Sketchbook: Tom
Hi guys, long time lurker here- finally posting to try and motivate myself and keep track of progress. I'm fairly new to 3d, having worked in 2d for a few years as an illustrator I'm now looking to broaden my skills and my options for the future a bit.
So to start here's a long term project I've been working on to recreate one of my favourite video game locations- the town of Suran from the game Morrowind. It's very nostalgic to me- and I really wanted to see it realised in a more "visually fulfilling" manner shall we say? I'm not going to keep exactly to the original design but rather to take the basic features and layout and then interpret the location in my own way.
Here's a picture of Suran from the original game:
The idea is to bring Into a modern game engine (Unreal Engine 4) and along the way to learn all the necessary skills to take an asset from concept to completion and placement in the game engine, as well as the ins and outs of the engine itself.
Ok, to start here's the docks. With a little Unreal fella for scale. A textureless Red mountain is visible in the top left of the image.
Here's the bridge where a player typically enters the town for the first time- after walking through the lush fields of the Ascadian Isles. Right now it's just a box- but eventually It'll be beautiful rope bridge. That grey lump in the middle distance is placeholder for a Siltstrider.
Here's the entrance to the town. Already I've taken a few liberties with the design.
The central plaza. The bottom left building is in fact a strip club.
The temple, which I've made a little bigger and more dramatic. I almost want that Hagia Sophia on the Istanbul skyline effect- something to fix the composition of the town. Note that none of these assets are finished. Most don't have lightmaps or textures and those that do are temporary or work in progress.
Looking down the main "street". I've set some of the buildings up so you can walk straight in- which you could never do in the original game without a loading screen. Because of that loading screen transition the designers of the original game were never compelled to actually make the insides of the buildings match the outsides. Consequently Morrowind houses have a Tardis-like quality of being more spacious and labyrinthine inside than they should be. I don't have that luxury here. I've yet to decide how to approach that...
Finally- here's an overview of the world looking towards Vivec- the largest city in the game. It's not meant to be seen from this height so you can see the limits of the world on the left there.
...And another looking in the opposite direction. Morrowind fans may notice that among other things I've expanded the docks and added a boat. I always thought the description of the town didn't tally with it's layout. And the bigger docks seemed necessary. Of course this approach taken to it's logical conclusion would mean me adding all the other things a "real" feeling town needs like the residential areas, toilets and clothes lines and all the other minutiae of civilisation. I have to prevent myself from actually doing all that since I've got enough on my plate as it is!
I've got a long way to go, but I'm pretty happy with basic bones I have so far. Right now I'm struggling with particle systems- so once I've got that down it'll be time to add some smoke to Red Mountain!
Thanks for looking! 
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I've also been experimenting with rocks. What type, colour and scale to use? What is the real life equivalent for the geology of Morrowind? I'm thinking volcanic basalt and reddish sandstone for the lower areas. Some of the sea rocks in game vaguely echo the sort of thing you see off the coast of Thailand- so I'd like to push that idea a bit.
I've got a new temporary water shader. It looks a lot better than my placeholder but it doesn't tick all the boxes yet. Needs translucency.
I've started setting up the interior of one of the buildings (Ralds Oril's tradhouse). Having a little trouble with light bleed at the moment. It's a lot smaller inside than it is in the game!
Siltstrider placeholder with a little unreal fella for scale. need to retopologise and texture him before I can bring the final thing in. I've also added waterlillies around the shallows- the water heavy culture of the local area reminds me of pictures of Kerala and the Mekong delta.
Finally- here's the bridge placeholder. Lots left to do.!
Heads! Sculpted in Zbrush- rendered in 3D Coat.
Siltstrider high poly is done. Low poly is also done, I just need to texture him now.
Here he is waiting by the striderport for passengers.
I've been messing with the lighting too. Trying to make it more "Morrowindy".
I also ended up replacing the entire map since some strange problem with Unreal was ruining my lightmaps. On the brightside most of the town assets are blocked in now and it's just a matter of fixing & refining shaders and assets.
Here's some of the other things I've been working on:
Modelled and rendered in Blender, making good use of the"hard-ops" addon.
A personal character design inspired by Overwatch.
Barbel is genetically modified and bionically enhanced catfish. I imagined him as a defensive character that blocks opponents and their attacks using his trusty bubble-gun.
The project took about 3 months on and off. I wrote up a little summary of things I learned on my blog
You can also the model in 3d on sketchfab
And something I'm currently working on for fun and practice- as a bit of a change- this guy is going to be a hand-painted character model...