Best Of

Hey everyone and welcome to the 79th Bi-Monthly Environment Art Challenge for the months of July and August!

This challenge is a way for real-time 3D artists to test their skills and create a piece of work based on concepts provided. It's open to those of all skill levels and we do our best to provide meaningful feedback along the way so everyone can come away from the challenge with actionable points on which they can improve their craft!

Anyone is welcome in this challenge no matter your skill level! It's a test of your own ability not a competition between members. We're all here to improve as artists and learn from each other.

- ENVIRONMENTS -

HARD SURFACE ENVIRONMENT:

Wind Harp by Jean Chevillard

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/L3zZRP

STYLIZED ENVIRONMENT:

Gods will fall -Enviro art exploration 02 by shaun mooney

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nYAVG9

- PROPS -

HARD SURFACE PROP:

Birds & Biolabs by Pavel Lisiy

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/B3WRam

STYLIZED PROP:

MH..unknown project 2015 by Hwanggyu Kim

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ZGkWw8

- RULES -

Please read all the rules before starting:

• Try to post at least one critique for every post that you make. This will make for a better learning environment and help us all grow as artists.
• Try your best to finish as much as you can in the time frame provided, but remember even if you don't finish by the end of the challenge we encourage you to keep pushing and finish your piece!
• Post what you are working on in this thread so that way it's a more centralized place for advice and critique. Please avoid creating a new thread as we don't want to spam out the forums.
• It is recommended to use a game engine to present your work. Unreal Engine, Unity, and CryEngine are very common engines that can be used but feel free to use any alternatives that you want. (Marmoset Toolbag for example.)
• Feel free to change up your chosen concept a bit if you want! Interpret these concepts to your liking, especially if your aim is to add storytelling elements.
• If you finish your project and decide to post it to Artstation, make sure you give credit to the concept artist in the form of a link to their profile. Additionally, it is recommended to ask a concept artist for their permission to post a 3D piece based on their work before doing so.

- RECOMMENDATIONS -

• When you are just starting out making a scene, it can seem complicated or imposing. Take your time planning and blocking out, it will set you up for success later on.
• Think about how you can re-use assets, re-use textures, break it down as simple as possible and plan it out. A lot of people will break it down in their own way when they start out their challenge. Gather some reference images as well for different parts of the scene, don't be afraid to make it your own.
• We strongly encourage you to go and look at other games and see how they make their assets as well as get concept art to give it your own feel.

The goal is to learn and grow both artistically and in your ability to both give and receive critique, but don't stress about it and remember to have fun!

Good luck!

Bit of a rush to finish and was not happy with the water but ran into a dead end on the method I was using.

@simonBreumier very cool and nice to see the breakdown 🤓

@PuuroMan Cool scene 👍️ Imo the texture tiling is a bit apparent in some areas.

@atunnard I would note that the shading on some elements (vertical part of pillars, ceiling arches) looks too round/smooth. Maybe use hard edges or face weight vertex normals to achieve tighter shading. Good luck for the next one 🚀

Made a run at the chicken coop targeting sketchfab viewer, using a trim sheet (1024x2048) + some vertex color.

Edit: Trim Sheet

Vertex Color

Hiya!

Excited to share the sub-level environment I did for the game Vampire the Masquerade Swansong, I was responsible for set-dressing, troubleshooting, prop creation and polishing! More renders here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/yJqqG9

Alright! Finally took the time to get back on the hard surface prop.

First, here's where I'm at (UE5 render, vegetation and rocks are from Quixel, dirt material is from substance source):

Now for the technical part:

I really wanted to make this prop with the least possible textures, a single material instance but a decent texel density, so I've put everything on a trim sheet:

The trim is made of three textures:

• albedo/transparency
• Normal map
• A packed texture with Roughness (R), Metallic (G), a paint mask (B) and a paint texture (a)

Then I made a shader in Unreal which:

• Differentiate which material is metallic or not by thresholding the metallness texture
• If it's metallic, then Painting the vertex with a red color will add rust (using the rust texture that's also on the trim, UV-offseted correctly). See how it works here.
• If it's wood then: painting the vertex will either result in (B) blue paint, (G) green paint, (a) white paint or (R) wood with a clearer tone and a less fibrous texture, as in the concept. See how it works here.

For each paint you can choose two colors to make its texture come out, the noise mask packed in the noise paint mask (in the blue channel) is also used to get a more natural transition between painted and not painted wood.

A quick view of the shader:

EDIT: thinking of it I'm stupid, instead of making a shader with three differnet painting colors I could have used the vertex color to decide the color of the paint right away 😅

And the paint mask part:

Though I gotta say I think this is not the best way to add noise on a mask and am not too happy with the way it looks right now so I might change it, I'm opened to suggestions!

Everything is textured with this single material (even the bucket at the top and the nails^^), final details were added using decals.

Hope you like it and I'm open for feedbacks :)

Austin Healey Sprite Mk 2, ChoroQ style - 112 tris, most of them used to make a negative space and shadow - definitely room to reduce the count. Texture is 32x64. Could probably trade some texture space for polygons by modelling the arches.

LATEST

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Ninja Character, Made in ZBrush, Rendered in Modo.

Started working on this guy a while back. and now Im more or less finaly done with the highpoly!
any crits or comments before I start on the lowpoly I highly appreciated of course