ESCAPE - Need a lift - Team Sobek

Joshua Stubbles

The mechanic of an aging cargo freighter finds himself tossed from his rack, when the vessel is damaged by robotic drones. Lerching towards the rear of the ship, he barely secures himself in a drop pod before the ship splits apart in the atmosphere. Crash landing on a hostile alien world, he's looking for a ride home...

TEAM UPDATES:
- Joshua Stubbles (environment/prop artist) portfolio
- John Valenti (environment/prop artist) portfolio
- Ben Close (technical artist) portfolio
- Chris Perrella (lighting/post/vfx) portfolio



Concept was cobbled from a few paintings and then painted over. Can't recall the artist's names so if you recognize them, feel free to shout out. The composition of this concept isn't the final layout, nor is the time of day or color/lighting scheme. This was just an idea laid out by Johnny and myself in a G+ hangout today.

We're still waiting on confirmation from a possible third teammate. We'll be using UDK to present the scene.

Joshua Stubbles

Slightly changed concept.

aajohnny

Work in progress of the high poly pod, still a ton to do and tweak.

Joshua Stubbles

WIP on the terrain



FYI, we're still looking for team members if interested.
- Tech Artist (Someone to build great master shaders for us)
- VFX/lighting artist (someone to work on particles/lighting/postprocessing)

We're using UDK, also.

Joshua Stubbles

Update on the terrain. Still some shapes to work out. I'm still adjusting the erosion and falloff of the sand/dirt on the slopes, too. The final scene will have larger sculpted 3d rocks nudged into the terrain cliff faces near the support mounts, to crisp things up.

Rens

awwyeah excited for this!

spetch

terrain is looking sweet dude, cant wait to see more

radiancef0rge

Hmm, this is very intriguing I may be interested in doing lighting, tech art possibly?

Azkur

liking the terrain man

Safemilk(Daniel)

Very cool, has a very alien but somehow familiar feel to it, looking forward to more!

Mangled Poly

Terrain is looking ace Josh.. Keep up the awesome work!

duncan

HAHAHAHAHAHA...................... so awesome!

Joshua Stubbles

So far we've managed to tack on a tech artist and lighting/vfx artist. We may need a character artist, or we might just stay with a generic blurry alpha card, hah. ;p

Joshua Stubbles

Updated terrain shot in 3dsmax.



The actual heightmap will be used in UDK on a landscape mesh. I just used it in Max to work on the textures. There are some color and detail splotch tweaks left to make, but most of it is done. This is for the macro details only.

I exported masks from World Machine already, so those will plug in to the landscape material as masks for rock, dirt, etc. Makes it nice and easy. Just need to create the detail textures now, then on to the sculpted rock meshes.

Joshua Stubbles

Only had an hour or so to work on this after work tonight, crunchy time

Got the macro textures and heightmap imported to UDK and set it up on a landscape actor.


Diffuse still isn't final, but feel free to crit along the way.

radiancef0rge

radiancef0rge

Ill start on some smoky clouds over the weekend, play around with some planes for real distance and some more volumetrics for up closer. Ill make an asset sheet for the rest of the stuff as well.

Joshua Stubbles

Sounds good, radiance.

Here's a small scene update. Still very WIP on the materials and textures, but at least I got the detail maps working. The lighting in these pics I post isn't final, either. It's going to be closer to the greenish hues of the concept.

radiancef0rge

a little burning ember thing for the ground.

aphexx

guys, go on and stage it! the landscape is awesome!
is it possible to halt a particle in udk, or will you just shoot the scene with differing particle shapes?

radiancef0rge

I think its nice to not have a static scene isnt that what games are about?! :P
But that being said, I could card the particles and choose something I like yeah. Pausing a udk scene resets the emitters

radiancef0rge

only a blockout really, but it took forever for some reason, ive lost some of my cascade skillz

radiancef0rge

Joshua Stubbles

Sorry for the lack of updates, all. Work is crushing right now, not a lot of free time.

Did some work on the crater impact site tonight.

The rock bits are different zTools and I'm assembling it all in 2.5D canvas. Then I'll render out a heightmap to displace a plane and get a contiguous mesh for the scene.

Joshua Stubbles

Effect is looking cool, radiance. I'd only suggest darker, thicker smoke. Like the smoke given off by burning oil rigs. Rich, deep and black. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Iraq_Oil_Well_Fire.JPG

raul

Nice work! I do think that the composition for your concept is very busy, too much stuff going on. i made a super quick rough paintover, hope you dont mind. Some of the things i think are not working too well is how much things you have going on at once.

Joshua Stubbles

Thanks Raul!
Yeah, the concept was just put together quickly to get ideas, it's by no means a final composition of the scene. I've already been dinking around with positioning and removing some things entirely.

sltrOlsson

DAT crater! Have you experienced any annoyance with placing zTools in 2.5D? They always squash in all kinds of retarded ways when I'm trying place stuff down.

Looking forward for moaaaaar!!!

Joshua Stubbles

sltrOlsson - It hasn't been too bad. You can also snap them by holding either ctrl or shift, can't recall which. It will prevent the odd stretching.

PoopSock

Looking awesome dudes

Joshua Stubbles

Update on the crater. Still need to tweak a few things on the textures, but finished for the most part.

Joshua Stubbles

Almost done. This is roughly about the size it'll be in the scene.

JessCooper

Looks amazing so far and a really cool concept!

Joshua Stubbles

Here's the finished texture at 1024



And a wireframe of the model:




Tor Frick gave me some ideas on how this could have been more efficient. I'll have to keep that stuff in mind, moving forward. I don't have a lot of experience making crazy shaders and such, so I'm still stuck in the last gen, to some extent. Lots to learn

MM

amazing, how did you place all the small pebbles/rocks ?

Joshua Stubbles wrote: »

Tor Frick gave me some ideas on how this could have been more efficient. I'll have to keep that stuff in mind, moving forward. I don't have a lot of experience making crazy shaders and such, so I'm still stuck in the last gen, to some extent. Lots to learn

tiled detail maps with RGBA masking ?

EmAr

That's one cool crater!

Joshua Stubbles

MM wrote: »

amazing, how did you place all the small pebbles/rocks?

They were separate ztools that were dropped into the 2.5d canvas. Nothing fancy with that.

tiled detail maps with RGBA masking?

Close, yeah. He suggested using a lower res macro normal on the mesh using the lightmap UV in chan3, while using tiled textures and a vertex color threshold blend for the alpha.

It would definitely be more optimal. But my experience with setting up shaders and such is pretty limited and I don't have the time to mess with it right now. I'm just going in and making the art any way I can. It's the only way I might be able to finish in time. Doing tons of overtime at work right now and my time is super limited all the way to the end of this comp.

Joshua Stubbles

Placed the crater in the scene:

robguest

It's looking really nice. I wasn't thinking of entering this thing but the more I see everyone else's work, the more I'm thinking of throwing my hat in.

Keep it up!