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.