Craig Payne's Work thread improvement blog.

PatsuKiki

Hi guys and gals, I'm starting off this thread as I've been nagged for the longest time to get one started by my lecturers and finally biting the bullet. 
Just gonna be posting in order to get any feedback and critique from the wealth of insanely amazing artists on this site. 

PatsuKiki

So to start this thread off, I posted around a year ago my MOON environment and at the time it was a second year uni assignment. But recently as I had a little time, I wanted to give the lighting and the roughness textures a little TLC as I had received some great feedback advice but never found the time until recently to make the changes. The light strips in the wall columns now have a dirty grill texture applied and the ceiling light grills also have a more noticeable texture than before. All surfaces now have a lot more rough variation to make them glimmer as one of the critiques I got was that everything felt too 'matte'. I also played with different colour combos. I wanted the comms area to stand out more than everything else so I gave it more of a white light like in the film. And added fairy dust to add a bit of 'lived in' feel. 

Here's before: 




Here's now:









If you can think of anything that would help to improve it, I would appreciate it. 
Cheers

Craig

Will_M

I love this kind of style you have and the treatment of the light is really atmospheric

littleclaude

PatsuKiki said:

Hi guys and gals, I'm starting off this thread as I've been nagged for the longest time to get one started by my lecturers and finally biting the bullet.

And that's why we nag because we see great work.

Love the new direction for the brown panel strips, the lighting reads so much better as well. A bit more direction on focal point would be nice, see image below. Love the new sepia tone.

Only got to put up with us until May 2017 and then your free. Ha-ha!! super proud of you, keep it up!

littleclaude

Ace

The mood from the lighting is fantastic. Only thing I could suggest is perhaps playing around with having some personal items around/on the desk?

PatsuKiki

Will_M said:

I love this kind of style you have and the treatment of the light is really atmospheric

littleclaude said:

PatsuKiki said:

Hi guys and gals, I'm starting off this thread as I've been nagged for the longest time to get one started by my lecturers and finally biting the bullet.

And that's why we nag because we see great work.

Love the new direction for the brown panel strips, the lighting reads so much better as well. A bit more direction on focal point would be nice, see image below. Love the new sepia tone.

Only got to put up with us until May 2017 and then your free. Ha-ha!! super proud of you, keep it up!

Ace said:

The mood from the lighting is fantastic. Only thing I could suggest is perhaps playing around with having some personal items around/on the desk?

Thank you Will, yeah it's an oldish project but it's the lighting and improving it that always brings me back to re-tweak a few things.

- Point taken littleclaude, haha. glad you like the new set up. Just trying to implement the feedback Mark gave me when he came in that time. Thanks for the suggestion, I might make some post-tweaks to highlight focal areas.

ACE, (tl;dr- great suggestion, they're in the making)
Thanks for the comment and feedback. And you're 100 percent right, personality is the biggest thing missing from the scene. It's all very just big weird shaped boxes at the moment and funky lighting and not many nice little touches. I have a whole list of assets I plan to make 'a little mug, a blanket draped over the chair, the main character's glasses, and also to flesh out all the other rooms that you see in the film. 
However at the moment, just working on my final year project which has to take priority I'm afraid. 

PatsuKiki

I guess some of these should be in RAWK but I'll post them here any ways to show our uni project.

So I'm working on our final project at uni called  'Fringe'. It's an open world - adventure - walking simulator esque thing.
My role is basically - Environemnt artist for all things organic - rocks, trees, foliage, layout, lighting and atmosphere fx etc.

And for the past couple of weeks I've been making a bunch of modular rock sets that can hopefully be bundled together and make some nice shapes




Very large sheer cliff face in Marmoset, (4000 tris - it's a lot for rock but these guys are massive in game so want to keep the shape looking nice)

Going for this sort of look (the background rocks) 



Rock wall bundle 



Generic boulder rock



Generic boulder rock 2 (affectionately known as turd rock)

And here's some in game shots of the progress so far (all trees and weird janky rocks are currently proxy and gonna be replaced later)


A quick test in engine with my snow material slapped on


A quick test in engine with my snow material slapped on



An adventure begins...

Krato

These are really cool. Did you use the Unity engine for the rock photos?

PatsuKiki

Krato said:

These are really cool. Did you use the Unity engine for the rock photos?

Cheers Krato 

Actually the five super clean ones at the top were rendered in Marmoset 3
and the in engine shots were rendered in Unreal Engine 4.

PatsuKiki

So here's a little update on the work I have been doing for my final year project at UNI. 

Mainly for the past week or so, I've been refining rocks, re-doing the landscape material with a bunch of new textures created in Megascans studio (I know you're gonna say that's cheating, but we love the look of them and it's quick) oh and yesterday, completely re-did the lighting as it was looking horrible. Hopefully a bit crispier now. 

and also today, started on my first attempts at creating the 'actual' trees that will be in the game. 

(disclaimer, some shite proxy trees also still remain)

Feedback and crit, always appreciated.

Already on TODO list

Add forest floor bedding (twigs, fallen leaves etc)

More tiny rocks here and there

Snow on the trees, I know, I know.

Finishing off various rock textures. 

Making new and more weird looking foliage (all in the plans)

replacing out old ugly trees with nice new ones. 

New landscape materials, soils puddles etc..

Refined the snow texture a little to make it pop a little more.

New rock stuff. 

New Lighting scheme. Have gone full on with all the possible cool looking render settings I can find. Frame rate is dead, but it looks nice, well I think so. Feel free to slam me 

New sexy hero tree. by no means a finished piece, but better than previous ones, has tesselation and snow plugged in now. 

The gorge with new lighting. 

And new rivers are coming. Ben the other Envi artist is in the process of building a spline based river with auto flow built in as we speak.

CnC welcome 

PatsuKiki

Been finishing off the opening forest area finally getting around to using the landscape material I've been working on, works ok but has some bugs. 

Also LOD'ed everything possible and downsized textures to a more reasonable size so the game actually runs smooth - ish now.

Oh and slapped some moons in but was a rush job just for Alpha.

CnC welcome as always. Would really appreciate any feedback or suggestions.

Still got a lot more foliage to create and paint all over the place. 

Akash283

dude the nature scene is awesome! Did you hand make the trees or use speed tree?

Seems like there's tessellation on most of the tiling textures. Were you able to optimize that aspect of it? I know Unreal's terrain functions have their own specific tessellation behaviors it can be hard to pin it down to something usable.

PatsuKiki

Akash283 said:

dude the nature scene is awesome! Did you hand make the trees or use speed tree?

Seems like there's tessellation on most of the tiling textures. Were you able to optimize that aspect of it? I know Unreal's terrain functions have their own specific tessellation behaviors it can be hard to pin it down to something usable.

Hey man, thank you for the nice comments

I wish I had time to model a full on tree but time is against us with my uni final project's deadline in a month and a half. So yeah, speed tree. Basically took a pre-made preset and then tweaked it to my liking. The texture was sourced from third party sources but remodified in line with the project's style. 

And yeah,there's tessellation on all of the landscape textures and materials. Basically, UE4's tessellation is just a bugger to work with, but I've found the best thing is to make your height/displacement as and low frequency in detail as possible. The higher the frequency, the higher the jaggy spikes which are just unavoidable in UE4 it seems. What is nice though is that I've set up the landscape material with distance based tessellation with customisable falloffs. So wherever the character / cam is, there is a radius around that increases the tessellation density. 
Followed this great tutorial for it, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1MRDXUWID4&t=554s

There are 4 videos in his series on landscape materials, they're fantastic