Monthly Community Noob Challenge November 2015 (35)
polycounter lvl 7
Regarding the future of MNC: http://polycount.com/discussion/161707/goodbye-to-the-monthly-noob-challenge#latest
Hello everyone and welcome to the Monthly Noob Challenge for the month of November.
Welcome back to yet another month full of exciting environment art. The year is rounding down to a close but I am still looking forward to the creations you guys put out. Reminder: Hosts of the challenge might change after December, so if you are interested in hosting future challenges, please PM me here.
You don't need to ask to participate in the challenge, just start working and post your progress in this thread!
Artist - Sung Choi
Feel free to approach either of the concepts however you like but I'd recommend making it as modular as possible to save time and keep things optimized. It's really up to you, and as long as you are learning, it doesn't matter right?
Also if you want to change up either concept a bit, as some people wanted, then feel free. Interpret these concepts to your liking.
There are some things that I would like to point out to for newcomers.
If you only want to do a few props as best you can, then feel free to go ahead and do it. This way you can gradually work on building up to a full scene before diving head-first into the whole ordeal.
Please read all the rules before starting.
When you are just starting out making a scene, it can seem complicated or imposing, so take the time to break it down.
Think about how you can re-use assets, re-use textures, break it down as simple as possible and plan it out. A lot of people will break it down in their own way when they start out their challenge. Gather some reference images as well for different parts of the scene, maybe gather some refs and make it your own.
Take your time planning and blocking out, it will set you up for success later on.
Here are some specifics.
- Try to post one critique for every post that you make. This will make for a better learning environment and help us all grow as artists.
- You must use a game engine to present your work. Unreal Engine and CryEngine are very common engines that can be used, but feel free to use any alternatives that you want.
- You must try your best and finish as much as you can in the time frame provided.
- Post what you are working on in this thread so that way it's a more centralized place for advice and critique. We don't need to have 1000 disjointed threads littering the forums.
- I would strongly encourage you to go and look at other games and see how they make their assets as well as get concept art to give it your own feel, but it must stay very close to the concept, if not super close.
- Please stay away from using Ddo. It's great if you know what you're doing, and for a production pipeline supplement, but other than that, please don't use it. Ndo2 is allowed.
All that matters is that you learn, while being able to effectively critique others, as well as accept critiques on your own work. Remember to have fun. Cheers!
Replies
I´ll try my hand again on this one. Even if I have thought of learning Mudbox later, this concept screams sculpting to me. And the colors of the structures should give me room to experiment with painting textures, wear and aging without having to consider too many color transitions.
I´ve taken the suggestion to heart and split the image (very nice concept by the way) in managable parts. At first everything except the skulls in the front looked like a rock to me until I realised that they are shaped like animal heads. I am not realy sure about the right one in the Front (maybe it´s a whale?)
I will use the opurtunity to learn some things about Mudbox. I will use 3Ds Max for the Base Models and Photoshop (or Corel Painter, I am not decided right now) to paint the textures.
First I will have to finish a mapping/texture painting Tutorial I am currently on, then I will start with the blocking out.
Looking forward to see how far I am able to go this time and I am excited to see the awesome things you will do with the concept.
Happy modeling!
//EDIT:
I´ve done a very quick Blockout of the "Gorilla Rock" to show what I meant - the roundness of the upper part doesn´t seem natural to me, the eye in the middle and the nose in front (I´ve taken a bit of liberty with the mouth, I don´t think I will keep that since it is not in the Artwork) convince me that it is a sculpted piece, man (or alien) made and not natural. Skulls was the wrong term, Heads, Idols or Monuments fit the description better.
I will join this month! Long time since. Once more into the frey! And yes.... since until now there is only one Concept up... I will attempt to solve this one.
Here is my interpretation of the scene so far:
These are a very rough whiteboxing and then a projected scene to check the feel in comparison to the Concept Painting.
Let's see if ever I come to make the two characters... Environment goes first. Engine of choice will be CryEngine.
Good hunt!
Sir Dillon
...don't think these are skulls. ^^
If you decide to make them skulls, you should prepare for the fact that each of them will be a unique asset. With a unique texture/material.
If you make it rocks, you can make more modular or at least re-usable assets which share textures. --> saves time.
good huning!
My block-in is done in UE4 which will be my main engine of choice this time (as is most of the time!). Up next I'm planning on sculpting at least 2 large rocks for the bulk of the masses. Then in the back I am seeing a large rock wall facade.
The models overall would be:
- 2-4 different rocks (painted via Substance Painter)
- 1 rock wall facade
- 2 diferent types of boney stuff for the things near the front, one spine part and one tusky/rib part
- 1 sand skirt? at least I think thats the term for them... they are the skirts of sand tufts/drifts that kinda help blend the ground to the surrounding walls.
Nice Blockout, your Ribcage looks very promising! I would love to see you do the characters! Character Art is way out of my league for now but I am sure they will look very cool.
@Limewax:
Unfortunatly I can´t be of much help but your materials look like a very good start to me. Maybe the sand is a bit to yellow, as I see it the hue of the sand in the concept is more of an orange.
Unfortunatly I am not realy sure if I am up to make it look as cool as it looks in my mind but I will do my best to bring it to life. I don´t think I am stretching the concept too far at that point because I intend to stick close to the shapes and the silouhete provided in the artwork. Maybe I will tweak it here and there but more or less it should look very similar to the artwork once I am finished.
Enough of the words - here are my first steps. I have to warn you, I am still a greenhorn in 3Ds Max and Today was the first Time I realy opened Mudbox with the intention to create something and not just play around with it.
Here is the Gorilla Head in Max, as I said I´ll try to stay true to the concept. I will place another Rockshape behind this one to provide the rocky parts on the ground - I choose to see them as a seperate piece behind the Gorilla Rock.
As I´ve learned in the Tutorial - Quads only, roughly the same size, I checked with turbosmooth if there was something weird in the topology and nothing caught my eye, it seemed to subdivide well enough.
Then I started to refine the shape in Mudbox with my very limited knowledge and I have to say that I am pretty satisfied with my first steps in this awesome tool. The Gorilla Rock is turning out to look like I envisioned it since I´ve taken a second look at the concept.
It is far from finished, I will have to add some facial details and traces of the tools that were used to bring it out of the rock - chips and something like that. The flat "steps" on the sides of the face are intended - I have something in mind for them.
Have Fun! I am looking forward to see your results and learn a lot along the way!
@Count Crushmore
You should really just go ahead with your idea. I'd like to see the result you come up with. I haven't ever used Mudbox myself. So don't expect big critique from me there... but what you have done so far looks fine, I think
I was going to post some stuff myself too. Unfortunately my machine just died yesterday night. =(( So far I have no idea how fast I will get it fixed. But I'm kind of worried that that's the K.O. for me for this Challenge. Even if I get the project recovered I will have lost quite some time by then..
Wish me luck!
have fun with your work and your Challenge!
The Dillon
@RadioActiveBritt: Now that you say it - there are still some formations that I havn´t identified. Since I am planning to use this challenge to aquire some basic Mudbox Skills and hopefully a nice scene filled with animal frescos in a canyon the sloth is set (maybe not the highest priority but it is on the list since the overall shape should fit very well in the concept. The smaller shape underneath it may be a rat that I´ve overlooked, I will have to update the blockout very soon).
Today was a slow day, I did not get much further, but I did some additional Lessons on Mudbox and I realy love the layerbased workflow, a nice contrast to the Ctrl+Z Workflow in Max. Something went wrong? Delete the Layer and start again, very convinient.I got a bit carried away while working in Mudbox and strayed from the concept - I added the typical "Gorilla Brow" to get a strong silouhette together. At this point I decided that I would need to alter some aspects here and there but I will try to stay as near to the concept as possible while following my interpretation of it.
The Gorilla Shape is coming together while it is still somewhat close to the shape in the concept (if you ignore the dent of the Brow). I am still not satisfied with the structure of the Head itself but since it is on a seperate layer I will be able to use another stencil to realise the "Hewn Rock" look that I wanted, right now it still looks too natural, even with the dents and scratches.
Well, still a lot to learn and still a lot to do but Mudbox is great fun and a realy powerfull tool.
Have fun altogether!
I made a cliff
hi guys
I put the cliff in Unreal4
but I can't choose fog color. it's too green lol
just checking in. Nice to see that some more people join and put up their creations.
@Limewax
your feel of the space is quite good I think. Can we have some colours please? ^^ any preliminary mockup materials to throw in?
@Count_Crushmore
hey, watch out that you don't have too much symmetry in your assets. At least in the final... Its just too obvious to the human eye and kind of kills the natural feel of things. If you're done sculpting, just shift it out of its symmetry slightly.... or find some other workaround to achieve a non-mathematical feel.
@Rago
nice progress! personally I got the feeling that you are a little short on space in the foreground. but baybe thats just a misinterpretation. maybe put some whiteboxings for the characters and the rib-bones in. Just some stand-ins. To see if your space and depth are good.
man... I'm so squeezing tears here. want to resume work!
keep yours running on guys!
cheers!
The Dillon
Nice silhouettes so far! I like how you're retaining the main negative space in the middle. How many sculpts in total are you using? I've determined I might be able to get away with using only 3 meshes for most of the large forms.
@count_crushmore
I think that your surfaces could probably benefit by having some areas for the eye to rest in all of the surface detail noise.... but all that could change when you get it in your scene. Goodluck with the skull representation thing, I sorta saw the same thing when I first looked at them.
----------
I've got some updates to share. Using this project to really get an understanding on Substance Painter as I feel like this is a great project to get started with it, and I'm so glad that I took the time to learn Designer first. Picking up painter has been very second nature!
Here's a quick shader test that I started doing before I really got to composing my scene together:
Right now I'm looking to add some of the foreground elements, the bones, of course, but I'm also thinking about adding some geo to the terrain as well. Those exposed rock bits where the sand sorta reveals the rockiness underneath may actually benefit from having some real geo in there for my scene at least. In the bottom left section I'm thinking about adding some wind sculpture elements like this: http://wildwill.smugmug.com/photos/234400978-L.jpg -- on that same note, I'm finding that this is a good reference point for me thats a bit more diverse then the standard dry rocks I had been looking at for reference in the beginning: http://www.motorcyclistcafe.com/forums/showthread.php?4430-The-Sea-Elephant-s-Geology
Here's where I am right now:
I'm almost wondering how I can make the near-ground area darker in the same sense that the concept is... right now it's in shadow, but I'm trying to think of ways to simulate the same sort of shadowing from the concept. Perhaps the concept is looking out from a cave? I've made quite a large gorge map to play around with... in fact, here is another shot that I found interesting that shows off more of the gorge-ish area. I think this shot better showcases the sand as well.
I've done a quick blockout of the canyon, that roughly matches the reference. I aim to use a few large sections to create the cliffs, with a variety of smaller assets to populate the scene. I've not done much environment work before, so I'll be sure to learn some new techniques.
These are quick GL renders from Blender, but I will be using Unity to assemble the scene.
Have fun, goodnight.
Nice start, the color and surface look very good but I agree, the fog looks weird at the moment. And the light might be too harsh I think.
@Sir_Dillon:
Thank you for the suggestion. I´ll try to break up the symmetry. I´ve already turned symmetrical sculpting off when I was doing the surface scratches but as they are just a minor detail the sence of Symmetry from the rocky surface still stays. I´ll have to rework the Gorilla Rock once I found a stencil that fits the surface of the rocks from the concept better and I´ll take that suggestion to heart - I will only do bigger details and the base shape with the help of Symmetry and do the details by hand.
@Limewax:
You are totally right - my surface is plain wrong at the moment. I wasn´t able to find the right stencil in Mudbox that fits the surface in the concept where there aren´t as much cracks in the rocks, it will take down the disturbance I hope. Your Sand and Rocks look realy great - I will try to come closer to your Rock surface but as the surface is on a layer it should be possible once I found the right stencil (I am looking into a tutorial how to get Photoshop Brushes into Mudbox, I hope that will solve my problem).
@DAN-R:
Nice Start, good to hear that I won´t be the only one to use Unity.
Well, I haven´t made much progress, I watched some additional Tutorials but wasn´t quite able to export the Maps from Mudbox for my Lowpoly to bring the rough Gorillarock Prototype into the scene - I´ll have to rewatch it closely and search for my mistake. In the meantime I started with the neighbour of the Gorilla (I´ve labled it Lizzard but in hindsight it is clearly a Toad).
The Basemesh in 3Ds Max.
The Front view with a Turbosmooth Modifier applied to check if it is subdividing as it should.
Then I´ve taken the Toad for a walk in Mudbox and I am pretty satisfied with the upper Part but -
I am forced to redo the Base Mesh - at first I´ve interpreted the ribbed Part as the Inside of the Mouth (like the filter [Baleen - at least that is what Wikipedia told me those things are called] of a whale). They don´t work out the Way I wanted - so I´ll redo it and use the lower part as the Belly of the Toad - I hope that will work better).
A short question: How well do Mudbox and Substance Painter combine, as they both rely on Maps, will they conflict on the endresult or do they work well together?
Nice Progress so far - keep going! I am looking forward to see the results.
Good work so far!
@Limewax
Wow, looks great! Nice shape and color.
I like the concept, also want to try myself in sculpting rocks. Here I made the first cliff and imported it to UE4.
I am happy to announce my machine is fixed up and I am back at work. Nice seeing some more people pop in. Still quite silent here though.
ok. I lost almost ten days for this challenge. but I'll try to keep up. I have done some rock-modelling and painting. and I have switched to whiteboxing and now populating the scene in Cryengine.
no critique to my materials, guys. For they are either a very quick and dirty polypaint albedo with no g- n- s-maps, or they are engine-innate (ground). Awesome materials coming asap...
this is only a brief visit to the forum today. I'll show some more stuff next two days.
have a nice weekend!
Sir_Dillon
@Sir_Dillon - Dont feel bad m8, I just lost 10 days myself to a family cruise we had planned for the last year... couldn't really miss out on it. But I'm nose to the grindstone tomorrow back on this project. I'm seeing the benefit of adding those foreground objects to the scene that will really spice up my own work. Keep goin!
quick update: Materials getting more refinded. Made the first bone sculpts and materials. Rock-material got a bit attention but ... They are all still far from done.
where is your stuff, people?
post post post!
Sir_Dillon
I'm a long time lurker and I wanted to join this challenge but was working on another environment, so I was hesitant about posting. I'm a pretty good way in now though so I guess I'll join the thread for the last 5 days!
My work so far:
Blockout-
I decided to make the leftmost huge as opposed to having 2-3 different meshes for the rock, unlike a lot of people here, I'll have to see how this pans out in Unreal.
I then did a 3D blockout in Maya and started sculpting in Z brush, Ive already baked out some of the maps so here are the high poly meshes for the rocks as seen in Maya
I hope to get some massive texturing work done today. I'll keep you posted!
@jpmiranda - Welcome to the forum, tall order to do in a few days, but I would say its possible! Just be efficient and try your best
Updates:
So I discovered that we are actually looking out of some sort of cave? The only way I can get the lighting to really play out like how it is in the concept is if you're looking out from some sort of covered area. Overall, I really like the new lighting set up because I feel like it helps me separate foreground, midground and background.
Working on some foreground bones (bottom right corner) and scale stuff in the final days. I'm thinking about adding some sort of thing to help blend the transitional edges, not entirely sure yet. I also pulled my camera back some from where it was earlier. The ground/terrain is probably totally impractical for "real studio implementation" as its a tessellated material, but I was able to do some scene trickery for optimization fun and make it so that the tessellation is based off of camera distance. The good news from that work is that the foreground rocks are now entirely material/texture based instead of having to make a separate model for them.
I'm open to feedback in the final push.
The final details will be done tomorrow, mainly looking to add some medium level details like small rocks, pebbles, small flat rock plate-like things? I have had too much fun working on this project and really looking forward to showing it off soon!
Yo9u guys are getting some sexy results, so would anyone be willing to share their process?
@Sir_Dillon: Nice to hear that you are up and running again! Your take on the scene looks very nice, but I think the shadows on the lefthand Side might be a bit too strong. Impressive how far you came after your setback through your crashed machine.
@Limewax: Amazing! It has a nice surreal tone to it - I love it!
I have to admit that I didn´t get far since my last update, unfortunatly I didn´t find enough time to finish this challenge. Well, at least I may show what I´ve done so far (even if it is not much):
I prepared two additional "Rockface Base Meshes" to bring into Mudbox to get something done but It wasn´t meant to be. Well, I´ll keep at it since I had much fun this month, I learned a lot about Mudbox but I also realised that it might have been to soon to tackle such a big scene as a first Mudbox Project and with my limited Max Knowledge. My old Nemesis UV-Mapping has raised its ugly head again, the day draws near where I´ll have to conquer that foe once and for all and make him my ally.
Well, even if I just said that it was too early to participate I´ll be along next month. The Challenge in Addition to tutorials gives me motivation to improve and priceless feedback in the thread (I´ll watch out for Symmetry - nice for sculpting but ends up looking to artificial and pay more attention to give the eye some place to rest on instead of cluttering all surfaces with too many details).
Thanks again for all your kind words and advice and not at least for showing me what a skilled modeller/sculpter is able to do, it keeps me motivated to get there myself one day in the future.
All of the textures were created by me using substance (except the smallest little pebbles, those were photosourced). I sculpted mostly everything in zbrush. All of the rocks are running a 2k maps. The terrain base was a fun material blend to work on, and I've got some distance based tessellation happening (that doesnt reeeeeally affect the screenshots all that much) but in the future, I would definitely make the parts of the terrain as mesh instead of relying so much on terrain trickery. Additionally, the terrain is tessellated where those little rocky bits get closer to the camera, and the sand dunes are definitely catching a bit of the tessellation as well. The furthest away rock sculpture probably got the least amount of love, it was a huge chunk of a wall, big facade. Then again, I'm glad I did that piece first because it warmed me up for the rest of the environment.
And here are some bonus images that I thought were pretty neat compositions, albeit slightly overblown.
So long, wulf! You've been good to me with these challenges, even if I was a lurker for most of them... and I'm looking forward to more adventures with the Polycount community.
This was probably the most fun I've had working on something in quite some time... it really got me pumped up to work on something again real soon.
@Limewax
I like your result. the scene looks quite fine. Has a little bit a surreal touch, as has been mentioned before. But that's not a bad thing.
CONGRATS!
as you are the first to deliver a final shot!
I myself have not yet delivered. Strange, but my softwares are no more operational. Maybe its some RAM now that also signed off... I will deliver as soon as I can.
Wish me luck!
Cheers!
Sir_Dillon
Almost as though I never smoothed it! Anyway as I search for a solution to this I thought you'd like to see what the scene looks like so far:
Since this might be one of the last official challenges for some time, I just wanted to thank everyone who posted their work here, It was super cool seeing other people work on the same project as I did and it really inspired me to give it all I could!