THRONE ROOM - Kindom of the Rock - Labmonkey and Daedalus51

Daedalus51

Hey guys!

Eons ago, in time before time, Iceland was home to a culture, now vanished and forgotten.
Mount Skar

labmonkey

Well, by no means a finished concept. But hitting my self imposed timeline for the rough, initial version, thatll have to do for now.

This will probably go through a number of iterations, but at least it should give some sort of indication and direction.

Daedalus51

Small Update: we iterated on the walkway and the overall feel of the environment. Robert made some quick overpaints which you can see here:



I updated the blockout with the new walkway and some other small things and did some first test for the mood in Unreal 4:



We still need to come up with a proper design for the throne (or better say the actual seat ), but thats the next thing to happen anyways

Cheers!

labmonkey

Righto, so since we changed the design of the space somewhat, as shown above, I decided to spend a couple hours on a revised concept.



Not sure yet about the extent of the gold, so I may touch this up at some point

labmonkey

And for good measure, the result of a lot of tinkering with heightmaps in zbrush. Trying to get a few good rock surface alphas out of 2d images. And these represent the first few steps in that direction, and whereas theyre not good enough to be used as is, they may provide a good sculpting base, in a pinch.

I am to understand that bitmap2material would be a good solution for this sort of thing, so I will look into that next. Maybe the results out of that will be a lot better.

In any case, I will continue chipping away at this, as we iron out the last remaining kinks in the composition of the scene.

cataev serj

I like the first surface and the fourth is also satisfactory.

labmonkey

Just noticed the concept was extremely dark on the work computer, so I just lightened it here, since it bothered me to think thats what people might be seeing.

Damn you calibration inconsistencies! At least one of the two should look fine, I hope

Spoon

Yeah this is much better for this monitor calib at least
Looks great! Loving the mood

noscope

this is nice. The lighting in here could really be something special!

Soy13

following. Excellent skills on texturing man.

labmonkey

Forgot to post this earlier, but may as well do it now. A fairly simple ref sheet, mainly for materials and colours

nyloc

nice keep it up!

lopezmolano

Amazing concepts!

EpicBeardMan

I really like the paintover. I admire people with such skills. Good luck and have fun.
Cheers!

Daedalus51

Hey guys, just a small update I did some quick tests for a rock and a gold ore material in Unreal:


And here is a small update to the blockout:


Cheers!

labmonkey

Sculpting rocks is the weirdest thing. A google search would yield the most unusual shapes, but its so ridiculously easy making them feel artificial, all the same.

Anyways, heres the current state. Still work in progress but I feel like its starting to come together and look natural, even if not perfect (yet). Its just the one mesh for now, but Im trying to make it distinct from different angles so we can reuse and rotate it.



I just copied the same mesh a few times and rotated it to see if it would work in principle, so this is the above mesh, 4 times at various rotations.




Starting to look promising, if a little unrefined.:)

Daedalus51

Hey guys, was just trying out a bit of vertex paint stuff to get a feel for the environment. By no means perfect, but I think its something to push further, since it adds a lot of nice detail together with tessellation.


Will continue to work on this to see how much more we could get out of this

Cheers!

lopezmolano

It's looking really nice! I like the atmosphere and the structure in general (the distribution of the entire scene).

Dykov

looks great

labmonkey

Ok, so just an update on the rocks.

Heres the sculpted rock I made earlier, baked down to a quickish lowpoly. And with a random tiling surface applied.





And the first pass at a tiling porous rock. The intention is to use a layered material, and to blend this in along with smoother and rougher rock etc. So this would only be used sparingly, most likely. And its only a sketch really. There is a seam along two edges from the alpha, that I havent bothered removing as of yet, along with numerous other issues. I was hoping to test this out in the shader before investing the time.



And finally, took my daughter to the zoo over the weekend, but figured I might grab my camera and take pictures of rocks, hoping to be able to process them into 3d. So I must have looked pretty daft, taking hundreds of pictures of the same rock, but ignoring, you know.. the animals. Anyway, the results so far are encouraging, even though its taking ages for the computer to process the material.



Have another 10 or so rocks to go through. I think they should prove quite useful, if only to generate heightmaps for zbrush. In any case, it was my first go at photoscanning, and its quite a bit of fun, I think.

labmonkey

Well, this truly is a last second update, but I feel I should post some of the material nonetheless, though its not exactly new at this stage. My bad.

Anyway, in an attempt to nail down the design of the throne, I went back to the drawing board a bit, and mucked around with various silhouettes in alchemy, like so:



We ended up settling on a variation of the tallish one:



Which I proceeded to model out, and play around with inside the quixel suite, as well as Substance designer. toyed with the resulting maps for a bit, trying to get a good stone base, to hopefully add gold to later on.





And to bring it closer to the concept, spent ages figuring out how to do the gold, and not make it look unnatural or bizarre. The below is a bit of a compromise for what seems to work the best in the actual level. (not to mention the timeline)

labmonkey

So following that, spent some time today creating a few simple rock meshes to populate the scene, and tried adding a few basic fog planes to evaluate how that might look.
My partner in crime on this one will do a proper pass on those, so this is just a sort of sketch, if you will.

Worth mentioning at this point that the red lighting is bleeding strangely, and that is being adressed also






Well, time is really against us now, so lets see how much we can pull off before the end

Daedalus51

Haha...yeah, we were a bit lazy with updates So here is also a last minute one from me while I wait for the final light build to finish

I was manly working on all the materials and setups, the scene itself, the outer throne shell and some rocks. For the rocks I used photoscanning as a base.

This is one of the final lowpolys I used:


This is a early wip shot of the throne shell:


And here is another rock material sample:


So, will start working on the final shots for the submission now

Cheers!

Daedalus51

Okay guys...here we are^^ This is the final submission of our work. There is still so much stuff we werent able to finish or even start doing, but overall...it was a total blast!

Since we were a bit lazy with wip updates as well, Labmonkey and I will post some more breakdowns in the coming days to show you guys how we did certain things.

One thing I want to mention is the sad fact that we didnt really use that much of the substance tools. Main reason for it was that we had quite some pressure time wise since we are very busy at work right now (and you know...children eat your time away like sweets as well :P), so I for myself decided to better invest the time I have into building stuff, than learning a new tool and loose some time. However, I have scratched the surface of the allegorithmic tools and I have to say, they are a blast! So I will definitely dig more into that since it was already fun to work with and gave some nice results.

Bitmap2Material however was used for almost all materials I made

So yeah...enough blabla...here are the final shots (and sorry, they are quite dark, havent fixed my monitor calibration and it looks diferent on every screen ):






Here are the throne wips from Labmonkey:








Hope you guys like it and cheers!