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The Rock Shop: Stylized Environment

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Xelan101 polycounter lvl 10
*EDIT*

Adding current progress to top post



Finally getting around to starting a new thread! It's been a long time coming. 

Anyways a while back I grabbed a concept from one of my coworkers  Wes Wheeler (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nE9dO) that looked like a lot of fun. I kept waffling back and forth between wanting to just handpaint everything from scratch, or to sculpt things. In the end I decided it was important to push my Zbrush skills as well as my painting. So my plan is to sculpt all my meshes and then bake down to a simple lowpoly and use those bakes as a basis for my painting to emulate artists like Fanny and Orb etc. Whether or not I use those bakes on the final models or just use it to inform the diffuse will be decided later.

I only have some preliminary work but I wanted to get this thing started so I'm a more accountable, cause this project keeps getting put on hold as it is. 

I colorized the concept and planned out some really general pallete guidelines and a list of potentially necessary textures, which I'm sure will grow.


Got things generally blocked out, though some proportions might shift as things go. It's to scale of a base Unreal first player character. Which in this case means oversized for said character, Wes intended this to be owned by ogres so it's intended to dwarf a human sized character somewhat.


And some of the early sculpting, I'm going to sculpt 3 different stumps and use them interchangeably for the 8 I need for the fence, the rope will use a tileable strip on the same texture. If it's not painfully obvious I'm pulling heavily from Orbs stumps that he sculpted for Heroes of the Storm for my shapes (https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/002/379/978/large/michael-vicente-58.jpg?1461036983)



Definitely plan to update frequently, I tend to get around 2-4 hours a day to work on, before or after work, so it'll be slow going

Replies

  • NateMasterFlash
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    NateMasterFlash polycounter lvl 12
    Great start. Concept is awesome.  Looking forward to seeing the progress.

    Crits so far:  Building seems more narrow in your blockout than concept.  The front door may need to be larger than it appears in the concept to help sell that it was built by ogres, unless that little figure is an ogre.
  • Xelan101
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    Xelan101 polycounter lvl 10
    @NateMasterFlash Took  another look at it and I definitely agree I had the overall building a bit too narrow. I pulled it out a bit towards to open side of the scene and it feels less claustrophobic on that front face now. 

    For the scale, talking to Wes earlier the figure in the doorway is intended to be an Ogre, if you look really close he's actually got a tiny loincloth and a bare chest. So I'm operating under the assumption that a human would stand about 2/3 of that height give or take. 

    Got a decent amount of time over the weekend so I established some early, fairly flat tileables for the bare rock and dirt. The thought being these can be used for areas of rest and then more details stuff will be blended in where needed. I sculpted them with Wrap mode set to 2 so the thought is that the tilable itself will be pulled from the middle of these tiling sculpts.


    And some object work, the stumps are pretty close to being called done, I put together a tiling rope to be tied between them, and then I started on a super simple stone block for the pile of them out back to get back into the groove of sculpting stone. Definitely would appreciate any crits or general pointers on getting the stone feeling good and for getting the level of detail that Fanny and Orb etc seem to get into their stone surfaces because I feel like mine are still lacking


  • Xelan101
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    Xelan101 polycounter lvl 10
    Super quick update, got the stumps modeled, unwrapped and baked just to take a break from sculpting. Needs a lot of painting for sure but I'm liking where they're going. 

    Gonna probably paint a bit and then I'm going to try making a set of sculpted Alphas for my rock surfaces, based on some tutorials from Jacob Gavelli


  • Xelan101
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    Xelan101 polycounter lvl 10
    Some painting progress on the the root stump. Probably gonna bounce around the other stumps get them all to similar quality and then take them collectively to a finish. Rock Alphas probably won't get sculpted until next week.

  • Xelan101
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    Xelan101 polycounter lvl 10
    Handful of new stuff. Got the stumps painted up to similar levels of quality. Gonna take a break on those and get back to sculpting. When I come back to it I'm gonna try some 3DCoat to clean up the seams and get more detailing into the tops of the bark shapes since that's where the UVs split. Once that's cleaned up they'll get detailed up.




    Went back to the stone this weekend and started trying some alphas for quick consistent surface detailing. Some are working better than others, and I probably want to make a few more considering how much stone is in this piece. But it's a start. C and A have been the most successful for subtle details and they're easily smoothed out into unrecognizable shapes after the fact. B works for detail patches, but it'd probably gonna be more useful on one-to-one sculpts than tileables. D isn't very successful thus far, the thick double lip makes it recognizable and hard to use in a variety of places. I played around with adding them to the flat rock tileable and I'm already much happier with the result. 


  • Jakro
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    Jakro greentooth
    Really loving this so far! The sculpts are great, and what a concept to work from! Looking forward to more  ;)
  • Xelan101
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    Xelan101 polycounter lvl 10
    Thanks @Jakro hopefully I can keep it rolling!

    Definitely getting happier with the use of alphas, it gives some good detail to start with, most of it gets knocked way back with some polish, flatten trim, etc. but it should get picked up with some edge highlighting in the bakes and give me lots to work with in the painting. 

    I laid out a trim/detail piece sheet to handle most of the repeating elements and smaller details and jumped into sculpting.
    The left side has the models that'll be used to sculpt, the right side was to help me visualize how the unwrap will lay out in the end, since I wanted to catch upper and lower planes for most of the rocks so they have a contiguous UV over the corner where possible. This should cover most of the repeating elements of the building itself, larger pieces like the crystals etc. will get their own sheets/sculpts.

    Added a quick shot in UE4, getting used to the interface changes, I use UDK at work still, but I wanna keep checking scale and see what needs adjustment. There's a pair of basic UE characters on the steps by the door, the smaller is 1.0 scale for a human, the larger is 1.5 scale and I'm working on the idea that he represents an ogre, so any object scale discrepancies should fall in his favor.



  • Xelan101
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    Xelan101 polycounter lvl 10
    Some more sculpting work. just trying to power through these trims. Want to get the major forms all sculpted out, baked and applied in editor before moving too far into texturing for the rest of these pieces, I've been following @praetus 's Magical girl thread and I like the idea of getting everything set up with bakes before working the scene further as a whole. We'll see how far I get before I break down and start painting for a change of pace.
    These pieces are gonna be used for the center diamond, the upper stone slabs (the middle ones not the pillar pieces, those will be done separately) and the stairs respectively.

    I keep jumping between MatCaps, which I know is good for the actual process of sculpting, but does anyone have a favorite presentation MatCap? cause I feel like I run into issues where the surface detail is either lost completely at most angles, or is blow out of proportion. 




  • Xelan101
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    Xelan101 polycounter lvl 10
    Haven't had as much time to devote to this project the past few days. Going on vacation tomorrow, so I've had to tie up loose ends at work, pack, plan etc. But I did manage to get the rest of the trims sculpted out. I had hoped to get them baked before leaving, but I've only just started unwrapping the target meshes so that'll have to wait till next week. Rendered a quick shot out of Max using the decimated meshes, just to get a pic of everything, since in ZB they got split into a bunch of separate tools and sub tools. 

    Looking back at them all together, I might add some more detail to some of them to match the style I ended up gravitating towards the end (ie getting the upper bricks more like the lower bricks)

    Looking forward to baking these out and applying them to the actual model, should start actually looking like something soon



  • Xelan101
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    Xelan101 polycounter lvl 10
    Finally got enough time post vacation to get some progress together. Unfortunately the trim sheet idea I had didn't have nearly enough utility in practice  :neutral: So I've taken a step back and I'm trying to see if I can re-purpose some of the already sculpted bricks into shapes I had planned to UV them to and then baking piece specific sheets from there.

    The biggest issue was that the trim sheet style bakes we're allowing for depth between bricks which limited how most of them could be used in unique situations.

     I've FFD'd my decimated bricks into one to one shapes for the arches on the front of the building and I'll do some test bakes tonight. trying to avoid distortion where I can by using similarly proportioned bricks where I can.



     hopefully I can minimize lost work this way, though I think I'm going to re-sculpt the pieces related to the corner pillars.

  • Xelan101
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    Xelan101 polycounter lvl 10
    resculpted the pieces related to the pillar as a standalone piece, and I cut in the bake for the stairs on the same sheet to help with the awkward pack I was getting with just the pillar pieces. each piece can be rotated for unique detail on the four corners so things can have a bit more variation, and each chunk in the pillar can also be rotated for additional variety.


    Got those arch/window pieces baked out too. Definitely intend to thicken up the stair rocks width wise, and clean up the arc so it feels more like the concept.





    Probably gonna do another pass on the upper and lower trim stone sculpts and bake those out to another sheet. Then I'll readdress the tilables so that I can drop the majority of the building into editor with bakes applied.
  • Xelan101
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    Xelan101 polycounter lvl 10
    super quick update, added more detail to the early bricks so they met the standard I had on the later sculpts and got them arranged for the low. gonna build the low, unwrap etc either tonight/tomorrow. like I'll probably unwrap most bricks individually and bake exploded so that I can rearrange them for the other sides

  • Jedairusz
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    Jedairusz polycounter lvl 13
    Your stones




    are totally desaturated. I suggest add more colors to textures. Good luck!
  • Jakro
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    Jakro greentooth
    Jedairusz said:
    Your stones




    are totally desaturated. I suggest add more colors to textures. Good luck!

    I'm going out on a limb here and going to say that this is just rendering the normal map

  • Xelan101
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    Xelan101 polycounter lvl 10
    @Jedairusz  :  @Jakro  is correct, it's all just bakes, no attempt to add color or tune value has been made yet. However there's actually no normal applied it's just a diffuse map made from compositing all my baked maps.

    My plan is to get things all baked out before going forward with color, so I can adjust values/colors all at once before committing painting time. Similar to the Magical Girl Shop thread that's going on currently.

    That said I can understand the confusion with the painted stumps in the render, I took those to near finish before I decided to take a step back and deal with the scene holistically.

    Got most of the shop itself baked out now, though there's still some clean-up or re-bakes to consider on some pieces. definitely not happy with the current stone tileable. Probably going to re-work it and then start focusing on the ground/prop elements. That and I want to start throwing things back into editor so I can evaluate them more properly.


  • Xelan101
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    Xelan101 polycounter lvl 10
    Got a decent chunk of work done over the weekend. Resculpted the dirt  and baked it out (along with little rocks to pepper into it, still needs some scale tweaking). Got the flat stone tileable a lot more subtle, but still with some form, I think it's gonna take shape more in the painting phase. (These images are tiled out in a 2x2 square)


    Did a whole bunch of sculpting over the weekend to get the roof crystal to shape, and started getting some shards built out to make the area by the ground dip as well as the collection of them on the landing in front of the door.


    And finally current progress within UDK. Again, the yellow figures should represent scale, the taller one is meant to represent an Ogre, who built and use the building and the smaller on is a human/UDK player character for whole the structure should feel a bit on the "too big" size.



    Critiques, Tips Hints etc very much appreciated!!!!
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