Sketchbook: Mahreen Fatima

Cloudydays

Hey guys, my name is Mahreen Fatima and I am currently a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design majoring in Interactive Design and Game Development and minoring in Concept Art for Games. This is my digital sketchbook which will be filled essentially with daily progress on the projects I will be working on.

Thank you for taking the time to look at my work!

Critique is encouraged!

Pub Brawl - Currently in beta being created by a core team of 10 people,  Pub Brawl is a stylized fighting game where players can drink and brawl with their friends across time and space.

Cloudydays

Class assignment: Mailbox

An assignment I've been working on over the past week has been a fantasy mailbox.

Here is the concept of it. I picked the 4.2 silhouette to build off of and put some references onto the canvas to learn how to do 3D trees/foliage since I've not worked with it before. I was inspired by a few pieces I found here on Polycount. In order to keep a bit with the iconic mailbox look, I decided to throw in a little cardinal to represent as the red flag in mailboxes.

Concept Art



3D Modeling: zBrush

I've already worked a few days on the modeling before. So here's the progression of what I have so far:

Day 1


Day 2






Day 3: Currently

Currently I'm working on poke some holes in between the branches at the top to help make the top feel a bit lighter and less mass-heavy. Figuring out how to punch holes through took a while before I figured out that I could insert meshes using zSub. I'll have to re-add some of the detail I had on day 2 after I'm done making holes. Hopefully I'll have the modelling done by the end of the day so I can start texturing tomorrow.

Cloudydays

Tried out Topogun to retopologize bu the holes in the back of the top of the mesh made it really hard to come out with a clean mesh. Ended up using zRemesher to get to my low poly. Baked down in xNormal and textured in Substance painter. For the first time, I tried rendering in UE4. I need to work on the lighting a bit more so that it doesn't leave so many artifact on the mesh but here is the current progress on the fantasy mailbox. Substance painter tries to make the UVs seamless so there's extra unnecessary data in non-UV'd parts that can be ignored. I'll probably go in and clean those out with a mask in Photoshop unless I can find a way to export cleaner maps in Substance Painter

josfield

Nice start Cloudydays!
I think for the overall appearance of your peace it would be beneficial to emphasize the curvature of the tree/mailbox. In your concepts I can see that you were going for some kind of curvature, which would improve the silhouette.
Also, in the back view of your last update the texture on top of your mailbox looks much too glossy.
;-)

Cloudydays

josfield wrote: »

Nice start Cloudydays!
I think for the overall appearance of your peace it would be beneficial to emphasize the curvature of the tree/mailbox. In your concepts I can see that you were going for some kind of curvature, which would improve the silhouette.
Also, in the back view of your last update the texture on top of your mailbox looks much too glossy.
;-)

Thank you for your feedback! Yeah, I need to rework in the curvature that I had in originally in the piece. I have to figure out why it's being so glossy - could it be because of the roughness maps? I've only recently started delving into the PBR workflow and using roughness maps.

Cloudydays

Been up to quite a bit lately and am still pretty busy but here's what I've been working on:

For a juried school gallery for game development students, I have been working on a small environment centered around a cherry blossom tree with Japanese garden bridges/planks over a small pond as a secondary focal point. I am on a time crunch though as submissions are due in only a couple days.

Rough composition sketch:


I modeled the cherry blossom tree base in Maya, brought it into zBrush to sculpt, and then used zRemesh to retopologize quickly. For the main trunk/branches, I've been using Substance Painter again and at first came up with this:



I quickly realized that this was too bland but also too light of a color for a sakura tree. So, changing it up a bit I am now at (includes reference pictures for blossoms):



Rendering in Keyshot, I checked out if the blossoms looked alright. I will, of course, actually place the blossom/branch planes in a more efficient pattern. This was just to test and see how things were looking:





I will be doing a lot of work over the weekend. Hopefully, I get everything done in time for the submission deadline.

Cloudydays

I haven't updated this sketchbook in a while but I thought I'd throw in a piece that I'm currently working on. This is the facade for the "Valhalla" level for the student game that my team is working on that I've been working on. I've been taking the concept art that my art director did and have done all of the modeling and texturing myself (the base wood texture was created by another artist but I went in to make variations of that base wood in substance designer and then painted on variations in substance painter). We ended up making the door a separate mesh so it's not seen in the button two pictures. This has been my process on it so far:

For more on this project, check out my website for the game Pub Brawl: http://www.mahreenfatima.com/





(I realize in the last shot my mouse was hovering over the dragon's nose so it kinda looks like there's a huge white snowflake on his nose!)

heroslime

Really cool! Can we see the flat textures for this?

Cloudydays

heroslime said:

Really cool! Can we see the flat textures for this?

Yeah sure! Here are diffuse and the roughness textures:



I'm redoing the normals (right now there's only placeholder normals from wood that's not shown in the above shots). There's also not a lot of metallic on the asset (only on the tops and bottoms of the horns).

Cloudydays

The team that I've been working with from college on Pub Brawl has finally finished a beta of our game! With that I've gotten a chance to do some breakdowns of the work that I've done for this project so far. Here are some ingame screenshots and then some of my breakdowns. More work and the trailer can be found on my site: http://www.mahreenfatima.com/






I got to do the hero asset Bar for this level (Valhalla). I did the initial low poly, following the concept done by our art director. The shape of the bar changed before it came back to me and then I served as the finishing artist on modeling by doing the high poly detailing sculpting.



I also did some of the roughs for the low polys and upheld the shape language of our models as set by the art director and our concept art.



And as I've posted above once already, I also had the opportunity to do the level select façade for this level. After other environment artists created the base textures for the level, I made substance designer materials out of them so that any artists using substance would have the ability to quickly texture assets.