@SamStark I love your little dragon thing. I'm too scared to attempt that right now haha. I'm trying to get my laptop to cooperate so I can take some stuff into ZBrush to make an attempt at the texturing...Welcome to the New To Hand-Painted Texturing Club.
@Larry so very few of my models are UV mapped and the ones that are, I also made a lightmap for. Unreal can automatically create a lightmap for a mesh on import if the option is checked, but depending on the surface and the material on it, the modular peices can look very obvious. It's 100% worth it to take the time to create the lightmaps for most of the meshes.
Yea but thinking back now, on what i've seen, people try to hide artifacts like that in modular buildings. For example if you have a modular wall set, people tend to place some columns or wood planks in the seams of those meshes. Isn't that to cover for the seam and not spend too much time on making it look good?
@Larry so very few of my models are UV mapped and the ones that are, I also made a lightmap for. Unreal can automatically create a lightmap for a mesh on import if the option is checked, but depending on the surface and the material on it, the modular peices can look very obvious. It's 100% worth it to take the time to create the lightmaps for most of the meshes.
Yea but thinking back now, on what i've seen, people try to hide artifacts like that in modular buildings. For example if you have a modular wall set, people tend to place some columns or wood planks in the seams of those meshes. Isn't that to cover for the seam and not spend too much time on making it look good?
Yeah that is an option as well. I'm just not that good at planning like that haha Too much environment math
Got sick this week, couldn't get much done . Started doing the textures though, this is my first attempt at hand-painting texture as well.
Saw so many people so far ahead, and some even working off the concept art! You guys are amazing, great works!!!
I really like what you've got so far. The texture comes very close to the concept. But I think it lacks of depth. I don't know much of hand painted textures, but you could try paint some noise all over the flat green. And maybe some more wood structures but less deep. The dragon looks neat!
Looks great ! But on the bottom part of the end does it look quite weird. and above that there are some points that probably arent supposed to be there...
Looks great ! But on the bottom part of the end does it look quite weird. and above that there are some points that probably arent supposed to be there...
Yeah I was thinking too hard about it and ended up taking the swirly bits out at the bottoms.
But I'm not sure I hit that painted look. It's definitely stylized, and I'm not trying to match the concept 100% with the textures. All this has is base color and a normal map, no rougness since I'm just testing out techniques...Not sure I 100% like this....I might have gone too small with the details in ZBrush
It gets lowres on the blocks I'm aware, I forgot to add extra edge loops for my high poly sculpt.
@donnolus, it's too early for me to give any major critiques other than I think that a lot of the details in the bed could be solved via a normal map as opposed to actual geometry, but that might just be your initial high polygon model. The spacing and proportions seem correct, so I would commend you to keep going.
@FinnIsengardt , I like your take on the robot so far. He's a little tricky in terms of figuring out design for aesthetic vs design for functionality, so I think you're doing it right by putting in compromises where needed. I really like the little bit of stylization to the main body and main camera piece cutout and the round gas tank details. I'm really looking forward to seeing when you get to the textures!
Speaking of textures....
@kwagner and @SamStark, I like where the both of you are going in your respective pieces.
With Sam's WIP, I get a good sense of scale from the wood, though as Finnlsengardt mentioned, you might want to exaggerate the depth. I'm not sure what software you are using, but consider using pressure sensitivity on your brush that you are using to carve in the wood grain.
Kim, I like what you've done regarding the wood notches (imperfections), but I'm concerned that some of the detail may be lost depending on what resolution you save at. Then again, I don't know much about modular asset construction for game design as I tend to focus on props and vehicles vs. architectural and level art, so I might be speaking beyond my own experience.
Lastly, and something that may not be too much of an issue, is that the wood surfaces seems a bit flat. Some textures I looked at online show a bit more unevenness in the surface for greater variation.
You all may consider looking at this texture for inspiration:
I apologize in advance if any of my critiques seem to be nitpicky or redundant (you both may already know what needs to be done and are still in processing).
I hope the above is a help and not a hindrance. I look forward to your developments!
@jewski-bot no that actually helps a lot! All the tutorials I've found show hand-painting in photoshop, but not how to apply it to a mesh and make it look good in terms of surface detail and such if that makes sense. I have a hard time wrapping my head around it...
@Larry so very few of my models are UV mapped and the ones that are, I also made a lightmap for. Unreal can automatically create a lightmap for a mesh on import if the option is checked, but depending on the surface and the material on it, the modular peices can look very obvious. It's 100% worth it to take the time to create the lightmaps for most of the meshes.
Yea but thinking back now, on what i've seen, people try to hide artifacts like that in modular buildings. For example if you have a modular wall set, people tend to place some columns or wood planks in the seams of those meshes. Isn't that to cover for the seam and not spend too much time on making it look good?
It's still worth learning how to unwrap lightmaps properly. Not every environment you build is going to have easy ways of hiding seams or bleeds. They're intimidating at first but once you've learnt how they work and how to unwrap them properly the results are soooo much better.
You could also just use dynamic lights if it's a portfolio piece but that can be taxing in terms of performance. Lightmaps are a ball ache but they're a sound investment, in my opinion.
If you're having difficulty, give this a watch. It helped me grasp the theory better:
@kwagner@Finnlsengardt@jewski-bot , thanks for ur kind words! And I agreed on the depths, I'll look into that more, maybe adding some noise, but I want to try to get it simple like the original art as well.
Jewski-bot thanks for the image, but your link doesn't work for me for some reason. Your textures are looking great Kwagner! You could add black/grey color to the bumps area, to make them more exaggerate if you think it's not enough.
I've played a game before, Creativerse, and the hand-painted assets in it are awesome, for those who are doing this challenge can go check that out, it's free. For my texture, I painted it with photoshop with pen (tablet), and all of the wood textures are from a 512px diffuse map (tiling on V-axis), normal map were used as well, but I lowered the bump to make the effect subtle.
Here are some progress screens, had fun making the house using "modular" pieces, now to figure out the roof. I was thinking that the roof tiles would be instanced meshes in unreal, is that a good idea?
Been actually experimenting in unreal engine, testing the lightmaps, I'm getting seams and been reading up but I cant help but wonder if I should follow the use grid size according to target Lightmap resolution or use target Lightmap resolution - 2 as grid size for UE4.. so basically if I wanted a 128 sized lightmap, which would be better? aligning to a grid of 128 so (1/128 = 0.0078125) or align to 128-2 since UE4 cuts 1 pixel per side so (1/126 = 0.0079365079365079) The advantages however on the 1/128 is that if I change my lightmap size, I'd still match perfectly, whereas the 1/126 would only fit in a 128 light map, or a 512 lightmap, no 256. dang XD someone advice me lolol XD
Here are some progress screens, had fun making the house using "modular" pieces, now to figure out the roof. I was thinking that the roof tiles would be instanced meshes in unreal, is that a good idea?
Already looking really good! I think using a mesh for every single tile isn't a very good idea because it could get very performance intensive. Unless you make the tiles very simple and bake high poly normal maps on them, then you could use instanced meshes. But if that makes sense... I think it would be a better idea to simply bake a tileable texture and use the material to enhance it's look, for example with a bump offset in UE4 Material Editor.
Guys great work on street scenes! My progress so far, made quick line on my model and started painting finally! I hope i`ll make that in time. Next time i should put stricter time deadlines for myself
Made the feet and the axes/gear today. not 100% happy with it. Will put some work into the edge loops and will also detail it more. Decide to use some floaters on the feet.
I found some nice reference on how to connect gear.
@FinnIsengardt I actually did make a blueprint and built this house in it, the floor was originally divided into 1m pieces but I've decided to simple make it a whole since it's just one cube anyways.
Been struggling with lightmaps tho (they are bleeding!) and been learning a lot with unreal, once I've finished importing I'll be making the textures, I'm using temp textures though my screens are with the default white material xD
Decided to import and check my meshes for anything wrong like how I see others do theirs xD
This is so much of a learning process for me. I feel like I'm in school again. ahahaha it feels good and I'm enjoying this way too much I'm also currently sitting pretty on 50 draw calls. I hope I keep it low so I'd have room for additional materials if ever. But I've read something called instance materials.. woohoo XD
@Zyhael You should give us some more info on your light map process so someone can help you fix the issues. Post your uv maps, your baking setup etc. You should try to practice the technique on a simple object to get the basics down and then try to bake them on your model again.
Maybe it's an issue with your uv's, but just a wild guess cause I've never baked lightmaps yet.
Guys great work on street scenes! My progress so far, made quick line on my model and started painting finally! I hope i`ll make that in time. Next time i should put stricter time deadlines for myself
Nice to see you back in action, @Quibees! I had been considering this as an alternate entry since I finished the robot a month early, but I'm afraid you've got me beat on the modeling, and if your preliminary textures are looking this nice, I think you'll have a winning submission for the hand-painted prop category! I'm eager to seeing your finished piece.
@kwagner@Finnlsengardt@jewski-bot , thanks for ur kind words! And I agreed on the depths, I'll look into that more, maybe adding some noise, but I want to try to get it simple like the original art as well.
Jewski-bot thanks for the image, but your link doesn't work for me for some reason. Your textures are looking great Kwagner! You could add black/grey color to the bumps area, to make them more exaggerate if you think it's not enough.
I've played a game before, Creativerse, and the hand-painted assets in it are awesome, for those who are doing this challenge can go check that out, it's free. For my texture, I painted it with photoshop with pen (tablet), and all of the wood textures are from a 512px diffuse map (tiling on V-axis), normal map were used as well, but I lowered the bump to make the effect subtle.
Odd, I must've somehow merged his site with the Art Station page.
@kwagner, Kim, you must've posted your new pics when I was typing my critique and I didn't see until the day after. In any event, yes, I was concerned with the scaling. If you're having issues with determining what the correct scale should be, consider using a procedural wood texture as a guide for figuring out what looks good before investing too much time and then having to suffer through rework. Another way of approaching the scaling issue, would be to build a stylized wood material in Substance Designer that you upscale or downscale as needed (if you have Substance Designer that is. You might be able to fudge your way through Substance Painter if you have that application).
FinnIsengardt, good work with the leg, and doubly thanks for the posting those references! I might be able to incorporate those into future projects. As for modeling the robot, thanks for the compliments! I'd like to think that at least some of those years spent trying to model Transformers (or at least their real-world vehicle modes) helped to pay this off! Haha. I tried using real world auto parts for a general guide, though I wish I had thought out some sections better. For example, the legs don't really connect to the base properly and are essentially ball joints intersecting where they should attach. I honestly hate modeling like that, but sometimes my brain goes to kaput and I can't design anything feasible so I cheat.
and before I forget, @Zyhael and @Bunnirobotcat, your both progressing very well in your respective entries. Keep going strong guys!
@Quibees I like your color scheme! i was curious if you were going to make the base of the throne (the gold) a little more reflective? i noticed you have done some highlights on the upper part of the throne. there isnt enough highlight at the base is all....
@jewski-bot i would recommend adding a gloss map to your wood surface to give it a bit of surface detail, also grain, noise and spatter are friendly filters for wood detail.
rookie model question, it is hard for me to make a hole in the side of the head for the robot camera, i have been trying to draw the perfect circle on the side, and this is the closest i could get and i get some distortion that i know will show up on my normal maps, any suggestion of how i can get rid of these edges around my camera eye( you can clearly see the square around it)?
I added a lot in the center by using the smooth, the edges were a lot harder before this (see pic #2)
@Zlivingston first of all your circle contains alot of verts. Try working with a 8 vert circle, so that you can fit it in these 4 faces.I believe the easiest way to do this would be to pick the vertex that you want to be the center, and chamfer it.This will produce a square. split the edges of that square in half,and connect the verts with the ouside corners. Then, scale those verts in pairs to what is closest to a circle. There are many other ways to do it but require a bit more effort :P
@jewski-botthank you! That`s kinda sad that nobody else haven`t picked throne concept @Zilvingstonthanks! yeah, sure i`ll make it. Now it`s only base color with some baked maps. The only finished goldpieces are that things on handles.
Hello ! I was thinking about trying the sci-fi environment, but I am literally pulling my hair trying to figure out the dimensions and the possible angle used in the reference image. How do you folks generally get that part done with as much accuracy as possible ?
Hello ! I was thinking about trying the sci-fi environment, but I am literally pulling my hair trying to figure out the dimensions and the possible angle used in the reference image. How do you folks generally get that part done with as much accuracy as possible ?
For me personally, i try to find something in the scene that i can measure in real life more or less, for the asian concept i got the door width and height. A door should be about 2 meters tall and about 1 meter wide. From there i drew a line in photoshop and moved/duplicated around to figure the proportions, with a small falloff due to perspective view. Haven't done this alot of times since im new as well, but it seems to work just fine. If the perspective distorts alot and the view is far away, you take more than 1 objects as a reference. Generally the concept artists try to give a sense of proportions using different objects for your eye to see the scale.
Hello ! I was thinking about trying the sci-fi environment, but I am literally pulling my hair trying to figure out the dimensions and the possible angle used in the reference image. How do you folks generally get that part done with as much accuracy as possible ?
For me personally, i try to find something in the scene that i can measure in real life more or less, for the asian concept i got the door width and height. A door should be about 2 meters tall and about 1 meter wide. From there i drew a line in photoshop and moved/duplicated around to figure the proportions, with a small falloff due to perspective view. Haven't done this alot of times since im new as well, but it seems to work just fine. If the perspective distorts alot and the view is far away, you take more than 1 objects as a reference. Generally the concept artists try to give a sense of proportions using different objects for your eye to see the scale.
@Zlivingston if the camera is coming out of the robot's head and there are no indentation (like the examples posted by @FinnIsengardt and @philipp.bogdanovskiy why not make it a floating geometry? :O I believe the normals will bake quite well if you know what you are doing, are should it really be just one solid continuous mesh? I'm sorry but I'm used to floating meshes now. XD
@FinnIsengardt I usually add loops in depending on how I want my circle, so for an 8 sided circle I would add 8 loops, 4 from top down, 4 from left to right, I select all the outer vertices and use radial align (modo thing, I'm not sure if there is an equivalent to 3dsmax) then select the other faces and extrude in.
@Quibees I was going to give it a shot but have never done hand painted texture and got intimidated, and you have done a very beautiful work so far!
I am having a blast with the cabin in UE4. I added some assets, only the astronaut suit left then the final tweaks.
Though I am having some problem with the opacity on the glass door and would like some help getting it to render properly. Do I have to set the material separate or can I get it to work on the same map as the flexduct pipe? It loses the PBR properties when I change the blend mode.
@supersnakelx Glass is the absolute hardest thing or me to figure out in Unreal. It never looks right or it's TOO transparent....
I started texturing and have been playing around with them for a few days. Pretty proud of my cobblestones, though it needs some tweaking still. My first parallax material in Unreal...Still a long way to go.
@Quibees I was going to give it a shot but have never done hand painted texture and got intimidated, and you have done a very beautiful work so far!
I am having a blast with the cabin in UE4. I added some assets, only the astronaut suit left then the final tweaks.
Though I am having some problem with the opacity on the glass door and would like some help getting it to render properly. Do I have to set the material separate or can I get it to work on the same map as the flexduct pipe? It loses the PBR properties when I change the blend mode.
I adore what you have going on there! Your keepad signs are awesome Getting really close to the concept. One critique would the left side of your scene, I dont exactly know why, but it looks kinda empty. Maybe it's because of your image ratio, maybe because you left out some details on the bottom. Maybe you could also make the carpet pop out a little more by increasing iti's size a little and make it a little brighter. But that's really critique on a high level, love your work, keep it going!
@supersnakelx Glass is the absolute hardest
thing or me to figure out in Unreal. It never looks right or it's TOO
transparent....
I started texturing and have been playing around
with them for a few days. Pretty proud of my cobblestones, though it
needs some tweaking still. My first parallax material in Unreal...Still a
long way to go.
That looks awesome! Very nice, rich colors. Love the marquise model.
(the yellow roof carpet thing, don't know if marquise is the right word
) I really look forward to see your scene growing!
I'm really tired, so you all will forgive me if I'm short on any critiques tonight. Kim, the scene looks good in Unreal so far. I'm not sure if you are familiar with baked lighting setups in Substance Painter, but I think Allegorithmic's youtube channel has a quick project based tutorial (it was made for Substance Painter 1.7, but I'm sure it'll carry over). I don't know how this will react with the scene lighting though as I'm not versed in Unreal or light setups for stylization (or in general for that matter, preferring to HDR it and call it day).
@FinnIsengardt, the base was a pain in the butt to figure out, but I think that your solution for attaching the legs is similar to what I would've have done had I redid the design again.
Something like the above mechanism for the rollers, but not have the legs stretched out as much, the base a bit thicker, and the legs numbered at 3 spokes rather than 5.
@Zlivingston, I don't have any wood material on my robot, so I'm thinking you meant someone else?
As for your rookie modeling question, here's what I have for an unsmoothed wireframe for the part you're trying to tackle, and it's different from what everyone else has shown: Made from a 24 sided cylinder.
@supersnakelx Glass is the absolute hardest thing or me to figure out in Unreal. It never looks right or it's TOO transparent....
I started texturing and have been playing around with them for a few days. Pretty proud of my cobblestones, though it needs some tweaking still. My first parallax material in Unreal...Still a long way to go.
Have you tried playing with fresnel on the material a little bit? Also try and place a lightmass portal box where the glass is. If i recall from my experiments it does look a bit better
Been fidgeting with unreal and edited some of my models, I have this question though, is it alright to scale my models non-uniformly? say I have a 100cm x 100cm x 25 cm floor and I use it and scale it to fit my whole floor area, say 3000 cm x 1200 cm x 25 cm floor. is it better that way or should I just make a floor that size? I'm wondering because I am unsure if that's how the industry does it or if that's the right technique especially for lightmaps.
All them roof tiles, I'm glad there is such a thing as instancing. xD
After unsuccesfully trying the environment, I just decided I would give a try to the prop instead, since I always had a blast doing props (the only reason I tried to do the environment is that I was always told that a prop artist had to be good at environment as well but hehhhhh for the life of me I just can't).
Here is the blocking of the robot so far on 3DS Max :
Since I have no idea what kind of stuff is under the robot I just decided to wing it, and add cables and gizmos and any cool stuff I might stumble upon while searching for references :^)
@Mahelix I thought it was the other way around? I thought environment artists must be good prop artists as well since environments are filled with props xD
@FinnIsengardt, My hat's off to you, sir. I think that your take on the robot is a bit more thought out then mine, and certainly does a better job following the proportions laid out in the concept art. Certainly I can appreciate the extra time you took to model in some of the camera details and lens interior (in all honesty I think I had a brain fart and forgot all about them, hence adding some things later via Substance Painter). So now that it's obvious you can model, the question is, can you texture? It's on! (In all honesty, I am looking forward to seeing your finished product to see if I can learn something).
@Mahelix, don't worry if you're not able to get the environment right if you're unsure how to approach it. I've just entered the character art challenge (category is Anubis) for August-September and can definitely tell you that I'm in a bit over my head as I haven't used ZBrush in a year and am attempting to do all the modeling, or at least the high res model, from a zsphere. I don't expect that it will be the best model out there, but I'm going to see how much I can learn doing it. Truth be told, I'm more comfortable doing hard-surface modeling than anything else, but there's no shame stepping out of one's comfort zone. Besides, even if I fail royally and make something that resembles early 1990's CG, I'll have gained a wealth of knowledge that I can apply to what I am strong in, that I would never otherwise have learned. Your robot's going well so far. One bit of advice I have is that you may need to tweak the proportions a bit as of right now the upper body looks too small in relation to the lower half of the robot. I think that the legs might be sticking out too far. As for the underside of the robot, I wouldn't spend too much time figuring out some crazy design (in other words don't do what I tried to do!), but instead opt for any simple solutions that seem plausible. Also, feel free to ask for help if you get stuck. We're all here to learn and improve.
@Zyhael, looks good for at the moment. I'm not sure what the proper way to make a floor is; I would think that you could resize the existing floor, but I'm not sure what that does with your UVs (I'm assuming that you are importing a plane or block in from your modeling app into Unreal; if not, please disregard as I'm not really well versed in game engines other than initial importation of character and prop assets).
@Zyhael You can scale it up if it doesn't distort the texture and make it obvious you scaled it way up. I typically make several sizes of flooring, like 1meterx1meter and then 4x4 etc. I worked with some Unreal Marketplace asset packs and noticed a lot had tilable floor meshes, but also chunks that specifically fit certain buildings so I think it just depends on how re-usable you want the piece.
@Mahelix, I looked back at the sci-fi room and your question for gauging the proportions. Scale everything to the door. Typical inside door height is 6.75 feet. Width is usually between 28 and 32 inches. This is from googling inside doors for houses, so feel free to modify accordingly. With regard to matching perspective, I would camera matching.
Here's a tutorial in modo by Ellery Connell to give you an idea of what I'm talking about. https://youtu.be/f0UPI4bno9g
@jewski-bot Thank you for your kind words. Don't worry, your take on the robot looks great. A little simpler than mine, but that never means it's worse. I really wanted to challenge myself here, so I tried to model it as detailed and complex as I could. When you look at my stuff on artstation, you see everything I modeled since the day is way more simple. I am a little proud how this turned out to be honest About the texturing... I already worked in Substance Painter and Designer. SP alot more than SD, but I want to try to make my own materials for the robot. maybe some kind of brushed metal and a cleaner one, some painted stuff and dirt. But I am not sure if I can manage to do that, we will see! Anyways I think Substance Painter is an awesome tool, it's really intuitive so I really look forward to the texturing part cause it can be very fun. What worries me the most is the baking process, its kinda tedious and it can be very tricky to prevent baking errors in complex parts... But let's see how this turned out, will spend tomorrow finishing the HP, some little details are missing. Like the floaters on the head and I wanted to add a grabber as mentioned earlier. I have another idea for the final composition that will be a little extra. But that's a secret for now Anyway, I will defently check out your character challenge submission!
@jewski-bot Thanks a lot for the bit of advice and the link for camera matching ! I didn't know the exact term for that technique for a long time and now this allowed me to find out that 3DS Max also possesses that same feature https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX6oUj4k7II
This is definitely going to come in handy for me now, and environment modeling will surely feel less daunting :^)
@jewski-bot yup, import from a modelling app, I decided to add an option to increase uv tiling and take it from there. @kwagner oohh awesome, I think I'll consider doing those if ever the textures won't add up even if I added the ability to modify the amount of u and v tiling.
I had so much fun tinkering with the blueprints. So I made myself a rope spline with knots on the end and lanterns. It was very educational and fun. It also means it's very easy to add ropes and lanterns in the scene wohoo xD
Replies
Progress for this week.
Got sick this week, couldn't get much done
Saw so many people so far ahead, and some even working off the concept art! You guys are amazing, great works!!!
I really like what you've got so far. The texture comes very close to the concept. But I think it lacks of depth. I don't know much of hand painted textures, but you could try paint some noise all over the flat green. And maybe some more wood structures but less deep.
The dragon looks neat!
Looks great ! But on the bottom part of the end does it look quite weird. and above that there are some points that probably arent supposed to be there...
But I'm not sure I hit that painted look. It's definitely stylized, and I'm not trying to match the concept 100% with the textures. All this has is base color and a normal map, no rougness since I'm just testing out techniques...Not sure I 100% like this....I might have gone too small with the details in ZBrush
It gets lowres on the blocks I'm aware, I forgot to add extra edge loops for my high poly sculpt.
@donnolus, it's too early for me to give any major critiques other than I think that a lot of the details in the bed could be solved via a normal map as opposed to actual geometry, but that might just be your initial high polygon model. The spacing and proportions seem correct, so I would commend you to keep going.
@FinnIsengardt , I like your take on the robot so far. He's a little tricky in terms of figuring out design for aesthetic vs design for functionality, so I think you're doing it right by putting in compromises where needed. I really like the little bit of stylization to the main body and main camera piece cutout and the round gas tank details. I'm really looking forward to seeing when you get to the textures!
Speaking of textures....
@kwagner and @SamStark, I like where the both of you are going in your respective pieces.
With Sam's WIP, I get a good sense of scale from the wood, though as Finnlsengardt mentioned, you might want to exaggerate the depth. I'm not sure what software you are using, but consider using pressure sensitivity on your brush that you are using to carve in the wood grain.
You may consider looking at this link http//www.tobiaskoepp.com/projects/bm8Ro.
Kim, I like what you've done regarding the wood notches (imperfections), but I'm concerned that some of the detail may be lost depending on what resolution you save at. Then again, I don't know much about modular asset construction for game design as I tend to focus on props and vehicles vs. architectural and level art, so I might be speaking beyond my own experience.
Lastly, and something that may not be too much of an issue, is that the wood surfaces seems a bit flat. Some textures I looked at online show a bit more unevenness in the surface for greater variation.
You all may consider looking at this texture for inspiration:
I apologize in advance if any of my critiques seem to be nitpicky or redundant (you both may already know what needs to be done and are still in processing).
I hope the above is a help and not a hindrance. I look forward to your developments!
You could also just use dynamic lights if it's a portfolio piece but that can be taxing in terms of performance. Lightmaps are a ball ache but they're a sound investment, in my opinion.
If you're having difficulty, give this a watch. It helped me grasp the theory better:
Jewski-bot thanks for the image, but your link doesn't work for me for some reason.
Your textures are looking great Kwagner! You could add black/grey color to the bumps area, to make them more exaggerate if you think it's not enough.
I've played a game before, Creativerse, and the hand-painted assets in it are awesome, for those who are doing this challenge can go check that out, it's free.
For my texture, I painted it with photoshop with pen (tablet), and all of the wood textures are from a 512px diffuse map (tiling on V-axis), normal map were used as well, but I lowered the bump to make the effect subtle.
Been actually experimenting in unreal engine, testing the lightmaps, I'm getting seams and been reading up but I cant help but wonder if I should follow the use grid size according to target Lightmap resolution or use target Lightmap resolution - 2 as grid size for UE4.. so basically if I wanted a 128 sized lightmap, which would be better? aligning to a grid of 128 so (1/128 = 0.0078125) or align to 128-2 since UE4 cuts 1 pixel per side so (1/126 = 0.0079365079365079)
The advantages however on the 1/128 is that if I change my lightmap size, I'd still match perfectly, whereas the 1/126 would only fit in a 128 light map, or a 512 lightmap, no 256. dang XD
someone advice me lolol XD
Also, still wondering how to do the ground xD
Working on the statues in zbrush. will post when they dont look like lumpy lumps >.>
I think using a mesh for every single tile isn't a very good idea because it could get very performance intensive.
Unless you make the tiles very simple and bake high poly normal maps on them, then you could use instanced meshes. But if that makes sense... I think it would be a better idea to simply bake a tileable texture and use the material to enhance it's look, for example with a bump offset in UE4 Material Editor.
I found some nice reference on how to connect gear.
Been struggling with lightmaps tho (they are bleeding!) and been learning a lot with unreal, once I've finished importing I'll be making the textures, I'm using temp textures though my screens are with the default white material xD
Decided to import and check my meshes for anything wrong like how I see others do theirs xD
This is so much of a learning process for me. I feel like I'm in school again. ahahaha it feels good and I'm enjoying this way too much
I'm also currently sitting pretty on 50 draw calls. I hope I keep it low so I'd have room for additional materials if ever. But I've read something called instance materials.. woohoo XD
You should try to practice the technique on a simple object to get the basics down and then try to bake them on your model again.
Maybe it's an issue with your uv's, but just a wild guess cause I've never baked lightmaps yet.
Here's the corrected link: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/bm8Ro
@kwagner, Kim, you must've posted your new pics when I was typing my critique and I didn't see until the day after. In any event, yes, I was concerned with the scaling. If you're having issues with determining what the correct scale should be, consider using a procedural wood texture as a guide for figuring out what looks good before investing too much time and then having to suffer through rework. Another way of approaching the scaling issue, would be to build a stylized wood material in Substance Designer that you upscale or downscale as needed (if you have Substance Designer that is. You might be able to fudge your way through Substance Painter if you have that application).
FinnIsengardt, good work with the leg, and doubly thanks for the posting those references! I might be able to incorporate those into future projects.
and before I forget, @Zyhael and @Bunnirobotcat, your both progressing very well in your respective entries. Keep going strong guys!
@jewski-bot i would recommend adding a gloss map to your wood surface to give it a bit of surface detail, also grain, noise and spatter are friendly filters for wood detail.
rookie model question, it is hard for me to make a hole in the side of the head for the robot camera, i have been trying to draw the perfect circle on the side, and this is the closest i could get and i get some distortion that i know will show up on my normal maps, any suggestion of how i can get rid of these edges around my camera eye( you can clearly see the square around it)?
I added a lot in the center by using the smooth, the edges were a lot harder before this (see pic #2)
first of all your circle contains alot of verts. Try working with a 8 vert circle, so that you can fit it in these 4 faces.I believe the easiest way to do this would be to pick the vertex that you want to be the center, and chamfer it.This will produce a square. split the edges of that square in half,and connect the verts with the ouside corners. Then, scale those verts in pairs to what is closest to a circle. There are many other ways to do it but require a bit more effort :P
@Zilvingston thanks! yeah, sure i`ll make it. Now it`s only base color with some baked maps. The only finished goldpieces are that things on handles.
I was thinking about trying the sci-fi environment, but I am literally pulling my hair trying to figure out the dimensions and the possible angle used in the reference image. How do you folks generally get that part done with as much accuracy as possible ?
Here is a simple way using 24 sides cylynder. Just add suport where needed.
@FinnIsengardt I usually add loops in depending on how I want my circle, so for an 8 sided circle I would add 8 loops, 4 from top down, 4 from left to right, I select all the outer vertices and use radial align (modo thing, I'm not sure if there is an equivalent to 3dsmax) then select the other faces and extrude in.
I was going to give it a shot but have never done hand painted texture and got intimidated, and you have done a very beautiful work so far!
I am having a blast with the cabin in UE4. I added some assets, only the astronaut suit left then the final tweaks.
Though I am having some problem with the opacity on the glass door and would like some help getting it to render properly. Do I have to set the material separate or can I get it to work on the same map as the flexduct pipe? It loses the PBR properties when I change the blend mode.
I started texturing and have been playing around with them for a few days. Pretty proud of my cobblestones, though it needs some tweaking still. My first parallax material in Unreal...Still a long way to go.
One critique would the left side of your scene, I dont exactly know why, but it looks kinda empty. Maybe it's because of your image ratio, maybe because you left out some details on the bottom. Maybe you could also make the carpet pop out a little more by increasing iti's size a little and make it a little brighter. But that's really critique on a high level, love your work, keep it going!
Your way is probably the easiest, thanks for sharing^^
That looks awesome! Very nice, rich colors. Love the marquise model. (the yellow roof carpet thing, don't know if marquise is the right word
I really look forward to see your scene growing!
@FinnIsengardt, the base was a pain in the butt to figure out, but I think that your solution for attaching the legs is similar to what I would've have done had I redid the design again.
Something like the above mechanism for the rollers, but not have the legs stretched out as much, the base a bit thicker, and the legs numbered at 3 spokes rather than 5.
@Zlivingston, I don't have any wood material on my robot, so I'm thinking you meant someone else?
As for your rookie modeling question, here's what I have for an unsmoothed wireframe for the part you're trying to tackle, and it's different from what everyone else has shown:
Made from a 24 sided cylinder.
Here is a bigger indent, same principle, just using 14 sided cylinder as a boolean object.
Also try and place a lightmass portal box where the glass is. If i recall from my experiments it does look a bit better
Been fidgeting with unreal and edited some of my models, I have this question though, is it alright to scale my models non-uniformly? say I have a 100cm x 100cm x 25 cm floor and I use it and scale it to fit my whole floor area, say 3000 cm x 1200 cm x 25 cm floor. is it better that way or should I just make a floor that size? I'm wondering because I am unsure if that's how the industry does it or if that's the right technique especially for lightmaps.
All them roof tiles, I'm glad there is such a thing as instancing. xD
Here is the blocking of the robot so far on 3DS Max :
Since I have no idea what kind of stuff is under the robot I just decided to wing it, and add cables and gizmos and any cool stuff I might stumble upon while searching for references :^)
So now that it's obvious you can model, the question is, can you texture? It's on!
@Mahelix, don't worry if you're not able to get the environment right if you're unsure how to approach it. I've just entered the character art challenge (category is Anubis) for August-September and can definitely tell you that I'm in a bit over my head as I haven't used ZBrush in a year and am attempting to do all the modeling, or at least the high res model, from a zsphere. I don't expect that it will be the best model out there, but I'm going to see how much I can learn doing it. Truth be told, I'm more comfortable doing hard-surface modeling than anything else, but there's no shame stepping out of one's comfort zone. Besides, even if I fail royally and make something that resembles early 1990's CG, I'll have gained a wealth of knowledge that I can apply to what I am strong in, that I would never otherwise have learned. Your robot's going well so far. One bit of advice I have is that you may need to tweak the proportions a bit as of right now the upper body looks too small in relation to the lower half of the robot. I think that the legs might be sticking out too far. As for the underside of the robot, I wouldn't spend too much time figuring out some crazy design (in other words don't do what I tried to do!), but instead opt for any simple solutions that seem plausible. Also, feel free to ask for help if you get stuck. We're all here to learn and improve.
@Zyhael, looks good for at the moment. I'm not sure what the proper way to make a floor is; I would think that you could resize the existing floor, but I'm not sure what that does with your UVs (I'm assuming that you are importing a plane or block in from your modeling app into Unreal; if not, please disregard as I'm not really well versed in game engines other than initial importation of character and prop assets).
Here's a tutorial in modo by Ellery Connell to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.
https://youtu.be/f0UPI4bno9g
About the texturing... I already worked in Substance Painter and Designer. SP alot more than SD, but I want to try to make my own materials for the robot. maybe some kind of brushed metal and a cleaner one, some painted stuff and dirt. But I am not sure if I can manage to do that, we will see!
Anyways I think Substance Painter is an awesome tool, it's really intuitive so I really look forward to the texturing part cause it can be very fun.
What worries me the most is the baking process, its kinda tedious and it can be very tricky to prevent baking errors in complex parts...
But let's see how this turned out, will spend tomorrow finishing the HP, some little details are missing. Like the floaters on the head and I wanted to add a grabber as mentioned earlier. I have another idea for the final composition that will be a little extra. But that's a secret for now
Anyway, I will defently check out your character challenge submission!
This is definitely going to come in handy for me now, and environment modeling will surely feel less daunting :^)
@kwagner oohh awesome, I think I'll consider doing those if ever the textures won't add up even if I added the ability to modify the amount of u and v tiling.
I had so much fun tinkering with the blueprints. So I made myself a rope spline with knots on the end and lanterns. It was very educational and fun. It also means it's very easy to add ropes and lanterns in the scene wohoo xD