[UE4] ZS25 Civilian Mars Rover Project [Substance Designer]
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Hi everybody, it's portfolio time these days, I decided to make a new piece, and to learn Substance Designer at the same time!
Hopefully this will brush away the dust that settled over my portfolio over the last years.
I decided to go for a vehicle in a diorama this time for various reasons, it's faster to complete, makes for some more variety and displays different skills as well.
Specifications:
The vehicle is fairly simple, it's a civilian class rover for light planetary exploration. In a future where distant planets have been colonized and basic roads laid out, such vehicles become the norm to everyone. The rover does not run on fossil fuels. Everything you see is displayed on a 180 degree display in the cockpit thanks to a set of panoramic cameras at the front of the vehicle. You enter the vehicle from the back hatch, since in some cases you will need to change to lesser athmospheres.
Dimensions are roughly 9.5m long by 5m wide, 4m high.
Current work in progress on the high poly rover:
These are rendered with Xoliul Shader2
Things left to do are a few micro details and surface bits and bobs. Then low poly and bakes, learning SD and producing the Mars diorama.
Any feedback is welcome, although the general shape of the vehicle is now well locked after a few weeks of iterations so keep that in mind
Cheers!
Hi everybody, it's portfolio time these days, I decided to make a new piece, and to learn Substance Designer at the same time!
Hopefully this will brush away the dust that settled over my portfolio over the last years.
I decided to go for a vehicle in a diorama this time for various reasons, it's faster to complete, makes for some more variety and displays different skills as well.
Specifications:
The vehicle is fairly simple, it's a civilian class rover for light planetary exploration. In a future where distant planets have been colonized and basic roads laid out, such vehicles become the norm to everyone. The rover does not run on fossil fuels. Everything you see is displayed on a 180 degree display in the cockpit thanks to a set of panoramic cameras at the front of the vehicle. You enter the vehicle from the back hatch, since in some cases you will need to change to lesser athmospheres.
Dimensions are roughly 9.5m long by 5m wide, 4m high.
Current work in progress on the high poly rover:
These are rendered with Xoliul Shader2
Things left to do are a few micro details and surface bits and bobs. Then low poly and bakes, learning SD and producing the Mars diorama.
Any feedback is welcome, although the general shape of the vehicle is now well locked after a few weeks of iterations so keep that in mind
Cheers!
Replies
Just one detail I found on my way, if after you symmetry some of your object, use OBJ otherwise your normals wont look right.
I'll start texturing it in the next few days.
God damn, baking without a cage? What is this sourcery?!
David, doeseph: thanks guys
Pedro: I read what Laurens said about it in the SD master thread and gave it a go without cage. I was dubious at first but really, aside from tweaking the ray distances, it is perfectly seamless. I still have to try it in UE4 though.
I'll get cranking on texturing
Joshfighter, thanks!
I wanted to update you guys more often but I found it hard to get to work on this before this week, had various things going on top of the whole Crytek thing.
I started to work my way into substance, I made my base materials, blended them with masks, then started playing with dust passes, mud, edge wear, etc.
My next steps are to bake and finish the grills that are missing right now, add the vehicle logo and tyre markings, model the headlights/backlight interior mesh so I can make them transparent next.
After that I'll start importing stuff into Unreal4 ;-)
Update number 3 on this one, slowly progressing, I did a first import of all the maps and meshes into UE4 with a basic shader to get an idea of what to improve next. The rendering in UE4 in epic quality looks slightly softer and the lack of a good hdri map makes me lose some of the shiny details that popped well into the SD preview. All in all, added a couple logos on the rover, I need to add a windscreen wiper on the front, and do a global graphic design pass using decals, and a more precise/localized pass of wear and tear/scratches on the rover so that it strikes as less generic material.
Very little update this time, starting to get my head around the UE4 lighting and cubemaps a bit better this time, I changed the rover coat color, pondering whether to use the new clear coat shader, but to be honest, this vehicle has got limited amount of shiny metal, with the layers of dust over it, I'm not sure it would really show..
In the meantime I also made quick headlights and tail lights geometry, enabled, lpvs, played with the distance field AO but had unfortunate artifacting with it, so this will have to wait! :-/
I started to work on the diorama which is slowly becoming a small level in my head. It always starts small.. :-P
The only thing that throws the scale off for me (I may be wrong) is the lack of branding.
For example: a number plate, or the vehicle brand/name.
That's just my two cents for now, keep up the great work
The current state of the vehicle is still very much a first pass, fresh out of substance designer. I need to have a proper think about the branding and storytelling I can achieve with it on the vehicle, to sell the universe it is in a little.
It is definitely on my list, I'm working through the terrain right now, and will jump back on the finesse aspect of the vehicle after that
Also, I'll post my update from yesterday here, from my blog:
http://usethesnap.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/zs25-civilian-mars-rover-update5.html
It's pretty standard when it comes to how it's done, two way blending using vertex alpha, on a static mesh, now as this is a diorama I have used displacement mapping which gives me that extra depth to it. But it fades quite quickly in middle ground.
The maps are just diff, nrm, rough and displ. Here's what my sand ripples sculpt looks like, very simple:
The diffuse is relatively empty of any lighting information, as it should be:
For the second texture I just very quickly sculpt rocks in Zbrush, really focusing on shape, not adding any details. I then decimate them to 1-2k tris and import them in max, do some UVs and then use an advanced painter to place them where I want. I start with the bigger rocks and then step by step accumulate smallers rocks around them. The texture didn't really need to tile here, because I overlay it in my shader at three different tiling ratios, one bigger, one normal and one smaller, to create a uniform coverage of the terrain wherever I want to paint a few pebbles.
Oh and since I didn't post it here, I made an update about my vegetation work for the scene over at my blog, here are the pictures in it:
http://usethesnap.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/zs25-civilian-mars-rover-update6.html
Like I say on the blog, there's substential work left for me to do, and please do ignore the lack of polish on the rover texture itself so far :P
I'm about to start a pass of 2D art on my vehicle now, I'm considering the rest pretty much done, except a few shader polishes to do on smoke etc.
I made the background mainly this week, using a bit of worldmachine, a bit of cgskies, quick and dirty planet sprites, quick and dirty smoke trails that I need to add depth fade to so that it doesnt clip through geometry.
I also rebaked parts of the vehicle with custom normals to avoid gradients quantisation on some parts of the vehicle, and polished the roughness and metalness maps to make my chrome parts come back alive.
carlobarley: I'll try to cover that in a post when i'm done
Awesome work by the way, i too would love to see your substance graphs.
Congrats on making the Substance homepage banner
I extracted five screenshots out of it, but as you can imagine most work went into the 1st one. The others are there just to showcase other angles of the vehicle.
I'll be prepping some breakdowns such as wireframe shots, highpoly render,texture flats and substance network screens if you guys fancy. Nothing fancy there though :P
I think the background mountains are the only thing letting it down still though. Also there's a fair bit of vegetation around the vehicle but none in the background at all. I know that'd be a bit tricky to do though and I understand it's just a small diorama scene.
Really like the design of the vehicle though, good job!