Happy Forest Shrine - Stylised Environment

Just having a little fun doing a mini-project.

Making a low-spec environment.  So I drew out a concept to get the theme and feel right.  I am aiming for a vibrant and simple palette, with the viewers eye drawn to the centre-piece as a focal point.

Decided to tweak my concept a little

After that I decided to use a texture map, but a lot smaller than normal - 256px X 512px.

This is used as I go to transfer colour and different gradients to assets and elements.  This way I can be "lazy" with the UVs.  It should look okay-ish, as I am going to use quite a lot of polys.

I have decided to try hand-painting the textures and spending time on each asset rather than my original plan of a quick&easy outcome.

Another way to approach this would have been to vertex paint the information, I may bake the vertex colours into texture maps as a base to work off.

For now I am kind of making it up as I go and blocking in the bigger parts first.  I'm going to try and improve it as I go and add in modelling and colour information where appropriate.  With the extra space on the texture sheet I can still add a little more.

This is going to go on the back-burner for a while while I concentrate on more important projects

Sci-Fi Quarters: UE4 3D Interior

I completed my sci-fi quarters interior in June, below are a few in-engine renders.  Challenge link here

Overall I am quite happy with it - Sci-fi is a bit of a weakness for me, so is a new experience.  There is room for improvement, but thought it's a good idea to wrap it up in the time allocated.

I learned quite a lot, and even reverted some work with the shaders to better suit my needs.

Everything has been properly UV'd and optimised for games,  which actually takes more time then just creating cool stuff to show off in UE4.

Process

The overall process was typical.  White boxing, and low poly assets created, which are then each developed in stages.

Here's the white-box, basic materials, then detailed & textured assets

 It took a lot of time experimenting, and re-working ambitious ideas, and simplifying assets.

The sculpting was the simplest part of the process.  Here I sculpted the organic/fabric assets.  I made sure that I was efficient with the UV space - creating single cushions which I could rotate around to add variety and break the repetition

Here are some of the major props.  Ideally speaking I could have been more generous with the triangle count to add more detail.  For example the plant on the left is not optimised and has 3,000 triangles, which matches the sofa

The architecture was all optimised and unified by making a flexible material in substance designer 5 & Painter.

In the end I stuck with a basic, but flexible material which required 3 texture maps to make adjustments easily in engine.
I also created a complicated texture which could use one texture map (a mulit-material-mask), then adding other detail layers.  This involved about 20 lerp nodes, loads of static switch parameters, but was ultimately convoluted for the scope of this project.  It is of course saved still, and may come in handy for future development.

Conclusion

Quite successful - Many doing the challenge did not completed it.  I learned a shed load, and have bolstered my experience and asset library.  Importantly I have some very useful graphs in Substance Designer, and materials in UE4.

Looking back I could have taken it up a notch by retaining higher poly assets, more/larger textures and decals.  But it is suited to lower spec systems, although I would look into removing the diffuse texture maps and making them more procedual, possible removing normal maps too.

One area I am very happy is my unwrapping - My UV'ing is pretty good.  Also the topology is very clean.  On top of this the process is very structured, and I can amend everything from scratch pretty easily.

Game Environment Sci-Fi Quarters 1 WhiteBoxing

I have been doing this months Polycount Challenge again!

It is for an interior environment, a science fiction style bedroom, or "Quarters".

This is the concept art by Sam Brown

This is an early white-box or Block-out

I am in the process of building up the detail of the different elements and adding Basic material

For this project I immediately started throwing architecture from 3DS Max into Unreal Engine to test the scale and feel of the objects in-game, using a first-person template to run around the environment.

Here are the base-assets in 3DS Max

By creating these proxies you can easily update them into Unreal to adjust them.  I will slowly add more detail to these, then create high-poly versions where needed to finalise the details for baking & texturing.

Sci-Fi Gun

I made a sci-fi gun, recently as part of the monthly Polycount Noob Challenge

I spent a few days on this, using the opportunity to get better acquainted with the Substance Designer/Painter workflow.  Allegorithmic has some brilliant and cheap (in sales) software for texturing.  I have been using the Substance painter program since in the beta stages, and it has come a long way since then.  I have begun to favour this over Quixel Suit.  I'm not a fan of DDo and love the flexibility of Designer, creating custom masks using world-space-normals, custom FX, and then taking the result into painter to tweak and make it look less "one button press for generic material A".

GIFs are simple to create; Marmoset>gifmaker.me>imgur.com
I have a softspot for these over Marmoset viewer/sketchfab

Original concepts by Matthew Harris

I went for a retro sci-fi feel, with orange to compliment the blue glow

The base model is pretty well optimised, using very few triangles.
This time round I did not optimise the normals/smoothing groups, which reduces an invisible vert count, which can be seen using a maxscript called Uber vert count

Creating a presentation Template in Photoshop simplifies the process

Nothing too special about the UVs - Selected which parts to share space or be unique.  (My gun is not totally symmetrical)

This is Substance Designer 5.  The graph shown actually has multiple graphs embedded (from the list on the left)
A very stream-lined way to combine multiple substances

Overall I'm quite happy with the result.  I learned quite a bit and got it done in a lot less time than allocated.  It's kind of in-between realistic/stylised, which I like, but could be looking sweeter with practice.  Saying that, this is my first ever 3D gun!

June 2015 bits

This week I have done a bit of work on my first Unreal Engine 4 landscape (Did a load in UDK, but is slightly different and have to start the process/shaders from scratch again).

A very basic terrain imported from World Machine - Its a start!

For this I am having a good go with substance designer, which has a new plugin to import substances with parameters.  The main problem with this is that substance is limited to a single tile for textures - You can't say have a larger/smaller map which calculates and displays different resolution pixels.

This substance was fully created within designer, starting with the grass blade creation, through creating a custom FX node to scatter the blades realistically

Getting the plugin to work in UE4 - first test samples.  Imports with what ever parameters you expose or create.
The herring-bone bricks require a bit of work in substance to maintain their ratio so they dont look awful. 

For example if I add in some micro-surface normals the resolution will stay the same as the rest of the material, instead of adding more fidelity while close up.  On the other end you can't make distance blending for landscapes or anything which includes pixel depth as these are calculated in engine.

This means further experimenting is needed to get the most out of Substance Designer and UE4 to get highly functional materials and opitmised right.  While the plugin files are tiny, they need to be "baked" into maps to be properly optimised to avoid the engine performing thousands of calculations to create them every time.  The plugin is fantastic for previewing and experimenting in game though.

I haven't done any digital pictures recently but done a couple of quick sculpts.

A bishop chess piece idea

I have been playing around with making my own stylised chess set - here is an idea for the queen

The king piece needs re-doing to fit the sci-fi/art neveau asthetic

It has been a busy month - spent a week house-sitting, painted the house and tried my hand at a polycount challenge in my spare time.  Link to page here

I haven't started on texturing yet, but nailed the basic forms and topology

I think I need to re-bake this to get more pleasing normal/surface flow

I have also been looking into presenting my work better and even a logo/signature thingy.  It's a good idea to but your name on work for a few reasons;

1)  Get your name out there (branding)

2)  Confidence - Putting my name on something helps me put more stock/value on my work

3)  Copyright/protecting work, it makes it a little harder to get ripped-off and is a way to evidence when you created the work.

Anyways, I'm gonna try to focus on one item - Even if I'm not happy with the work when comparing to specialised professionals I should finish work, post it online and maybe even get feedback.

Unreal Tournament (UT) Cosmetic Hat: Valkyrie Helm

I've been developing my design for a new helmet for use in UT (unreal Tournament).

I have started a sketchbook on the UT forums here, it's a good place to show the progress and get feedback for creating items for use in UT.

For this post I'll display my work process overview for this cosmetic item, from design to full in-game implementation.

To start I draw some pics in a note book to start getting ideas, while searching the internet for inspiration on places like Pinterest and Google images - Throwing the images I like into a folder for later use.

Next is the design process, I start with doodles and develop ideas I like

Photoshop is a really efficient way to draw and post images digitally.

Early in the process I start modelling in 3DS Max and Zbrush - seeing the item on a character gives you a better idea of what proportions and designs work better.

It's kind of a waste of time returning to the drawing board or getting refined images as I'm working alone, and don't need to translate my thoughts for others.  Also I want a cool 3D model and not a cool concept piece.

I get the base mesh looking cool and make sure it is optimised well for in-game.  Trimming triangles off and looking at the "Readability" for the game type, which is an FPS

I improved the original sketch to fit the character and UT universe better.  Is more masculine than a pure "Valkyrie" design, but are no female characters in UT yet, so will do a true Valkyrie one next.

The unwrapping is very important, and I ensured there is plenty of space for the prime primary parts

For this project I am experimenting more with Substance Designer 5 before I start hand painting everything.  This is now the standard in many games, and should look nice.

The baking process is very important, and for flexibility I have strayed away from doing all the detailing via sculpting in Zbrush.  Through Substance you can be more flexible and don't waste time "noodling" with little details that you won't really see in game any way.

For this you still need a decent high-poly model to bake all the information needed to texture.

For my basic high poly model I used sub-division modelling in 3DS Max with modifier stacks.  Although I will be using one material in engine I used multiple ones here to create a material map.

With Substance painter you can actually be quite creative, and make your own procedual masks and materials in a non-destructive manner using nodes.  Even using Photoshop afterwards with Quixel suite to tweak the output maps

I will be spending more time to hand paint details on and add grime and the like.

I am aiming to hit the fundamentals and getting an optimised asset which is easy to read at a distance and at high speeds.  I have been playing a lot of UT, and these are very important

Here I have simplified the paint/dialectric material, made the emmisive/glowing parts linked to the team's colour for an easier read, and tweaked the forms to make the helmet more appealing and interesting from different angles

With the created helmet I have a lot of leeway to alter the appearance.  This can be done in my 3D application (3DS Max) by re-arranging parts/elements into different configurations.  I can also tweak the shaders in my game engine (UE4) to create different looks through the textures.

For my next cosmetic item I will concentrate on creating inner-details and small forms to push the "next-gen" look further.  Personally I think this is probably not essential for a fast paced first-person arena shooter, but it what everyone likes and should fit the game's style better.  Just by adding small panels, bolts, tubes and the like.  You will only truly get to see this on the character selection screen as in game it will zip past you or be seen from a distance before someone is blown-up.

There are currently only two character models available in Unreal Tournament - Here is a sample of it on the "Malcolm" character doing a taunt.  The only opportunity you may get to see the cosmetics is also at the end of the match where the camera focuses on the winning player - Who is obliged to perform a taunt!

Customizing Photoshop

Photoshop is a great tool, and can be made even more effective by making your own shortcuts, actions, and even custom panels.  You can also download scripts to do more complicated actions, and also batch process many files with your own custom actions.

Game Art Focused

Personally I use a tablet and paint digitally, and often create texture sheets for game assets.

Ctrl, Alt, and Shift Keys (Modifiers).

Combinations of holding these three keys gives the user many more options.  You should always have your hand over these.

Here are some examples of using Ctrl, Alt and Shift with just the brush tool (for painting)
Alt + Right mouse drag = Alter brush size
Alt + Left mouse click = Eye dropper (colour sample)
Alt + Shift, + Left click = create info point (provides colour and positional information for that point)
Alt + Shift + Right Click = Colour Wheel.

There are even more uses and changes for each tool or button you use or hover over.  For example Alt+Left Clicking between layers creates a clipping mask.  Shift+Left Click on a mask hides it (while keeping it).  There are many, many more uses to discover.

Using the Alt, Ctrl, and Shift are used in most software today - Providing the user with many tools for a quick and intuitive work flow.  Basically, if you don't use these "modifier" keys you are doing it wrong!

Shortcut Keys

Find out what shortcut keys you use and need to increase your speed and reduce the number of times you have to glance at the keyboard.  For instance the Escape key always exits your current process or text box (no need to look for its location on screen).  B is for brush.  Holding Shift and clicking B (or any other shortcut that is for a tool, like the marquee or lasso) you cycle through the tools.

You should change any shortcuts keys so tasks you use often are very easy to do.  For example in Photoshop I have made A and S decrease and increase brush size - This means I can keep one hand on the stylus and accurately change brush size.

A handy shortcut to make is to "Flip Canvas" - This is for mirror checks and getting a correct image.  I use Ctrl + F.

Actions

Actions are very easy to make, and are a recorded sequence of actions.

One handy one to make is "Offset" - this can offset your texture so you can easily paint over the edges and fix seams on tiling textures.

Scripts

Scripts can perform more complicated actions, but take a little coding knowledge to create.

There is a great one that is very simple - It saves out a texture and names it for you with one click.  With this you can save out a diffuse, normal or whatever map without having to do anything.

Plugins

The most useful plugin I have is Coolorus 2.  It adds a whole bunch of colour features to PhotoShop, and makes colour theory a lot quicker and simpler to apply to your painting.

Coolorus 2, cheap, and fantastic - Go try it for free!

Configurator

Configurator is a program used for creating your own custom panels.  Many concept artist put their favourite brushes on it, or their most used tools.  For me I made one with buttons for tasks I used a lot, but normally takes a while to find the option.  For example I have a + and - button for expanding or contracting my current selection.

Create your own panel with Configurator 4 and streamline your work process.
Turn your "actions" into buttons!

A great feature on Configurator is making buttons to run any actions or scripts you have.  So now I have a panel with many buttons to export all my texture maps.  I also make a lot of new documents, so created buttons for a 1080p image, an A4 print size, and a square texture sheet at 1024px.