Interior Night Scene

Hello,

I would like to know your feedback about the scene I'm making in Unity 5. I've been trying to make a nice looking scene for the past 7 or 8 months but I'm still not happy with the results. Here's the scene:
http://imgur.com/a/EyHQu

I know it may look ok but it's nothing as good as Visage and/or Allison Road (http://www.3dmgame.com/uploads/allimg/160201/244-160201120410.jpg). I'm not going for a PT game-style but those games are pretty good in terms of graphics. I've also been reading about Unity 2017 (https://blogs.unity3d.com/pt/2017/07/11/introducing-unity-2017/) and I'm pretty excited for the release of the new version but I'm also not sure if me being excited is worth it just because Unity is great for outdoor environments but when it comes to interior/indoor environments specially at night... Let's just say you can't compare it to something like Unreal Engine, and plus I'm not sure if they'll do something about interior graphics. I love Unity as much as you do, but there's almost no good tutorials about archviz. And the ones that exist are for day only.

I understand that to make a good looking scene (wether it's in unreal or unity) you need to know basically everything about the engine + modelling program + lighting + texturing... etc etc etc

Anyway, if you could give me your opinion and feedback on the scene I'm making it would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

 

Basically what I'm asking here is your feedback and Unity to make tutorials about archviz or at least including it in the documentation.

 

I fundamentally disagree with this assertion. If anything Unity's progressive light baker is superior to Unreal's Lightmass, but I digress - don't want this to become a Unity vs Unreal discussion.

It helps knowing all that, but all you really need is some quality assets, understanding of lighting, the post process stack and visual aesthetics.

There is no denying the lack of tutorial material for Unity when it comes to lighting and composition though.

As for your scene, what bloom shader are you using and how are you setting up for post process stack in general? Are you baking lightmaps or are you using realtime lights, prebaked GI and AO post process?

 

Here are some of my thoughts on how to get the reference look:

The most important contributor to the quality of the reference image is by far the quality of assets. Lots of subtle details and none of them go overboard and ruin the look. In your picture the walls have distinct normal maps that give a look more akin to magnified skin pores, rather than wall textures. If you can't get your hads on a better wall normal map try to tile more of them per wall, and reduce their strength.

The reference image you posted makes use of moderate chromatic aberration(you can see at the corners of the image the colour channels on the corners of objects mismatch). This effect is available in Unity as Image Effects.

Aside from the lamp light sources there are very soft hidden light sources in this scene. Try adding weak light sources, but turn off shadows for them.

Walls smoothness is not uniform in the reference image. They likely use smoothness maps. Your walls seem to be the same smoothness uniformly. This is why your walls lack those darker scraped parts. Unity offers this functional through the alpha channel of the specular map AFAIK.

You may also want to experiment with changing the colour of the lightsources. The reference image has a more homely look thanks to the slightly yellow-ish light.

Also there is a subtle grain effect present. Image effects has that aswell.

 

The biggest differences are:

Your scene doesn't have a lot of geometry so there's not that much "stuff" for light to shine on and catch details, and

Most importantly the lighting. Dark interior does not mean simply turning the intensity of your light down, which simply makes your image hard to see. If you look at the other image, you'll notice that the bright spots on the walls are actually quite high in value. The brightest light is clearly the hallway light, but you can see a blue file coming from front right (looks like moonlight), and another warm light from front left, which reads like another hall or room light.

For understanding lighting like this you don't really need unity to make a tutorial imo; what you probably want to do is find a nice book on lighting for film or photography - the principles are not game specific. Of course game engines/graphics cards have some limitations on what you can do, but that's not what's holding you back here.

 

Hey guys, thanks for helping me.

I've tried searching for Enlighten Unity tutorials but I can't find any (at night)... Also I've tried to bake the lighting in a day scene and I've been actually successful to produce something I like, but the moment I try to bake in night time the walls just become all white and it's a total mess so I haven't baked anything in the scene. I'm using the Post processing stack (bloom) and the standard Unity Bloom Image effects.

That's what I've been doing. xD

Oh... Where can I find/buy those?

 

I embarrassingly don't have any recommendations for lighting books - I learned all my lighting/cinematography on the job from a super talented director of photography.

I think your best bet is to look on cinematography / film forums and look around for what they consider to be the best film lighting / director of photography / cinematography books. Game lighting differs from film lighting in some ways, but the basics (value, contrast, shape, form, saturation, depth cueing, the kinds of stuff you're struggling with) are all transferable imo.

Maybe something like https://www.amazon.com/Reflections-Twenty-One-Cinematographers-At-Work/dp/0935578161 or https://www.amazon.com/Motion-Picture-Video-Lighting-3/dp/0240807634 or https://www.amazon.com/Negative-Ansel-Adams-Photography-Book/dp/0821221868/ or https://www.amazon.com/Lighting-Digital-Video-Television-Second/dp/1578202515/ or https://www.amazon.com/Lighting-Cinematography-Practical-Moving-CineTech/dp/1628926929/ ?

There may be game-specific lighting books too, I dunno.

 

@kritoa Alright, thank you so much!
I've been also looking at Allison Road photos and the developer first made the scene in day time and then moved to night time. I'll probably do the same. Also I'm struggling with my 3D Workflow. For example, I'm using modular geometry and what I normally do is create the wall in sketchup, create groups and then export to blender. Next in blender, I usually just try to join the groups (Ctrl+J), unwrap the textures (and give them a name (usually: Wall1Texture1; Baseboard1Texture1... etc)) and export it to Substance Painter. And from Substance Painter I export the textures and the object (.fbx) onto Unity.

I'm not sure if it's the right way to create buildings or houses... If you guys know any better way to do this without using Modular Geometry (or using it) it'll be greatly appreciated because there's some drawbacks of modular geometry, in this case. And it's actually frustrating once you create 30+ walls (sketchup>blender>substancepainter>unity for each wall) and then thinking "Oh these walls are horrible. Let's start from the beggining"

Since I'm a begginer I don't know everything about 3D Modelling, Lighting, Texturing... etc but I'm willing to spend hours upon hours learning everything I need to know.

Thank you!

 

@BakeMyCake @KarolisO

 

Hello! To create a good looking interior scene a lot of tips here http://fixthephoto.com/blog/photo-tips/shooting-at-night.html