Best Of

ThisisVictoriaZ said:

Hi! First of all, I think your portfolio work is great! The art style is very charming and having the 80lvl and Games Artist articles are great additions. Your portfolio work is consistent, however I would say that the art style is very unique and specific. Something that I realized, as an artist working for a studio is that you will often be expected to work within an art style that either already exists or is otherwise predefined. In your work I only see an art style that is specific to you, I would recommend for your next piece to try and match the art style of a game that really inspires you! This will show both variety and flexibility, and when I was applying for jobs in the indie space this really helped to show employers that I could adapt to whatever they threw at me. Everything else is looking good to me, you obviously have the skills, and you seem to enjoy what you're doing!
Keep it up!

Thank you for insights very much, Victoria! I agree with you. I have been struggling with the style. After making 3 pieces, I feel they look too similar and I really want to make something different. You pointed a clear direction for me. Again, thank you

Sweet! lets go all

That's an awesome vase, I love it!

About the shader, I'm late to the game but I might be able to help. Disclaimer: I'm an illustrator, not a 3D artist.

I put something together in Blender, it got plenty room for improvement but I think it's enough to explain what and why. Let me know if you want the file to play with it.



The key to the shader is a good diffuse you can hue shift with fresnel. I've not touched Unreal in years but it must have fresnel since fresnel is so basic, and I know it has something similar to incoming because I recall creating a hue shifting "eyes in the dark" shader once.

This is what I'm doing in Blender. Diffuse in, use fresnel to shift both hue and saturation (more on why both below). The incoming is not vital, it just adds a layer of interactivity, an extra hue shift by texture when you move around the object that isn't 1:1 to the fresnel.



This is a PBR shader + fresnel. Here are the maps with extra contrast so they're visible and saturation in case of the normal (which is a converted bump map). Only the diffuse is as is.

Diffuse, roughness, metallic, normal, fresnel-controlled hue, fresnel-controlled saturation. They'd need adjustment for Unreal because last time I checked it treats some things differently from Blender.



They're all procedural, using noise, wave and normal/gradient textures.

I don't know much about this kind of glass at all and don't have the time to research, so I took the educated guess that the iridescence isn't down to pigment alone, it's structural like humming birds' feathers. It makes the effect a good candidate for fulling the role of micro detail in the texture. I made the glitter fairly large due the distance we expect the vase to be viewed.

Added to that there seems to be a small, tactile-only wave pattern in the vase, so I layered that and the glitter in the normal and other textures.

You can see metallic and roughness differ slightly, they're not the same texture in different grayscale values although they were generated using the exact same noises. That's because using the same texture can make something look artificial, not in the man-made sense but in the unnatural-looking sense. Materials have variation in density, components mixing, etc, so even the same material straight from the factory will have subtle variations in roughness and reflectivity and color. Add the wear of light exposure and age, even little age, and you won't have something that maps out the the exact same textures. Sometimes you can get away with it, but if you can, put a little extra effort and vary them a bit.

When creating textures it's also interesting to experiment and do the opposite of what you'd do normally. Crevices usually are darker, right? What if you make them lighter? You'll be surprised by how well stepping out of what you think it should be can work.

Finally, and that's the only thing I'm really qualified to talk about: Hue x saturation

Color is relative. My favourite color is gray, not because it's gray, but because it's kinda... any color you wish. Put gray by a cold color and it'll look warm, reading as red or orange, place it by a warm color and it'll turn blue or green. It's magic.

Meaning you can shift the perception of a hue by decreasing the saturation. It's subtler, it makes the color you're contrasting against pop more, it's a strategy I use in painting all the time because it works and it's wonderful. When everything is saturated nothing is, but if you pick the saturation levels carefully then your work will have more impact. In the context of that texture I absolutely don't need a warm tone as saturated as the base color for the waves or fresnel, thus I'm not relying on changing the hue alone, I'm delegating some of the temperature shifting to the saturation to make the color warmer without being overwhelming.

And that's it. I hope this helps!

"With the paint wearing off on the back, down to the wood grain, I would expect more wear on the rest of the instrument."

This is just classic belt buckle wear haha.

So it's pretty realistic from my experience.

Good work!

This looks great!

With the paint wearing off on the back, down to the wood grain, I would expect more wear on the rest of the instrument.

The fretboard seems like it should have high roughness near the frets (accumulated grime) and the back of the head is surprisingly pristine… I’d love to see some baked AO there, and high roughness around the peg machinery where it meets the paint. Also more wear near the plugs & pickups?

Keep going!

Here a few of the animal assets I have been posting here for the past few weeks in-game. This was an assignment that my classmates and I were tasked with creating in a short time. If anyone has any feedback or advice please let me know!
   

@cheesechen12 really good progress! debris can definitly be challenging. I would approch it by modeling a couple of different meshes, blocks, wood, concrete and so forth and "drop" it with pyhsics sim inside unreal so you dont have to lay it out everywhere by hand. but definitly adjust some stuff by hand too. But - I am not 100% comfortable with this kind of workflow too as I havent used it a lot. Maybe also worth to create some preset rubble  meshes you can quickly place and rotate around in the scene.
Overall thou, I think the lighting looks solid, the overall size of the scene feels great and you are doing great progress.