Ben Merrick- Environment Artist Thread

benmerrick3d

Hey guys,

I have been keeping up to date with the work on Polycount but I haven't posted any work online for a couple of years and I thought it was about time to show some!

I am an Environment Artist and have worked at Frontier Developments for the past couple of years on multi-million selling games such as Kinect Disneyland Adventures and Kinectimals: Now With Bears.

Sadly I was one of the people who got made redundant just before Christmas. I am currently looking for employment and am free and willing to move anywhere (English speaking) for the right job.

The redundancy came completely out of the blue and my portfolio was completely out of date so I have been working hard over Christmas to update it.

This is a scene I am currently working on:



It has been a couple of weeks work so far, but in that time I have had to learn a lot of UDK as I had only briefly used it before.
The scene mainly uses 7 tiling textures applied with a mesh paint/vertex colouring shader that I adapted.




Here is the concept that I have been taking ideas from- I am not copying it exactly but using it as a very strong influence:



Things to change:

Just noticed the bricks/plaster texture didn't have the normal map connected so I have changed that
Lighting direction
Adding a fountain/well in the foreground/courtyard by the back buildings to the right
Work up the textures and model details- some where done quite quickly

Any other crits please say

My website can be found here: www.benmerrick.com
My blog here: www.benmerrick.com/blog

And please pm me or send me an email to: benmerrick3d@gmail.com if you have any job opportunities.

Kind regards,

Ben

FemCharles

You fleshed that out quickly ben! Nice start. Can you post the concept you are working from so i can have compare?

acreativebox

If you plan on putting a lot of work into the textures you might want to reconsider the amount of bloom in your scene, it's gonna destroy and wash out a lot of the crisp and yummy details in your textures.

Looks cool though yo! Reflection looks a little odd though in the water

I'm also wondering if there's a story behind the very warm lighting (the orange) in one of the buildings? Is there a furnace in there, if yes - it might be cool to add a chimney with smoke on the roof

Keep at it! Peace!

benmerrick3d

cljohnson wrote: »

You fleshed that out quickly ben! Nice start. Can you post the concept you are working from so i can have compare?

Thanks, yeah I forgot about the concept. I have updated the first post!

acreativebox wrote: »

If you plan on putting a lot of work into the textures you might want to reconsider the amount of bloom in your scene, it's gonna destroy and wash out a lot of the crisp and yummy details in your textures.

Looks cool though yo! Reflection looks a little odd though in the water

I'm also wondering if there's a story behind the very warm lighting (the orange) in one of the buildings? Is there a furnace in there, if yes - it might be cool to add a chimney with smoke on the roof

Keep at it! Peace!

Yeah I will re-balance the bloom when I make changes.

The reflections have been a complete pain and spent 2 days trying to get something to look good! As I am new to UDK I have been trying to work out how to do them properly. I tried DX11 Image Based Reflections but I kept on getting weird seems and I couldn't get it look right on the corner- around the barrels and steps.
For this I used DX9 cube mapping for the reflections which work well if you are at the right angle, but when you move a tiny bit off that they completely mess up.
If you have any tips please let me know, I would love to sort them out!

Good call on the chimneys- it wouldn't be much work to add some and it would break up the roof a bit.

Thanks!

benmerrick3d

For the reflections here is the part of the mesh paint material that does them:



I learnt this part from the 3DMotive Advanced Mesh Painting tutorial video.
If anybody has any advice on how to improve the reflections at all please let me know

PogoP

Looking pretty nice, Ben! Good job

Best of luck with the job hunt.

PixelSuit

Realy sorry to hear what happened mate, very similar thing happened to me a while ago, good luck with the search.

I like the look of the scene, the vertex blending is working well but I agree that the lighting is currently taking away from the textures. have you thought about maybe including one small texture for unique textures? I think it would be nice for things like the hanging cloth and sign to have some nice unique colours to help break up the tiling.

FemCharles

I would maybe spend some time going back to the model and nailing down the silhouette. The buildings in the concept are more organic. Spend some more time modelling in those details. Yours compared to the concept art is more at a block stage. I like to work with just grey block out (or various greys, Light, mid and dark) to help me concentrate on the silhouette and compostion. I think sometimes textures and lighting can distract you from this.

Go back model and get the base in UDK, Set up the compostion, in the concept art you can see fence in the foreground. Something along those lines would break your image up and make it more interesting. Then once your happy with your grey environment, start lighting it. Then block colours for the buildings, then detailed textures.

I think this will help you concentrate on making each section as good as you can without getting distracted by the overall picture. If that makes sense

benmerrick3d

PixelSuit wrote: »

Realy sorry to hear what happened mate, very similar thing happened to me a while ago, good luck with the search.

I like the look of the scene, the vertex blending is working well but I agree that the lighting is currently taking away from the textures. have you thought about maybe including one small texture for unique textures? I think it would be nice for things like the hanging cloth and sign to have some nice unique colours to help break up the tiling.

Yeah definitely. I was going to add some individual maps when I have my lighting sorted.

cljohnson wrote: »

I would maybe spend some time going back to the model and nailing down the silhouette. The buildings in the concept are more organic. Spend some more time modelling in those details. Yours compared to the concept art is more at a block stage. I like to work with just grey block out (or various greys, Light, mid and dark) to help me concentrate on the silhouette and compostion. I think sometimes textures and lighting can distract you from this.

Go back model and get the base in UDK, Set up the compostion, in the concept art you can see fence in the foreground. Something along those lines would break your image up and make it more interesting. Then once your happy with your grey environment, start lighting it. Then block colours for the buildings, then detailed textures.

I think this will help you concentrate on making each section as good as you can without getting distracted by the overall picture. If that makes sense

Yeah the buildings aren't finish yet, I will add more shape and detail to them I just needed to get something on my portfolio that was more recent and now I can work on it in more detail.

Good idea for the no textures for lighting, it really helps

benmerrick3d

Does anybody know a way of adding some depth to my mesh painting- for the normal I have the normal of the planks going into A of a Lerp, the plaster going into B and the vertex mapping into the Alpha. Which works great for the painting and getting it in place. But when there is an edge between the plaster and the wood on my mesh it is very flat, it would be good to have the plaster 'pushed outwards' at the join so it looks like it is on top of the wood and give a bit of shadow/lighting information at that join.
I thought that you might be able to do something like this with a bump offset but I couldn't work out where I would put it in my material to be able to do this.

Something like my quick paint-over, but obviously would look a lot better!



Edit: I don't know why my image isnt showing? Please copy and paste the link to see it

benmerrick3d

Hey,

I am currently working on an art test for a job so I have put this scene on hold, but I will definitely come back to finish it as soon as I get a chance.

Can anybody help me on my last question about adding depth to that vertex/mesh paint shader I am using?

Regards

joshschmitt

This looks fantastic, any chance of getting a run down of what up u did and the problems you faced?

benmerrick3d

Hey,

Thank you. Sure, it was pretty simple really- just standard modelling and texturing, and using a mesh paint shader in UDK. I can say in more detail if needed when I have the scene finished- there is still a lot of work I want to do on it.

Would be good to work out my shader issue that I asked about, it would greatly help the final scene when I get back to working on it.