Sketchbook: Dylan Amos

dylan_amos

Hello and welcome to my sketchbook!

My name is Dylan Amos and I'm currently a senior studying Computer Animation and Game Development at Chico State University. My main interest lies with environment art, however, I also dabble in many other game development areas such as programming, level design, and FX.

Critiques are welcome!

dylan_amos

To start things off, here's a UE4 game optimized environment I'm working on with Luke Neubaum, a classmate/friend of mine. Currently, he's mainly in charge of the hard surfaced assets, foliage, trees, and world machine maps. I'm in charge of the master layout material, landscape textures, making sure everything works, and eventually modular town assets. 





PBR Procedural Dirt




PBR Procedural Snow: Jacob Norris's Forest Snow Ground tutorial was a large help in starting this.

dylan_amos

I've updated the dirt texture some more. The previous versions AO was overkill and I decided to fix that. I've also adjusted the soil color and normal values. Additionally, I add subtle traces of weeds, though they might be too subtle!

dylan_amos

[3/17/17]
A simple grass material I'm currently creating inside of Substance Designer. 

dylan_amos

 [3/19/17]
I aimed to even out the lighter areas and the darker areas for tiling reasons. I also exposed multiple parameters to change things like color, density, amount, and masking. I consider this simple grass material done.

dylan_amos

Been busy with multiple projects o_o Anyhow, here's an update on the game optimized environment. I did forget to mention that I'm building the environment to build up and melt snow dynamically. 
____________________________________

Changelog:

Substance Designer
-Updated dirt, grass, and rock textures
-Created master UE4 export node
--Creates three maps [Base Color | Normal | AO/Roughness/Metallic/Height (ARMH)]

UE4
-Added two types of foliage that my friend created
--Testing out subsurface
--Testing out dynamic placement where the grass texture is
--Optimized LOD's
-[Alpha]Added snow buildup/melting mask
-Created a dirt/grass/snow blend inside of master material for the valley
--Added masking variation for the blend
-[Alpha]Added dynamic snow buildup mask for assets
-Optimized terrain LOD's
___________________________________

Additional Notes:

I've been hard at work optimizing the crap out of the terrain, materials, and foliage. The screenshots below are stable at 60 fps, but that's on a GTX 1080 running a 1440p ultrawide monitor. On a Gtx 970m it's around 30-40 fps. So, not bad overall. Additionally, I'll be creating a blueprint that'll control the snow, foliage amount, and texture quality. 

dylan_amos

Changelog:
-Implemented dynamic snow [Landscape, Assets, Foliage]
-Adjusted snow mask
Note: For assets, it's masked so snow only builds up on top of them.
-Added trees (Created by Luke Neubaum)
-Added various rocks (Created by Luke Neubaum)
-Added log pile (Created by Luke Neubaum)
-Adjusted optimization of various assets and materials
-[Alpha]Created blizzard particle
-Implemented dynamic scene color changing [Will possibly add seasons]
-Fixed issues with landscape material where the blends looked harsh/blocky
-[Alpha] Created master blueprint to keep track of time, snow buildup/melting, when to activate and deactivate particles.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yNDFLqDfvc&feature=youtu.be

dylan_amos

The animation I'm working on with my team needed a portal, therefore I made one! It was my very first time creating something like this and ended up being pretty enjoyable to create. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ajGAbmU4mc&feature=youtu.be

dylan_amos

Refined the grass texture and added clovers.

dylan_amos

A new demo of the buildup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoaBWaWS9RY