Freelance work for The Forest

AlecMoody

Hi Everyone,
I recently started work on the indie game, The Forest. One perk with this contract is that they are allowing me to post work when their monthly patches come out. I plan to update this thread twice a month with what I have been working on.

This represents my first two and a half weeks of work on the project and my first time digging into Unity 5's new features.





From gameplay:

Pedro Amorim

Love it!

Felixenfeu

Really clean work ! Good job !

xChris

show those wires!

joecamotive

Second for wires, por favor

AlecMoody

The wires on the chair are pretty messy, I had to get it done in 3 days to make it into this patch:


I have plans to go back and redo the upholstery. Right now it kind of lacks character and I think it would look better with some construction seams and more drapery matching the material.

Carabiner

How many polys is the chair lowpoly model? I'm curious, I'm still learning a lot about 3D and I guess I was under the impression that one should strive for lower poly density than your model. But your model looks freaking great in-engine so maybe that's considered totally acceptable! Thoughts?

ysalex

I believe that the wire shot of the chair is of the high-poly, and the low poly (not shown) is optimized for the engine.

Carabiner

Oh okay, that would make more sense based on what I've picked up so far! Cool cool cool.

AlecMoody

The first release with my new plane came out yesterday. Here are a few images of the interior- More details on the artstation page I made for it:
http://www.artstation.com/artwork/airplane-interior-for-the-forest

I didn't do the lighting and unfortunately we weren't able to use any of the new fancy lighting features in Unity 5. The plane is animated for the crash sequence and then gets placed at different orientations in the world to randomize the player's starting conditions. As a result, things like local reflections probes break (since they don't inherit rotations). The current lighting solution is just point and spot lights.

DavidCruz

I've seen the game play and the intro (thanks to pewdie) really cool props, congrats.
The only thing the stacked boxes on the blue carpet (behind the seats) there in the 2nd image look like they are floating other than that ace.

AlecMoody

And here are a bunch of images of the exterior of the plane:

Clark Coots

Love that crashed hull shader, very smart! Are you using the same UV layout for all the layers?

AlecMoody

Yep, Just one UV layout. It has a unique unrwap with careful attention paid to the orientation of the tiling paneling. The tiling for different maps is set differently. There are also some decals on the exterior for text. With the decals, the entire exterior texture maps add up to ~11.5mb.

Millenia

Smart stuff Alec, well optimised!

AlecMoody

This is something I did last week - It took me just under two days. Breakdowns and more details here:
http://www.artstation.com/artwork/modern-axe-for-the-forest

Joshflighter

So much awesome stuff in this thread! Great work man!

Stavaas

Your texturework is superb mate! Would it be possible to get a look at your workflow?

TrevorJ

Great work!

Stavass,I believe he links to some write ups he did in the art station link.

whw

Very nice work, Alec. Thanks for sharing the breakdowns and workflows - it's interesting you would use ZBrush to generate the various surfacing maps, I guess it workaround having to explode and export to XNormal.

Christian Nordgren

Stuff looks freaking great, thanks for those breakdowns

LaurentiuN

we want more!!! Please

AlecMoody

whw wrote: »

Very nice work, Alec. Thanks for sharing the breakdowns and workflows - it's interesting you would use ZBrush to generate the various surfacing maps, I guess it workaround having to explode and export to XNormal.

Everything is still baked in xnormal but I am just outputting object space and then vertex colors off of several sets of highpoly models. AO and cavity in xnormal are the slowest outputs so it's a huge time saver. I also prefer the look of the cavity masking that zbrush generates.

whw

Alec, would you mind explaining a bit more regarding the AO and cavity generation please? You're not using UVMaster and as you say, you're still using XNormal so what exactly is this "time saver" if you're still baking down from high to lowpoly?

AlecMoody

Sure. So first off I don't decimate anything ever. It is faster to bake ao and cavity this way (and I like the quality a lot more) then to decimate and use the ray traced methods in xnormal.



AO is basically the same process but I drop the subdivisions a few steps to keep zbrush from crashing. I think this Ao took about 5 seconds to calculate and it is totally smooth and clean.

AlecMoody

Also, occasionally on simple objects I will just polypaint in more texture information. here is a baseball that I did a while back. Texture painting on this literally took 10 minutes and the bakes were very fast since I was only outputting normals and vertex colors:


The total time spent to model, texture, and set up materials in unity on this was probably less than an hour:

whw

Wow! Thank you for the quick response. Yes, I can see how that is a time saver - I'd never considered doing it this way. I'll use this method for my next project I promise!

AlecMoody

I have been doing nature sculpting and materials - which is not really my thing but is a lot of fun. The texture resolutions are all pretty low but I am using carefully masked detail albedo and normals to work in more detail without making things a busy mess.

AlecMoody

Several new tiling cave materials:

MeshModeler

all this stuff is hot.

AlecMoody

Yeah. 3dsmax 2010 here. I refuse to use caddies!

All the organic stuff is 99% zbrush.

Kyle KR

Very impressive stuff

xChris

Curious if you're polypainting those rocks or using references/textures? Neat stuff!

AlecMoody

I haven't done much actual polypainting in zbrush for the cave sculpts. I do output a cavity mask in both directions (cavity -100 and +100), and a peaks and valleys mask. The other supporting maps I usually use are curvature and AO (which is used to create some dirt masks). My texture PSDs usually involve a fairly smooth tiling rock texture (with no cracks or large scale forms) and then about a dozen layers of solid colors masked with the supporting maps to locally reduce fine scale noise and create tonal relationships.

Mr-Brett

I really like the mix of weathered smoothness and harsh angles on the rocks.

AlecMoody

Some new stuff:






And we finally got heightmap texture blending for static meshes. Here is an example with two of my cave materials: