Sketchbook: Justin DeVore
polycounter lvl 4
Hi all -
I figured I'd start a sketchbook as my first foray into actually posting some of my art to Polycount. Up until now I've been mostly lurking and occasionally asking questions.
I work as an Environment Artist at Schell Games, in Pittsburgh, and any remaining free time is usually eaten up by my two young kids. I'm hoping the public scrutiny will encourage me to create more art in any remaining hours that don't end up in either of those two destinations.
I'm open to critiques on anything, particularly on going projects. One-off sketches I'm less likely to revisit.
Thanks - I'm excited to actually contribute to the community!
I figured I'd start a sketchbook as my first foray into actually posting some of my art to Polycount. Up until now I've been mostly lurking and occasionally asking questions.
I work as an Environment Artist at Schell Games, in Pittsburgh, and any remaining free time is usually eaten up by my two young kids. I'm hoping the public scrutiny will encourage me to create more art in any remaining hours that don't end up in either of those two destinations.
I'm open to critiques on anything, particularly on going projects. One-off sketches I'm less likely to revisit.
Thanks - I'm excited to actually contribute to the community!
Replies
I've been working on an idea for an environment that I can use to learn UDK. I do a lot of Unity work at Schell Games, so it would be nice to learn some other popular (and more powerful engines). The basic concept is a stretch of highway where alien invaders first happened to land on Earth, but not where they ultimately settled. A number of years have passed since the landing and their landing pods (which destroyed the road and cars) have been abandoned and are starting to be absorbed by nature. Architectural hints of their successful colony can be seen off in the distance.
I'll likely start a proper thread for this once it gets far enough, but for now I'm going to mix progress on it in with other sketches.
These first images are just some sketches where I'm mostly trying to establish the bounds and key points of the level and nail down a language for the alien's technology and architecture.
Some thumbnail ideas:
I'm leaning towards their technology using materials that feel fabricated, but mimic forms found in nature. This landing pod's form takes influence from...an artichoke.
Some architecture that might be seen in the distance.
This would be the edge of the environment and a sort of gated tunnel leading off towards their actual city.
An idea for how their objects might be welded together.
I may do further sketch exploration, but I hope to start doing some color tests on these soon.
Here's a quick sketch I did as a submission to Puzzle Clubhouse, an interesting site that some other folks at Schell Games are working on. Basically, its an experiment in crowd sourcing where a short animated episode is posted monthly with a short game embedded in the middle of it. Right now its in super-early Alpha mode, but it will be moving into a more public Beta at the end of the month and will be launched at PAX. Right now, the latest call is for art of creepy garden gnomes. Here's my submission:
If anyone's interested, here's the proper teaser site:
http://www.puzzleclubhouse.com/
And here's where you can get involved early:
http://www-prod01.puzzleclubhouse.com/
I promise I won't spam my own thread with any more external links! I was just excited about finding the time to actually churn out a quick sketch for this.
I started thinking up some ideas for it ahead of time. Generally I want a small circular level with a big room with a pit in the middle it and then an outer corridor around the room, which also has a moat running along its edge. The place is built from stone and wood by some civilization that worships giant man eating plants. The pit in the center and the moat will be filled with giant vines covered in thorns, with a big mouth in the center of the pit. Its possible as I plan that I may decide to actually have two sets of textures instead of my original single texture: one set for the building materials, one for the organic ones. Here's a quick sketch of the outer moat. I'm hoping to send a little time tonight cleaning it up in PS and adding in some color and value (I know... its quite flat and loose right now).
The thorns/vines might be a great use of the new curve Insert Multi Mesh brushes in Zbrush. Might be a nightmare in low poly tho...
Actually, even the design running horizontally around the front pillars too. Sorry, got those brushes on the brain and I keep looking for ways to use them!
Jam Week kicks off on Monday. I'm trying to cram a bit more planning in before the craziness begins. I made a quick sketch of the central pit. I like the general idea, but I think I'll play around a bit more with scale when I start blocking. I'm thinking something more impressive - a wider chasm rather than this, which currently looks like a well with a plant crawling out of it. If I get some time tomorrow, I might take another stab at this in sketch form, but I also want to reserve some time for playing with color on these two images.
Settled on a layout:
Built out the super rough blocking in Maya (colors still correspond to those in the layout drawing's key):
Brought it into Unity and got the basic scene set up with a quick character controller. The model itself is a 6ft character I'm using for size reference. It was modeled by John DeRiggi for a previous test project at Schell Games).
On to sculpting!
I'm curious to know, did you sculpt it out of just one plane, or did you use separate subtools? It seems like you did it for the rocks, but the roots/green things seem like they were just sculpted on a plane, and it feels more flat than the rocks.
Pretty cool, though, can't wait to see it in engine.
Stoop_Kid - Thanks! Glad you like them. You're basically right on with your guess. I've used other methods in the past for sculpting tiling textures like these (dropping tools down to the canvas or arranging a lot of stones/bricks/etc in a subtool, keeping them separate via polygroups). I hadn't played much with the wrap mode fuctionality before, so this time I started the rocks off as a single double-sized plane, turned wrap mode to 1 on all my brushes, masked out the shapes I wanted for the rocks, and offset them a good distance via the deformations panel. After I sculpted them to my liking, I created a second plane for filling in the cracks and overlaid it so that the rocks poked through it. The plant texture is intended to be wrapped around a cylindrical model as the skin for my thorny vine/tentacle things. It was modeled from a single plane, and I'd agree that it feels flatter. This was partially because I didn't really have a solid plan for what I wanted this to look like until I had been sculpting for awhile. In the interest of time and actually getting something thrown into the level by Friday, I decided to go with it. Not ideal, I'd agree.
Here's a few more sculpts. I lost a bunch of time today trying to better understand scale in zBrush vs. other 3D programs. I didn't want to end up with any surprises when it came time to bake. Hopefully I can finish up the last few sculpts tomorrow morning and start getting these texture on in-game objects.
Revised the texture plan slightly since I clearly won't have time for the bonus props I had sketched. I may do them as unique textures on separate sheets after Jam Week is over:
And now a buttload of trims:
Although it looks cool I think the concept of a stone grate is a little weird. Just a small Nick-picky thing.
And now, some tiling boards:
This looks sweet (my favorite one so far), and so does the plant!
- Trim dynamic to rough up edges and define general forms
- Orb's crack brush to define the major cracks and chips
- Faintly ran a custom wood grain brush over the whole deal for believable noise
- Used the h-polish brush over each little wood segment, leaving just hints of the noise from the wood grain brush
- Now the time consuming part: Used Orb's crack brush again to add in a lot of finer cracks and chips beyond the major forms of the original pass.
- Did any last little bits of cleanup with either h-polish or trim dynamic brushes, depending on the need.
Stoop_Kid - Thanks again! As for your question: Only if they decide to make it publickeep them coming.
Life slowed things down a bit this past week after a weekend full of camping. I'm working on baking these sculpts out - I'll post the results up once I get them all finished and combined into the texture layout.
In the meantime I did a super quick, silly painting for another Puzzle Clubhouse entry - this time the goal was:
My idea was a busted battle mech that had been converted into a planter. The end result is fairly "meh," but at least it kept me Arting.