A collection of the latest and greatest pieces from Sketchfab users
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The BRAWL² Tournament Challenge has been announced!
It starts May 12, and ends Oct 17. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
It starts May 12, and ends Oct 17. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
The Polycount Newsfeed
Re: Sketchbook: Frank Polygon
Art fundamentals: test samples and process validation.
Creating test samples, to explore different workflows or approaches to solving a specific problem, is something that takes a bit of extra time but can be a very powerful tool for validating ideas without having to commit to taking a specific path.
It's tempting to skip over this part of the creative process in the hope that it will speed up the completion of the project. The problem is that skipping over this part of the process often means placing artificial limitations on knowledge of both potential problems and solutions. This often means wading into a project with a heavier reliance on assumptions, intuition and improvisation.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with making assumptions. It's often a safe shortcut around things that have already been encountered. Likewise both intuition and improvisation are great fundamental art skills to develop. The problem is that assumptions can be based on incorrect or incomplete information. Which tends to lead intuition astray and the result is often a lot of wasted time re-working problems caused by over improvisation.
Another thing to consider is that sometimes the work piece can become so jumbled that it's just going to be easier and faster to take the lessons learned from the current iteration and start over. It can be painful to discard work but there's diminishing returns and a point of no return.
One of the biggest time sinks artists can fall into is trying to force an overly complex or deformed piece of work into the proper shape. Planning ahead, blocking out the major forms, adding details incrementally and saving revision files all help provide fallbacks to work forward from if something goes wrong.
Anticipating and working through potential problem areas on small scale
samples can be helpful because it allows for direct comparison of
different solutions. Resolving something once using intuition and
improvisation can be down to pure luck. Doing things a couple of times
and comparing the results provides insight into exactly what works and
what doesn't. That's where a lot of the real learning happens.
Here's an example of why it's important to create samples and analyze different solutions before making blanket assumptions about specific workflows and topology layout strategies.
Below is a relatively basic shape. It's just a blind oblong hole in a rectangular cuboid. The modeling process is relatively simple and the topology layout is fairly conventional. Nothing really amazing or ground breaking.
The process starts with a boolean subtraction of the hole then the center points on each side of the semi circle are connected to the adjacent points on the rectangle. Additional geometry is cut in to support the hole's geometry then perpendicular support loops are added to prevent the rounded areas from deforming the sidewalls. Additional support loops are added around the shapes so they keep their shape when subdivision is applied.
The results are as expected. There's no major smoothing errors and the entire process is fairly intuitive.
But what happens if the circle geometry requires additional geometry segments? The subdivided result doesn't look much better but since these changes were based on the assumption that all of the geometry elements must have their own support loops and the mesh must remain all quads the overall mesh complexity has increased.
Projecting this behavior forward: what happens if there's adjacent geometry that needs to be connected to the rectangular cuboid?
All of these extraneous support loops will tend to increase the amount of time and effort required to get the topology to flow smoothly around the rest of the shapes. It's also quite likely that the addition of multiple complex shape intersections with this type of topology layout strategy would be quite difficult to improvise with while also keeping a relatively clean and well organized topology layout.
So the next logical step would be to start challenging some of the underlying assumptions and looking for alternate workflows that reduce the amount of stray geometry and provide some level of automated support loop generation. Part of this process may involve searching out examples of other workflows, similar to what's shown below.
In this example the basic shapes are generated using a similar modeling process but the base mesh is much simpler and the support loops are generated with a bevel / chamfer modifier that remains editable. The simple mesh and automated support loop placement makes it easier to add additional shapes and produces minimum viable results that are comparable to the previous examples.
Testing this workflow should be a fairly straightforward process but skipping over critical details or trying to apply previous assumptions may produce different results. So what went wrong here?
The same boolean subtraction process is used to generate the basic shapes and the support loops around the shapes are generated by a modifier. Yet the results are completely unusable because the mesh collapses in on itself. When this sort of thing happens there can be a strong temptation to go back to what works and try to apply the previous assumptions that generated a usable result.
This anchoring bias can make it difficult to troubleshoot the problem
because, even if it takes longer and is less flexible, there's already a
workable solution. This can lead to even more assumptions which tend to
be based on incomplete or faulty information.
The following is an example of how anchoring bias and faulty assumptions can mask the underlying problems and generate even more faulty assumptions that can create circular reasoning loops: "The sample above is pretty close to the previous example so it should work. Since this latest sample doesn't work and the first sample with all of the extraneous loops works that must mean the only way to make this shape is to manually add all of the support loops and the extraneous geometry. Clearly, based on these samples and these logical assumptions this simplified mesh workflow with automated support loops is completely flawed and unusable. On top of that there's now conclusive proof from the first example that having lots of support loops and an all quad mesh is the only way to create usable subdivision meshes."
Again, the paragraph above is just an example of how shallow observations and assumptions based on incomplete information can create a false picture of what's actually happening. When results don't match expectations and there's sufficient documentation to demonstrate a process works then it's important to go back through the sample and compare technical elements like order of operations, topology layout, segment matching, etc.
While the basic modeling process was the same and the basic mesh was close it wasn't exactly the same as the reference mesh above it. In this case the problem wasn't the workflow but the placement of the edges that connect the blind oblong hole to the rectangular face. Adjusting where the edges connect the shapes solved the issue with the mesh collapsing in on itself.
Small details like this may seem unimportant at first glance but when
learning about new processes it's important to pay attention to the
details and figure out how things work. Sometimes this kind of stuff can
slip through the cracks due to inattentiveness or hurry-up-itis. When
results don't meet expectations it's important to walk back through the
process to try and identify what the root cause is an troubleshoot a
solution.
Recap:
Assumptions, intuition and improvisation are all excellent tools but
come with their own blind spots that need to be filled in by testing.
When creating test samples it's important to compare the inputs and the
results while also double checking whether or not assumptions are
correct and complete. Creating test samples is an important part of the creative process and is a tool for learning and solving problems.
Test samples aren't just for technical stuff either. They can also be used to compare the effectiveness of different design elements and design strategies which can be used to solve common design problems. The whole point of making test samples is to evaluate different ideas before committing a significant amount of resources to any one direction. This reduces the risk of any single failure and helps encourage exploration by making experimentation a low cost high reward exercise.
FrankPolygon
9 ·
Re: Tech Artist - What are you working on: FOREVER Edition!
Some Saturday night fun with GraphN: this is a material picker + object placer that basically samples whatever material under your cursor, and assigns it to the object you're currently moving.
We're just a week away from the beta now, feel free to DM if you're interested in testing! 
would love to start getting some feedback from y'all.
would love to start getting some feedback from y'all.
Fansub
5 ·
Modular American Diner (UE4 environment)
Hi everyone, I'm happy to finally post for the first time here with my modular American Diner scene! Modelling in Blender, some texturing in Substance Painter, assembled in UE4. It's all my work, expect the paving and street lamps outside which came from the 'City park environment collection' on Epic's marketplace.
I've been using Unity for a couple of years so I wanted to put something together in Unreal, and this seemed like it would be a fun project.
I decided also to share the neon signs in a downloadable UE4 project (for free) for anyone who'd like to play with them - https://gum.co/neonsigns/
All the photos can be found here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/9mVA2y
Follow me on Artstation for morehttps://www.artstation.com/garethart
I always love playing with neon lights! Simply made in Blender using bezier curves. A nice trick for making curved ends:
Mane the shape with a curve, give it a thickness of about 0.8 and a resolution of 1 (you won't need a detailed mesh once the emissive light is on it), convert it to a mesh, then decimate to about 0.25 if you want. Then;
1. Select one of the open end loops
2. Go to Select Similar>Amount of faces around an edge
3. Press 'F' to fill
4. Press 'F3' and type 'poke' - press enter
5. Press '1' to go to vertex mode
6. Subdivide once
7. Press Ctrl+NumMinus twice so you end up with the centre vert selected (you may need to first go to edge select mode - press '2' - and deselect straight edges joining two edgeloops on small pieces. I found using the circle select - press 'C' then MMB - worked well for this)
8. Press ',' and choose 'normal'
9. Press 'O' to turn on proportional editing and choose the curved shape
10. Press 'G' then 'Z' and move about .5
You can do this for all your neon tubes all at once which is a nice time-saver.
Thanks for checking out my work!
I've been using Unity for a couple of years so I wanted to put something together in Unreal, and this seemed like it would be a fun project.
I decided also to share the neon signs in a downloadable UE4 project (for free) for anyone who'd like to play with them - https://gum.co/neonsigns/
All the photos can be found here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/9mVA2y
Follow me on Artstation for more
https://www.artstation.com/garethartI always love playing with neon lights! Simply made in Blender using bezier curves. A nice trick for making curved ends:
Mane the shape with a curve, give it a thickness of about 0.8 and a resolution of 1 (you won't need a detailed mesh once the emissive light is on it), convert it to a mesh, then decimate to about 0.25 if you want. Then;
1. Select one of the open end loops
2. Go to Select Similar>Amount of faces around an edge
3. Press 'F' to fill
4. Press 'F3' and type 'poke' - press enter
5. Press '1' to go to vertex mode
6. Subdivide once
7. Press Ctrl+NumMinus twice so you end up with the centre vert selected (you may need to first go to edge select mode - press '2' - and deselect straight edges joining two edgeloops on small pieces. I found using the circle select - press 'C' then MMB - worked well for this)
8. Press ',' and choose 'normal'
9. Press 'O' to turn on proportional editing and choose the curved shape
10. Press 'G' then 'Z' and move about .5
You can do this for all your neon tubes all at once which is a nice time-saver.
Thanks for checking out my work!
algaib
10 ·
Re: Woodworking and other real world projects
@Lamont yeah I suppose some people might find this cool. This is a wood computer case I built a couple of years ago. Built out of hard maple with baltic birch side panels. The box/finger joints were difficult to get right.
EarthQuake
14 ·
Re: [FINISHED] Electric Generator
I think I will soon finish this piece because I don't know how to improve it more at this stage. Any critics and advice would be a pleasure.
Dolgaror
4 ·
Re: Show your hand painted stuff, pls!
Hey guys! I wanted to share the Goblin themed treasure chest I recently made for a Brushforge mentorship with Jordan Powers 
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/D51qBy
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/D51qBy
Camisado
14 ·
[FINISHED] Rocky Hilltop - UE4
I've been working on this rock scene for about 5 weeks and finished it over the weekend.
I took part in @TheClubsDiscord sculpt-a-rock-a-day-challenge in January. And after starting but not finishing most of my projects last year I wanted to keep the ball rolling and put some of the rocky goodness to use. I purposefully kept the scene small so I could finish it within my 5 weeks.
I'd originally intended on presenting the rocks just by themselves. But then felt it needed a little life so added some simple grass, in the end I had a small hilltop.
I'd love any c&c, both from these images and those on my Artstation project (I didn't want to overload this post), and anything I could do better or fix!
Thanks for looking and there's more on my Artstation project page: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/rAyKvO
iansmithartist
14 ·