So! First things first, there has been a gaping hole at the front of my build since day one, and now I have finally addressed it! I now have a proper doorway!
This took me a surprisingly long time to model properly, because I wanted to keep the shape concise and to model it all out of one shape: however, that meant I had to do a lot of line cuts and vertex melding in order to prevent n-gons being made. I ended up using a cylinder that I squashed down thin and stretched wide, and then made cuts in the faces to extrude from. Overall I'm very happy with the look of it: it fits the reference very well, and the flat surface of it will make applying textures and materials nice and easy.
After I added the doorway, I made sure everything inside was properly selected: all that's really left of the maya build is refining the overhead bars and the windows, so I decided to get the build as it is into Unreal. To give a more accurate comparison, I took a number of screenshots with the scale men inside: here it is in Maya.
While I was adding some quick lighting in Unreal, adding even one light made a huge difference: the space instantly looks more relatable, and the positioning of everything becomes more important. I can imagine lighting my blockout before, when the room was massive and everything was stretched out to the sides, and it would not have looked good.
This scene is with six point lights added at equal intervals: one in each corner, and one in the centre of the left and right walls. I went for that lighting arrangement because, admittedly, I'm not 100% sure where the lightning is coming from in Magneto's cell, but it appears to be from both beneath the floor and from the ceiling...to experiment with the effect of the lightning, I chose to only light the floor, and I actually really like the result.
The effect of the lighting, from my view, seems to make the walls look less solid, and it almost appears as if there's a space outside: this is a really nice preview of the effect I hope to achieve. The lighting also looks somewhat dreamy and sci-fi, and it lights up both the floor and ceiling: this has a very nice effect that (surprisingly) closely resembles the lighting in the film! However, I'm not sure how this lighting will hold up once I add materials, so I think it would be a good idea to clearly mark out where the light sources will be.
Next step: finally fixing up my models in maya, and then I believe it's onto the materials and UVs! Fingers crossed I can figure out enough about Unreal to use it!
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