USR "Colossus" - Fractured Space [Finished]

Millenia

Decided to rebuild the first ship I ever made for Fractured Space since it could use a fair bit of love. Concept art by Mike Hill:



Built the rear third of the ship - ~100k tris so far, ~12 tiling/modular materials. Max viewport render:



Recommend opening the above image in a tab as it is fairly high res.

Kihlstrand

Hey dude!

I looked through your portfolio and saw more of these ships, how much time does it take to complete one? Impressive as hell! You got to have some real discipline to finish monster projects like this!

Subscribing to this thread!

PS:
Six Million Polygon Man - "Gentlemen, we can retopo him. We have the Zbrush."

Laughed way too much to this than hahaha.

Millenia

Thanks man! The time to complete varies quite a lot by the type, design and size of the ship and whether I have concept art for it or not. Basically, the first four ships I made for the game (Colossus, Watchman, Disruptor and Brawler) I had concept art for, which I can crank out in about a week and a half including export, LODs and all that fun stuff.

Newer ships that I concept myself tend to take about 2½-3 weeks since I tend to concept them as I build them and try to iterate on the design as I go along.

Ootrick

Great work! I admire your attention to detail, would love to hear more about your workflow or a breakdown! 

Millenia

I might have to do one at some point - my lead artist Alex Clarke wrote a nice article on ship design itself for the 3d World magazine for the August 2016 number.


Almost finished with the midsection.

Nicorepe

Really nice man, have you built a kitbash of diferent parts for your ships and update them as you work?. Looks amazing.

Damian Nachman

Hardsurface boner at full force. 
Will look that magazine issue up, really intrigued regarding the workflow.

CharacterCarl

Amazing work! I wonder how you go about distributing texture resolution on assets this big? Are you going for an even texel density or do you tone it down in certain areas to save space?

Millenia

Nicorepe said:

Really nice man, have you built a kitbash of diferent parts for your ships and update them as you work?. Looks amazing.

Cheers! Kind of, I have a couple of modular kitbash kits used to build specific things but for the most part, I tend to just strip big pieces off ships and put them on other ones. All the white paneling especially just uses a simple tiling texture that I hand-place UVs on to get interesting breakup going.

DerRazputin said:

Amazing work! I wonder how you go about distributing texture resolution on assets this big? Are you going for an even texel density or do you tone it down in certain areas to save space?

Kind of, though I tend to try and aim for somewhat even panel size rather than texel density. You usually don't get to see these close enough in-game to be even able to tell the difference in texel density so it's never really a big issue. The only bits with bespoke textures are a handful of modular kitbash parts I made for the warp drives & things like thrusters & hangar bay doors.

Here's a little update in Unreal 4.

A_GAME

Amazing Work, Man! I would love to get into hard surface modeling but it all seems so time consuming! I have so much respect for people who are able to do stuff like this!

EmkaStudios

Amazing work

amirabd2130

awesome work

Kihlstrand

Nice progress, how many materials do you usually end up with in UE4 for one ship?

Millenia

Kihlstrand said:

Nice progress, how many materials do you usually end up with in UE4 for one ship?

Usually my ships have around 20 different submaterials - it could easily be reduced, but since we make skins for the ships inside Unreal by creating a material override list, it keeps them nice and modular

Millenia

Progress,

Millenia

Millenia

Aaaaaand it is all done, finally! Artstation here: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qv11a

Sorry for the following flood of high res images:





Comparison GIFs:

Millenia

So as an optimisation thing, I decided to make the panel textures into a nice dynamic shader that allows me to adjust the wear, scratch, discolouration etc parameters in-engine while allowing me to recolour the textures easily. Previously, the ships were using Photoshop made textures for the different colour variants that isn't too efficient. Improved the look of them slightly as well:



In-engine example - the dark grey, white, crimson and dark blue panel textures all use that same parent in different material IDs. Will be super handy for skins!

that_guy_nik

do you have a massive library of greebles and elements that you reuse in all your sci fi designs? Because if I look at the ship I can see that many if the elements repeat multiple times. Love this ship, it looks absolutely amazing

Millenia

that_guy_nik said:

do you have a massive library of greebles and elements that you reuse in all your sci fi designs? Because if I look at the ship I can see that many if the elements repeat multiple times. Love this ship, it looks absolutely amazing

It's not so much an organized library as me just going in and gutting pieces from one ship to the other, haha. Definitely try to reuse certain components for both speed and consistency's sake, since realistically a spaceship manufacturer like this would want to make their designs as modular as possible to shave off manufacturing costs.