The Polycount Newsfeed

Hello la compagnie !

I've pushed an update on the state of the project here : https://www.artstation.com/blogs/vexod14/49Xj/star-wars-redemption-work-in-progress-18

Here is what's new compared to what I already shown here

So, some new levels, in terms of pure art. Just cause I wanted to bring on more levels now I've defined a solid way to produce them =) (And you probably don't know my penchant for making overkill details & stuff no one but me will notice x)) New levels added consists in :

Jedi Temple on Coruscant, and LucreHulk's corridors. I've also added a lot of new things on existing levels, but I prefer keeping this under the hood and let you dicover it through the next version of the demo =)

First level is showing magnificent blue holobooks, one of the high places of Order 66. I found cool to create this interior environment,it was like playing the sims except you can craft everything you want. I learnt a lot while making this, especially on the texturing process. Making env. Art is definitely a technical problem to solve first, making sure your shaders meets most requirements, having the good texture palette (that's how I see an atlas, just a painter's color palette. Offering enough texel density & surfaces when covering most of the room).I initiated this level last year for just a single shot of the trailer, keep in mind that I simply wanted to show like... a wall behind Mevenn, and perhaps a balcony and a sculpted bust. I ended up making the whole place. It's always like that, I plan a little thing, then I add a lot over the first idea. Pfew !

I started off with a simple shape to kinda mimic the good old battlefront 2 level from Pandemic Studios, just to have a starting point for servers blocs. Then I brought a box around them and started to build some things. I wanted to bring the player close to the server towers in confined clusters, that's why you see a 1st floor. And this was only a starting point made roughly at the end of the day. Next was about to be much more exciting and it brings the Archives level to another pleasing state of nostalgia exploration. Archives was already good as is and "Servers Room" was only meant to be a bonus, for when I will have time to build it... and I finally added this to the level in nearly a little week of work (put apart the Jedi Statue sculpts ^^)

Statues are completely using the Jedi characters assets I made before them, but they are static and uses only a single UVSet without mirroring/overlapps, since I wanted to control completely the surface and avoid unwanted "butterflies" patterns. There came a wonderful tool of 3DCoat : UVs. Cool point is they are synced with paint layers, so if you rearrange them, 3DCoat will automatically bake old texcoord to new one for each layer. It's awesome how it saves a lot of time ! This way I could simply repack my textures per statue, reduce drawcalls and improve the final look while keeping normalmap/AO baked data =) It's wonderful ! An important point to keep in mind when doing this is to avoid to rotate or flip UV islands, else you will break the bake of your normalmaps (it's obvious if you know how normalmap works but, well, a simple tips just in case =))

Just because "pourquoi pas ?" =D Simply the Roughness render pass. These clones look terrific !

Star Wars - Redemption is an overgrown original idea. (You can note that somewhere ; In French I would say "c'est une idée originale qui n'arrête pas de partir trop loin". Haha)

Next environment is the "Lucrehulk's Corridors", giving the demo a deeper Prelogy mood. I loved crafting this level, as it's the first memory I have of the entire Star Wars franchise. Yep. I didn't start with A New Hope but with Phantom Menace, the first shots over Naboo, Qui-Gon Jinn & Obi-Wan slicing BattleDroïds with John Williams music to emphasize the whole thing...this has rapidly become a strong good memory.

In case you wonder, yes, I love both trilogies but the prelogy is definitely my favourite one for dozens of reasons (if you want to discuss this...let's go in the comments ^^")

So here is a little glimpse at the last assets I did for the level, but it's globally the same routine : Roughly lay out ideas in 3dsmax with a quick blockout, test "Lego" pieces and see if it feels right, then start the pipeline...

Make a texture palette, model assets, unwrap, integrate. Done

Except here I wanted to refine a technique I used on Lumberia Assets : make use of a second UVmap to add dirt over the base surface. This greatly helps selling the asset as part of its world and not just a 3D asset with tiling stuff everywhere.

Making big environments of course you will use tiles a lot, but it's better if you can hide them as much as possible. One solution would be to make everything by hand on a 8K map, pretty un-optimized and not the best time saver...another is to mix UVs to actually texture your asset, using fewer maps. Like really fewer. It's also way faster than painting 8K maps per asset of course ;)

I keep this for really important props and characters, but tiles are textured the same way : by hand. Smartmaterials are a base, just a base. It's up to you to take your best brushes and give these automated texture a better & more personnal look ;)

The diff with how I approached this technique on Lumberia is on details put into the dirtmap. Lumberia has a shy paint look, I wasn't completely sure of the direction I wanted to take, and I had only straight dirt gradients. A lot of variants, colors...etc, but here what really helped me is I decided to add circular and rectangular dirt shapes, and when you have domes, boxes and curved areas, this rapidly becomes helpful. Else it simply requires more vertices on the geometry, just to support a second UVmap...I don't like it, especially if I can avoid it.

Here's the comparison of with and without this "Dirt" effect :

Looks better, right ?

Now here's how it looks once polished :

As always I used akeytsu to rig/skin/pose the characters, I continue to encourage every animator to get their hands on it. Please note that akeytsu is going to have a free version soon, so you should be able to mess with all the rigs I did in their very best conditions =) Also yes, these Jedis are about to come on my stores aslike Mevenn, clones, and any fan-arts : under limited/standard & editorial licenses only (no-commercial. Still cool for your personnal training and offers wider actor choices for anim challenges ;))

Two little tips about skinning though =) I don't remember if I've said this somewhere else, but : use QUADS. But only for skinning, else it's simply a non-sense (especially when you rely on normalmap bakes), always remember geometry is made of triangles, not quads. Quad mesh facilitates skinning for a simple reason : smooth algorithms. When you smooth a vertex weight, you basically ask the software to look at nearby vertices weights and lean towards their values, this way you'll reduce the gap between them and reach a smoother joint influence through your mesh. Nearby vertices are defined by connected face, using a quad you preserve edgeloops & flow, so your texture remains nice when deformed. If you smooth a triangulated mesh, things can rapidly become bad. But don't worry, you can of course skin roughly your triangulated model, then transfer skin on a remeshed model to fix weavy weights, and transfer back to your tri-mesh =) No need to have the best flow ever, just quads and a model at least as dense as the final one, also no UVs needed here, as we only need it to support skinning data ;) 

Second tips : use "global" retopo to ensure smooth connection between cloth parts/layers. Here I had to keep the cloth bands following the Pelvis/Stomach/Spine/Torso, so I used a global mesh underneath to copy/paste skinweights, then I removed influences from shoulders and gave them to extra cloth joints. Just so I can adjust these parts if needed and avoid them to always depends on arm-cloth. If the jedi is in a relaxed pose, then I need to keep the shoulder cloth up =)

Also, as I wanted to have modular possibilities on my character like changing the length of the sleeves, their meshes needed to be split out of the main body part. Thanks to the same global mesh I could transfer the connected area weights and avoid having ugly seam when deforming each sleeves =)

Finally, if you look closer you can see meshes only has one side. This simply helps keeping final mesh thickness because I'll source a single vertex for two targets, so both will end up with the same weights and reduce drastically front/backfaces overlaps fights

Isn't she beautiful with these skinweights ? Fun fact : twilek version wasn't planned at all. It was... (guess what ?)

A bonus. Hohoho =) But a really good one, that's my favorite version of the female Jedi Knight ♥

That's all for now folks =)

Des Bisous ♥

Hey polycounters !

I rarely post but i'm at a point where I feel like I need to open up.

I've been practicing digital art (both 3D & 2D) for the past 6 years, I work professionally in the games industry (doing 3D and rough 2D for a big French company) but I want to make the shift to be a full-time illustrator/concept-artist.

For that, I am well aware that I need to focus on my 2D art, but unfortunately I never seem to get any feedbacks/critiques on my pieces. And that's really tough since i'm pretty sure a great way of improving is by hearing what people who have master the craft have to say about my art !

So yeah this is a new and hopeful attempt at getting help going forward!

Here's the latest piece I worked on, she's the main character of a short story i'm writing at the moment.

I would LOVE some advice that I could take into account for the next painting, especially that she's gonna be the protagonist again.

Thanks a lot everyone! ♥

Its finished 😁 Thank you so much to every one who commented and helped me, I feel so happy that this is finally complete!

Check it out on artstation https://www.artstation.com/artwork/4XRO9W

The suit is 97% complete! The only thing left to do is give him a belt pouch, then I can move on to either making the render mesh so he can be textured and animated, ORRRR sculpt Jim himself. I’m leaning towards Jim because sculpting is more fun, but we’ll see what happens. Lol

Still plucking away. My aim is to get the scene done by the end of February. Still need to do the door frame and I'm using some Megascan decals at the moment which I want to replace with my own. Then I have a bunch of things I want to tweak, some textures, lighting, etc.

Hello there! First time posting here, so no idea if I'm doing everything right or not.

Have been working on this scene for a while, and today was the day when I've finally finished the highpoly for the character. The next is retopo... oh joy!

The base for the pilot was generated in Metahuman, character posing and rendering done in UE5, the rest - pure ZBrush.

Lighting preview; For the final render I'll strive for the feel the version without PH mats has (the two shots in the middle);

"Cradle" in the cockpit; Most of it was made for subdivision (pity tessellation isn't a thing in UE5);

Pilot's life support wetsuit