine the following scenario. You’re in a room. The camera is pointing right at your face. To the front-right of you is a floor lamp. Behind you is a window with the soft blue glow of the moon. To your left is an open door with a hallway light on in the distance. See that image in your mind? Okay.

The floor lamp is the strongest, most prominent light source in your room. That’s where all of the big shadows are coming from. That’s your key light. The moon provides a soft backlight to you. Not enough to cast a perceivable shadow, but enough to better define the forms in the room. That’s your rim light. Finally, that distant light in the hallway? Its purpose is not immediately apparent. However, turn it off and your room loses its influence and gets just a little darker. The hallway light is your fill light.

Of course, since single every object has some sort reflectivity, however slight, all of those light rays bounce around within your room to further brighten things up. That’s why a white semi-gloss paint gives the room a totally different feeling than a matte black paint. The white semi-gloss is going to reflect back the light much better than the light absorbing matte black.

SO… That’s the basic form of a 3-point setup. Now for the equally basic description of the lights and what they do.

There are numerous types, but there are really four (5) major light types you’ll encounter in your setup: point, directional, spot, area, and dome.

Think of the point light as the sun. It’s far away from the object, provides shadows, and emits light in all directions. Like I said, the sun. A directional light is also (generally) far away like a sun, but only emits light in one direction. A spot light is exactly what it sounds like. It can be close or far away, provides shadow, and is usually narrower in focus. A good IRL example of a spot light, aside from the obvious, is a flashlight.

Think of the area light almost like the light coming from that florescent overhead in the ceiling, the light coming from your cell phone, or maybe the one coming from your monitor. The light emitted from an area light starts with a certain shape (eg. your phone screen) and usually provides softer, less crisp shadows.

Finally, in our little menagerie here, is the dome light. Imagine a cube sitting on a plan. That is your scene. Now, imagine that scene with hemispherical dome surround it. Basically, cube under glass. That hemisphere provides soft lighting from all directions from its surface. Each ray is dim by itself. However, combined, they light the object from all directions and, when sourcing the ray information from a “sky dome” image, provide a more realistic global illumination effect.

What you need to do is to:

1. Identify what your most prominent sources of light in the scene are. You can have multiple in the scene. Desk lamps. Overhead lights. Anything that provides substantial light and shadow. These are your key lights.
2. Determine WHAT sort of light each is. An inset overhead florescent, as I said, might be an area light. A desk lamp might be directional or spot in nature. Light coming from outside might be a distant point or even a dome. You can figure out where your fill light come in later after you isolate and define those major lights.
3. Determine HOW STRONG each of these lights will be. They may all provide significant light and shadow to specific portions of the scene, but not to equal effect. A desk lamp will surely do a lot for the desk, but not nearly as much as, say, the sun.
4. Light doesn’t all have to be white/yellow. Light coming through a red filter would be red. Light coming through stained glass might be multi-colored. Light establishes mood. Light establishes temperature.

You also have to consider the following:

1. Some lights have what’s called a volumetric effect. Imagine a flashlight. It emits from the bulb in a cone like manner and hits the object, which then casts a shadow. The cone of light itself is invisible until something like dust or fog passes through. The small particles of dust or water then reflect/refract the light and gives shape and volume to it. That effect is referred to as volumetrics. Not all lighting in a scene can be volumetric. More importantly, not all light SHOULD be volumetric. It’s time consuming when you hit that render button. Be sure to know when and where to use it. Volumetrics can add drama to a scene. They can also be used to illustrate light coming from outside and through a window pane.
2. Global illumination (GI) has to be used carefully and with great consideration to every other light. By itself, GI can leave a scene evenly light, but equally washed out. Also, to get a scene sufficiently lit, you might have to crank up the samples.
3. You can fake GI and area, and to faster effect, with a dome/grid shaped array of dim point lights. Just be mindful of light intensity and falloff.

The big problem I see in your image is that, apart from some of the glowy lights in the wall, your lighting doesn’t have direction or purpose. I don’t know what your lighting setup is, but the (more or less) evenly - though dimly - lit appearance tends to be a hallmark of GI. As I said, if you can identify your major light types, intensities, and configurations then you probably won’t need GI. You might/will need some non-shadow casting fills to bring up the ambient illumination, but that’s it.

[cookepuss]

I just ran across this image on FB. It’s from Mythbuster Adam Savage’s page. Here he is on the set of “The Expanse”. Note the various sources of light and materials. It’s not exactly what you’re looking for, but it should give you a few ideas.

[culverjds]

Thank you for that. I take a film class so I knew about 3 point. but I never applied it to 3D art.
also thank you for taking the time to write that all out its helping me a lot.
I fixed my lighting issue though.
I took some screen shots of the lighting setup so you can critique it

[culverjds]

Tiled the floor too. Your right it does help with the large spaces. Need to put something there too space is way too big.

[culverjds]

So heres the update.

[mister3d]

You’ve been suggested to change the color of lights. Why not to try?

[culverjds]

Figured that I finish the modeling before I do that