UT3 & Gears Environment Art
polycounter lvl 19
Hey folks,
I haven't really shown any work publicly since Unreal2, which was a while ago
and since then I've been learning to be a modeller rather than a texture artist.
I showed Per some stuff tonight, told him I'd registered www.kevinjohnstone.com
and suggested I pimp it in the meantime ( the site isnt done yet ).
I'm still sort of rendering as I build the site, so I'll continue to pimp stuff periodically
here while I work on it.
First up are some pieces from the Liandri theme in UT3.
Ybeam
GooTank
BigNose
ChasmBridge
Torlan Support
Torlan Wall
I haven't really shown any work publicly since Unreal2, which was a while ago
and since then I've been learning to be a modeller rather than a texture artist.
I showed Per some stuff tonight, told him I'd registered www.kevinjohnstone.com
and suggested I pimp it in the meantime ( the site isnt done yet ).
I'm still sort of rendering as I build the site, so I'll continue to pimp stuff periodically
here while I work on it.
First up are some pieces from the Liandri theme in UT3.
Ybeam
GooTank
BigNose
ChasmBridge
Torlan Support
Torlan Wall
Replies
Couple of Necris pieces next. Getting to work on the Necris theme was my favourite part of
UT3, it was a lot of fun to learn to make flowing forms.
DecoPillar
Klaw
"Secure Connection Failed
www.kevinjohnstone.com uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is not trusted because it is self signed.
The certificate is only valid for box386.bluehost.com."
That is with Firefox 3.
When I put in the URL without the S on http it loads fine, and the work is brilliant
hope to see some tutorials from you again, your old site was a great community effort.
note: i couldn't see your images with firefox, only with IE (??)
You website just comes up as a bluehost page for me too btw.
.............. if you see him round, squeeze Hawkprey and get him to show some love too.
yay new site!
Looking forward to seeing more from you.
Cheers, Nick.
how long to you get roughly to work on peices like this?
These links should work for people who can't see them...
http://www.kevinjohnstone.com/%7Ekevinjoh//Images/UT3/Liandri/LT_Ybeam.jpg
http://www.kevinjohnstone.com/%7Ekevinjoh//Images/UT3/Liandri/LT_Gootank.jpg
http://www.kevinjohnstone.com/%7Ekevinjoh//Images/UT3/Liandri/LT_BigNose.jpg
http://www.kevinjohnstone.com/%7Ekevinjoh//Images/UT3/Liandri/LT_ChasmBridge01.jpg
http://www.kevinjohnstone.com/%7Ekevinjoh//Images/UT3/Liandri/LT_ChasmBridge02.jpg
http://www.kevinjohnstone.com/%7Ekevinjoh//Images/UT3/Liandri/LT_ChasmBridge03.jpg
http://www.kevinjohnstone.com/%7Ekevinjoh//Images/UT3/Liandri/LT_TorlanSuport.jpg
http://www.kevinjohnstone.com/%7Ekevinjoh//Images/UT3/Liandri/LT_TorlanWall.jpg
That stuff is lovely, really really nice. I can spot a couple of classic Kev designs in there, like the 'knee' section of the Torlan Support.
So, how relevant is this old post detailing parts of your workflow? : http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=40822
Can't wait to see the main site, you good a cool domain name too.
Been waiting forever for you to post this stuff, well worth it
Great stuff Kevin
however my opera browser (9.51) thinks that your domain is unsercure, it spits out this: maybe I am just the only one then there is not much to worry but if people with Firefox and newer IE versions get the same message it might scare some visitors
one question, how much time does it takes you to build something like the decopillar or the bridge thing ?
Can't wait to see more goodness from you dude
I too am curious about how long you get scheduled to produce pieces like this. I know it would range depending on the scope / size of the asset. I really would like to know how much time you'd expect to get though for completing these pieces. Also are you given a pretty solid concept to go from or do you yourself come up with most of the detailing?
In some of these pieces you have a detailed components that are reused in the construction of the bigger pieces and they are deformed along the contours of a surface or surfaces of other components (example the "Big Nose" piece has a series of identical plates running the interior surface sweep curve from top to bottom and the "ChasmBridge" piece has a component that is repeated and follows the contour of the underlying surfaces) How exactly do you go about doing that? I've attempted it using the WSM Path Deform modifier in Max but I seem to get distortion in the shapes that destroy the appearance of the smaller components maintaining their original shape. If this is what you are using to achieve it are there any tips for not distorting your source shape for the smaller components being cloned along the destination path or another way of doing this all together?
Thank you for any insight into this stuff, it is appreciated and once again, awesome work.
I could be completely wrong, but the way i'd try to handle forms like that is just do the top 'facade' of the shape in a plane, deform as needed, then add a shell modifier (with a spline input for the ramp) and then turbosmooth?
simply awesome dude
]
but yeah really impressive
its because of art like this that ut3 and gears are so successful. Everything is carefully crafted
waiting for your new site, and making off's *wink*
lovin UT3! great stuff, can't wait for your new website!
I would suspect that technique woudld be possible through Zbrush. Hide the unwanted areas you do not want to affect so that all that is left is the workable region of the mesh. Create a black and white Alpha in photoshop which looks like that shape or silouette. Save in the Zdata\ Alphas folder of pixal logics zbrush folder .In zbrush use the stroke feature that scales patterns by dragging center outward. Standard Brush, Clay, or Layer will probably do the trick. That's just miy take on a way of doing that kind of detail. It's possilbe in a number of ways. I Think it might be done simular to this way because i noticed the spacing on those rivet strap patterns are not exactly even between eacch other.
It looks absolutly beautiful Mr. Kevin. Nice job sire. What a truely inspirational set of art.
I'd bet a lot of folks* would learn quite a bit if you were kind enough to dissect a piece of work of yours and go through the creation process.
*me included
This is all assuming you are working with sub-D's, Im pretty sure maya has a similar feature but its been to long since Ive cracked it open to remember what it's called off hand.
so those plates were all just handmodelled.
ChasmBridge: This was a later piece, the bits you pointed to I modelled once by detaching
a duplicate of the area of the curved surface underneath and shaping the way I wanted
by edge dragging then shell modifier, then I just repositioned the duplicates by hand
as instances of the first.
For stuff like bolts and so on, I use a plugin that you can get from scriptspot.com called
advanced painter, the randomize and scatterer modes in it allow you to select a source
model, then select a model, then apply duplicates (instance or copy) of the source
to the normals of the model selected in an easy point and click fashion.
I tend to try and make things a little irregular to aid the idea that there’s wear and tear.
Generally I take between 2 and 5 days for these pieces apart from the Klaw piece which took
around 10-12 days and the chasmbridge which was closer to 15+ as it had to be animated
and there was some back and forth with the animator and level designer to make things
work the way they needed to. The Necris metal stuff always took twice as long because
flowing contiguous forms are about the hardest things to model, lots of clean up and
edge sliding while constraining to edge or face.
The majority of the set was modelled by Peter Ellis and myself with Maury being the main
texture guy doing the defining work initially for Bill Green and Mike Buck to follow through
on later once they got off Gears.
We try to work smart and make a number of modular pieces first that can do the job that BSP
used to do in UE2 while also defining a base architecture too. That leaves more time to focus
on the more elaborate pieces which we also tried to get 4 or 5 lowpoly variants out of for
better texture efficiency.
We generally used 1 2048 per asset then in the engine decide what res to turn that down
to when ingame on the 360/PC/PS3.
As long as you remember to make the majority of the forms medium strength, whatever
hi frequency you place on top of those should still read ingame. Some of the pieces fared
better than others, my push to be more optimized caused some pieces to do less well and
I dont try to push as much as I did to a single texture.
The info I wrote up here before is all still relevant.
As far as concepts go we get great mood setter scene images that depict how everything
looks together and with what lighting more than we get individual breakouts specific to
to the asset we are building because of the large variety of level themes not allowing for
time to do very specific breakouts.
We used Kovacs and Feng, also Wallin as contractors for most of the project until later on
we hired Shane Pierce fulltime and began getting clearer concepts at a more reliable rate
and they were more useable because being inhouse he could get a much clearer awareness
of what was helpful to asset creation as he could look at the levels and the assets we
normally make.
Often we just winged it and made stuff up ourselves to suit some BSP form the LD’s had already
made in the level, Bignose, Ybeam were just made up to suit a level for instance.
Generally you get about 30-50% of the design worked out and need to expand the rest or research
stuff yourself. The ArchWall piece at the bottom here I found variants of when reading up on
Islamic art as I pushed to incorporate that stuff in addition to all the giger style Necris metal
concepts so we’d have a light, low specularity swatch to run through the levels at the height the
players were for easy recognition ingame. The Necris metal stuff is so detailed and dark that the
set needed a contrast swatch to sort of allow the LD’s to tame the set.
I think I’ve covered most of peoples questions?
I’d just like to thank everyone for the feedback, I’m a bit overwhelmed.
As far as tutorials go, well we’re in crunch on Gears2 atm, in September my wife is due to give
birth so I can’t guarantee when I’ll get around to that.
Couple more Necris Pieces -
ArchWall -
BabelSpire -