Best Of

@Fabi_G Looking great! Two suggestions I'd maybe have is to extrude the roof a bit, maybe? Having the main tile surface as just a plane does stand out on the edges a fair bit. Even though the reference is fairly flat too, adding just a bit of depth would help, I think! Wouldn't add too many extra polys either, I imagine. Also, you could perhaps have the moss on the roof more confined to crevices or anywhere it'd be more protected from the sun (unless you're trying to go for a more abandonned look!).

Also, what do you mean by a mockup? For the animation? I have a solid idea of how I want the whole thing to move, and only the map section would get weight painted. I intend to scale down the bones that are inside the body so that I can move the whole assembly in cleanly.

As for my progress for the day, I finished all of the modelling phase (outside of the rope for the pen, but it's sitting at a cozy 6,400 polys), and fully UV unwrapped it. Easily my most complex UV map and I'm honestly pretty proud of it! 😅 I could probably optimise the space I use further, but I was kind of impatient to jump into Substance instead… The textures are very basic still, mostly just slapped some quick layers on in Substance with my mouse since I don't currently have my pen display, but I'm really happy with how this is turning out!

I was sort of hoping I could also work on the Stylized Environment concept, too, but this is taking me a lot longer than I expected. Maybe I'll do it in my own time after this challenge is done! Looking forward to seeing everyone elses' progress, too!

Last batch….it really was an incredible display and I didn't even show everything. It makes the fire at Aardman all that much more heartbreaking. Can't wait to see Wildwood.

That's all folks.

Boxtrolls time…

Kubo…. up next.

@mxrxq Congrats, turned out nicely! Like the solution you found for the back side.

@Gannon Wood texture looks great! Keep it up!

@PeculiarSana Nice! Already has some character. Do you use any baking or paint the texures directly? If I had to make a rigged prop, I would probably make a mockup first, to identify potential problems.

Found some time to continue working on the house. Added some Megascans foliage.

Currently simple materials use a vertex painted mask to add some variation.

Some more environment WIP stuff. Still just geting some color applied to all the grayscale textures I've already done and trying to balance the values/hues with some light tests. I'm not sure I'm feeling the warm tones for all the stone so I think I'll play around with making it cooler once I finish this pass on the remaining textures.

Skelly for scale

Hey all! This is my second time joining this challenge, and although I didn't finish the project last time I did, I'll hopefully manage it this time!

I decided to go for the stylized prop this time around, as I really want to work on my prop art and I figure I could also have fun animating this little guy, too! Gonna try to make it game-ready so I'm forcing myself to not go too crazy with the poly count (heh!).

Here's where I'm at after about 2 hours:

@Gannon Really liking that wood material! Are you making them all yourself?

Edit:

After a handful more hours, I've finished most of the modelling - still need to work on the actual 'map' which is relatively terrifying to say the least, as I'm likely going to have to rig it.

@Benny_Jam Looks great! My only critique is that I would add a little bit more variation in the roughness, but it's definitely a preference.

I think I'm done with that project :D

I decided to take a more next-gen approach with this building. It has 93,000 triangles (not including vegetation and props). I knew I was going to use Nanite, so triangle count was never an issue, however, I still decided to bake sculpted slate and rock to low poly models for the sake of memory optimization and to make working with those models more manageable. there is definitely one big thing I learned the hard way - Nanite actually does support vertex color. You cant paint it per instance in engine, but you can still import it. At first, I thought I will use texture masks for detailing the plaster, so I heavily decimated the meshes after sculpting and that kind of topology is really inconvenient for vertex painting.

I have only used a few materials for this building: wood trimsheet, rope and steel trimsheet, stones that are baked and uniquely painted and then assembled into walls and chimney, slate which was made the same way, and plaster, which is a tiled material with 3 grunges that are mixed in using vertex color masks.

Huge shoutout to James Arkwright, who created the original concept art, and my amazing colleagues at Paradark Studio who provided me with feedback through this project