Jack McKelvie. 3d Sketchbook and Commissions.

Jack M.

Hey everybody,

I've decided to move my previous thread to a new one because I discovered I couldn't change the title of this thread to something more appropriate. I would like to keep the thread up to date and several months down the line the title could be very misleading. My apologies!

With that said I would like to get crits for my ongoing push into doing freelance work as a 3d artist. As a growing artist I always feel the need to do better and I know I need your help to accomplish that. So going forward I would like to know what I've done wrong, what I could do better, what looks good, what looks bad, and how I can continue to improve myself in the future.

Here is one of my previous props I posted on an old thread. The pipe consists of one 512x512 texture, one 256x256 detail texture, and one 256x256 normal map. They are all three tilable and the colors are changed via material.

This is also one of my first attempts at creating a pbr metal material. At first I had a lot of difficulty forming a proper metal material so I settled on going halfway on the metallic node. Later I discovered that was the incorrect way in going about getting a metal material, but I was still getting a very black material when going full metallic. As it turns out I was breaking some of the rules of pbr and once I aligned to the general rules of pbr I started getting some really nice effects. In the end I came up with this for my pipe.

Jack M.

Here are the textures. Due to the struggle I have been having with pbr I used unreals textures as a base to work from. The only one that I didn't modify heavily is the normal map. The rest were changed quite a bit.

UV's



Main Albedo



Detail



Normal

Shiniku

I think you're still breaking some PBR 'rules'. For something meant to be metallic your albedo is very bright.

Also... what is this?

billymcguffin

If he's using a metalness workflow, a bright albedo is fine for metals.

Jack M.

I am using a metalness workflow. Sorry for not disclosing that to begin with.

I also based my luminance off of some of the metal textures that come with the basic content in Unreal to make sure I was as in line as much as possible with Unreals PBR system while still getting some different detail effects.

Also this is a pipe that someone asked me to make from a reference. I had a lot of freedom with the materials, but not a whole lot on the design.

Luckily I have some much bigger and more interesting pieces that you guys might have a better time critiquing for their unique designs, UV's, and non-tiling textures. I will be putting some of these on the thread pretty soon.

Jack M.

Hey everybody,

So I'm doing a little personal project in my spare time to gauge the costs of different assets using a tier based system. For this one I'm making the Sydney Opera House.

It's pretty early in the blockout phase, but it's never too early to get some tips, crits, and advice for tackling challenges I'll most likely bump into down the road.

Here is my reference board, and my progress so far.

JasonHeckmen

Interesting pick. I'm looking forward to seeing how this develops.

Jack M.

Here's a tutorial I made recently on how to make an albedo map from a diffuse map. With this transition to PBR I have found cgtextures.com to be fairly useless because 99% of the textures are not taken with a polarizing lens. With this technique you can remedy that and still get some pretty good albedo maps from diffuse maps.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKQZN3eoKUo&feature=youtu.be

I will also be updating the opera house here soon.

Jack M.

Made a bunch of tweaks and changes to the existing geometry and of course added a bunch of stuff. I need to make some additional stuff and do some tweaking to the existing geometry. Next I'll probably do some optimizing because it's at a pretty absurd polycount for the silhouette I'm trying to achieve. Soon it will be UV and texture time.

Jack M.

Taking a little break from the opera house, I sculpted a piece in zbrush and textured it using substance designer and photoshop. This is my first foray into making textures in zbrush and substance. Any crits would be helpful.

I'm not real happy with how the grass turned out so I'm thinking of ways of fixing that as well.

JasonHeckmen

Good first try man. Although you should probably talk about what you were going for before we can give you proper feedback. The ground looks close to something like scar tissue but I can make out what I think are tire tracks.

Tell us what your vision for this was in depth and maybe we can help you out?

Maximum-Dev

Hello,

I'm not sure how you went about texturing the grass but it looks like its painted with a big radius brush in PS.
The parts that are covered with water have to have a flat normal. Also make sure to use pure white in the gloss map for the water covered areas to get some nice reflections.
The mix of yellow and brown isn't looking good IMO. It's usually better to use a solid color instead of having that much variation in mud textures. Or at least reduce the contrast between the two.
Add some more micro noise so the glossy parts don't look like plastic.

Can give you more feedback when you are done tweaking
And as said before, good first work there.

Jack M.

Thanks for the tips guys. I'll be making some major tweaks on it soon.

The key goals I had in mind while making this texture are as follows:

1) Get some significant depth to the mud (the tire tracks)
2) Get Large Details + Medium Detials + Small Details (Micro detail)
3) Get some good color balance to the texture (get good composition while staying accurate to references)
4) Make several layers to push the depth of the texture
- Grass leaf layer
- Slight imprints where water can reside
- Deep imprints where water would pool

Thanks again guys for the tips. I'll try to make some massive improvements on it for the next update.

Jack M.

Got an update here. Modular house with a lot of texture variations (I think around 30 or so) for Unity.

I will post some of the textures tomorrow.

JasonHeckmen

The interior art direction looks wildly different. What were you going for? What kind of roof is that? It looks like caked mud or something.

Jack M.

Yeah, I was pretty unhappy with the roof texture as well. I recognized the inconsistent design of the interior vs. exterior soon after making it. I actually created a separate thread to help address this issue I have.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=140522

Jack M.

Small sample of the texture work on the house.

Wood texture


Carpet Texture


Dirty blacktop texture

Jack M.

Hey, everybody. Just got done blocking out an old bowling alley scene. It's going to be a collaboration between me and a friend. I'll be uploading an update with some texturing done (he's doing the texturing).

Jack M.

Hey everybody. I'm working on a spaceship. If you have any crits at all please feel free to post. I'll be updating again tomorrow night, so I wanted to get feedback ASAP.

Also if you guys see anything that might give me trouble in the future regarding the UV's or making the low poly any heads up's would be appreciated immensely.

reference:


Render:

Joao Sapiro

hard to read any shapes when you just render with ao and no specular. just take a screengrab of your viewport.

Jack M.

Here's the screengrab of my viewport. Hopefully it's easier to read despite the bad resolution.

Jack M.

Hey everyone. Made some more progress today. The rear is very WIP but any advice/tips you guys have would be invaluable. I'm planning on re-posting the reference image on each post in so it's easy to make comparisons between the renders and reference. If it gets annoying or distracting just let me know and I'll do something different.

Reference:


Render: