Monthly Environment Art Challenge - September & October 2017 (50)
greentooth
Hello everyone and welcome to the Monthly Environment & Prop Challenge #50!
Dare I say last round was our biggest turn out ever? Incredible work by all - as always special thanks to everyone who participated in the voting process this time.
Remember if you don't finish in the time allotted, just keep plugging away and post when your work is finished. There's always some good progress that falls off the radar - we want to see your work! So keep going and finish those pieces!
Without further ado, here are our options for Challenge 50!
HARD SURFACE CATEGORY:
Artist: Waldemar-Kazak
HAND PAINTED CATEGORY:
Artist: nunchakus chen
HAND PAINTED CATEGORY:
wildstar concept
HARD SURFACE CATEGORY:
Artist: olabooku yu
Dare I say last round was our biggest turn out ever? Incredible work by all - as always special thanks to everyone who participated in the voting process this time.
Remember if you don't finish in the time allotted, just keep plugging away and post when your work is finished. There's always some good progress that falls off the radar - we want to see your work! So keep going and finish those pieces!
Without further ado, here are our options for Challenge 50!
HARD SURFACE CATEGORY:
Artist: Waldemar-Kazak
HAND PAINTED CATEGORY:
Artist: nunchakus chen
HAND PAINTED CATEGORY:
wildstar concept
HARD SURFACE CATEGORY:
Artist: olabooku yu
If you want to change up either concept a bit, as some people wanted, then feel free. Interpret these concepts to your liking.
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. (Marmoset Toolbag is allowed as well)
- 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.
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
Notice: Did the artist in the factory spell "MAHT" wrong? Isn't it "arbeit macht frei?" meaning "working for free"?
@Topic: nice concepts, not sure about the factory (due to it's history origin) but maybe I will give the closet a try (would be a difference to the usual realistic hard surface stuff).
Anyway, I feel a little upset about this part of the concept. I am from germany, maybe I have a different connection to it.
I even think the artist might have mispelled it on purpose.
It reminds me a little bit of the Wolfenstein Series...
I had started on the previous challenge pretty late last month and didn't get much done, so I've decided to work on one of the smaller pieces this time around. Just finished getting everything blocked out. Will start detailing things a bit more tomorrow.
looking good! The bottom right leg/pipe (the fat dark gray one) looks to be more of a chamfer box in the concept than a cylinder like you have it.
I interpret it as more of a graffiti/intentional misspelling than posted propaganda with an error. Either way now is your chance to change it as you see fit for your modeled scene!
Nothing wrong with trying and failing and learning from it!
I’ve been lurking around for a while and I wanted to throw my hat into the ring on this one. Here is the progress I’ve made so far. I haven’t decided what direction to take it in but I’m thinking of going for a boarderlands style.
Here's a small breakdown guide for overlapping UVs, text/paint decals, and shared geometry. I may add more to the breakdown later as there are still plenty of things that can be shared. This will be an interesting challenge, not so much from a creative standpoint, but more for figuring out how to efficiently handle props. I'm not sure if I'll continue to use Toolbag 2 for the rendering, or switch over to Unity or UE4.
C&C welcome of course!
Not exactly a finished prop, but more of decal test. The screws are a higher texel density to get the necessary resolution and I think that they're working okay. Asides from the screws which use a small poly-plane, the main prop itself uses a single poly plane. I want to go back and do a proper low-res model and see how things progress. By no means is this a finished product, but more akin to a proof-of-concept.
I have all the props in various stages of modeling right now, and will hopefully be able to efficiently get the UVs mapped out onto a single 2048 map.
@JamesArk, nice work on the modeling for the two hatches / panels / props. I agree that some of the details are best left to being stamped out in either NDO or Substance Painter, in particular panel lines, notches that don't disturb the silhouette, and other such areas that might be a little bit tricky to directly carve into the high res model.
At the moment I am still breaking everything down and making tests, trying to loosely match the shapes. There are certainly a few bits that need straightened out and/or deleted, but I'm just going to concentrate on matching things visually for a while and then optimise later. I used Illustrator to draw the curves and imported them as shapes and have been taking it from there. I'm not sure if this is a particularly good way to do this, but I *think* it's working.
@muckuruxx That's an awesome start, although I would consider putting more geo in the cylindrical areas where the tessellation is especially noticeable, particularly up top. Sure, when it comes to really putting something in a game, you might want to scale those back and reduce as much as possible, but for presentation purposes in your portfolio, making it look great takes all precedence.
@jewski-bot I love how the bottom hatches have a residue of dirt around where they used to be when they're flipped up. At least that's how it looks in the screenshot. It's a nice touch.
@Namic I really like the proportions you went with on the shelf. looking good so far!
@Beccenstein seeing your breakdowns of those complex shapes is super informative
@Jesse Walsh Yeah, I wasn't sure about that one. I'll try both and see how it looks.
@9Solid Thanks! I need to remake that part anyway, so I will definitely keep that in mind.
@Tokoya I think the body of the shelf and the legs might be a bit long, but looks good so far. What are your thoughts on that cylindrical item in the bottom shelf space? Flashlight? I couldn't really tell what it was from the concept art, so I just made a wrench.
@Hyperion Terror Thank you
@Toyoka Glad you liked the breakdown. Your work on the Wildstar cupboard is looking ace, I was almost going to do this one too, all the little knick-knacks look fun. Looking forward to seeing more.
Since my last post I decided to re-use some of my roof pieces and warped them using a lattice, so I have a total of 3 unique shapes being used for the 7 roof pieces. Matching the image is impossible in a few places as the concept uses a little bit of forced perspective here and there, so the proportions are a little off with my interpretation. Hopefully I can do it justice.
The above is a bit closer to how I envision the final product. Added the panel lines and vents. I promise that the next update (probably the weekend) will be substantially more than a few tweaks!
Now, for the feedback!
@Mahelix, good start on the props. Depending on what software you're using, you might want to use a rounded edge shader to fake the microbevels on the hard edges without having to deal with the hassle of manually beveling / chamfering. A good thing about this is that if you use Modo, you can always adjust the width to give the desired effect at any given time! You can then also bake this out as part of the normal map before importing into Substance Painter or Quixel Suite.
@Tokoya, the blockout looks great, my only concern is that you'll want to added more polygons to round out the cylinders on top of the shelf for the high res model.
@Beccenstein, I appreciate you demonstrating your workflow as to how to go about tackling those curved shapes! I wasn't really sure about it myself, so I opted out for doing a full scale environment this time, but it does give me some ideas on how to go about tackling some of the other parts of the environment, depending if I decide to try this later. As for the modeling, I think that there may be some issues with smoothing of the curved surfaces. If at all possible, you might want to re-loft / sub-patch the curves with lower polygon count and then manually adjust the vertices to tweak the shape. To do refined smoothness tests, you might consider temporarily enabling NURMS, Turbosmooth, or MeshSmooth (not sure if all those things are the same as I haven't used Max for modeling in ages).
@Beccenstein, I'm super jealous!! You've got a good grasp of what how the rooftops flow. I like the topography so far. Keep it up!
@Mahelix, The props you have are very clean looking. What did you use for the AO and Normals?
@Hyperion Terror I use Tim Bergholz's baking method on Substance Painter and bake in two parts. Here I made some quick pics to explain :
Hope this answered your question ! :^)
@Hyperion Terror Looking amazing so far, and so neat and tidy! The curves are very accurate to the image as well. Getting the flow of each roof piece relative to neighbouring pieces is definitely a stumbling block with this one.
After a few more tweaks I blocked out more of the surrounding environment, it definitely deviates quite far from the concept in some areas, such as the length of some of the walls, and placement of the towers.
Since I mirrored the front door section and used it for the piece that fades off into the distance, the back of the building has a door now too. I probably won't add any more to the back though, the environment is busy enough as is
Next I plan to block out the floor geometry and work on the composition a little more before delving heavily into the modelling and texturing phase.
@jewski-bot I agree, I think it also has to do with the color/how the light hits it, since it's uniform between the plate and hatches.
@Beccenstein That's an awesome start. Just imagining the organic modelling behind that was giving me a headache with all those details. I'm excited to see how that turns out and how it sits in the environment.
@jewski-bot thanks man, yeah that circular part is way too rough looking., first thing I'm going to do is smooth it out
@Beccenstein dude! looking really good. I'm feeling more inclined to take a crack at this once I finish this shelf
@Beccenstein I'm excited to see what you'll do with the organic portion of the environment.
Finally finished the high polys for the Hard Surface props I'm gonna do (although some of the edges on the rightmost one seem a little thin to me now that I look at it again, so I might loosen 'em up if the bake sucks). Low poly are done also, gonna try to unwrap and test bake it all today.
The first plate
For the second plate, I tried a different approach to model the hinges/locks. I think I prefer that result better though the upper part of the locks is so thin it is harder to see against the plate
For the cylinder, uhhh... do I need to say that performing highpoly modeling on cylinders is not my strong point ? I think I'll have to rework it at least to remove the pinching here and there, because I doubt any amount of texture will be able to hide that mess >_>
Now I'm modeling the "8" shaped prop, and the intersecting parts gave me quite a hard time figuring out how to model them, but I think I somehow managed to make it work.
@9Solid I really like your take on the architecture. Especially the roof trim. Also, thanks for the link to the 80.lv article. It'll definitely help me with my workflow. If only I read it before starting lol.
I've been slowly plugging away on this, maybe about 12 hours or so invested. I almost have all the high polygon meshes built, this time relying on things like creasing PSUBs, regular polygons and the Rounded Edge properties in the Material tab to create micro bevels rather than doing it myself manually. There are a few trouble spots I need to resolve, especially for the last piece, but I hope to High Heaven that I can finish the high poly modeling soon. (As an aside, I have some of the low poly models built and UV'd with test normal map bakes, which I might post later).
Now, of course for some quick feedback. My apologies in advance if it's not too detailed or if I don't get everyone; it's 10:13pm here, and I need to get up at 5:30am for work.
@Mahelix, Good job with the hatches, don't fret too much about the cylinder. As a freebie, I'll show you an up close shot of my cylinder piece and tell you the basics of how I made it: I used a 60 sided cylinder, and extruded from the base on up. To fake the micro bevels for rendering, I adjusted the Rounded edge to 1 mm / 2.5 mm. Therefore, I didn't waste anytime with sub-D modeling. Yes, Sub-D modeling is great, but if you're pressed for time, there's no shame in using cheats, especially since it's the game model that counts.
@Dreyzie and @9Solid, excellent looking start for what I believe to be one of the more difficult 3D environments (the sense of scale is totally lost on me, going from the concept, so I look forward to how you'll handle this). I'd definitely like to see a human reference put in there, as that might give you a better idea of how big the floor grates need to be compared with the height of the walls, etc.
@JamesArk, Very Good modeling on the four props you've selected, especially the last two! Of all the props, I considered those to be the most difficult in terms of reproducing accurately and making sure my proportions are correct (I still haven't completely figured out the last prop as you can see in my list). I'd very much like to see what the props look like from other angles, especially from those viewpoints not given in the concept illustration.
Excellent job thus far, guys! Keep'em coming~!
As for the "8" (definitely don't know how else I could call it), the modeling ended up looking pretty good to me after the preliminary baking
I am now modeling the long cylinder prop; I decided to use a plane and bend it for the circular hole in the middle, like some users did for last month's robot, and I gotta say it's already looking pretty clean with the turbosmooth on it.
I might also try this technique for the previous cylinder as well as @jewski-bot 's technique; I feel in an experimenting mood today
Meanwhile, I basically finished the main blocking, so I will move on to smaller details.
@jewski-bot Thanks for the feedback. I've always had a tough time judging scale, and this piece wasn't any easier for me. After looking at the height ref again, I think the floor pieces seem a little too big.
Doing the "bent plane" method worked pretty well on the cylindrical prop, and the baking went nicely. I also had to detach the bottom in two parts for the highpoly to get those curved "dents" at the bottom.
I should think a bit more about detaching parts in the highpoly model when I have those kind of details to model without messing the rest of the geometry.
I am now finishing the lowpoly of the last prop.
The hardest part for me was to figure out how to get the front part to correspond nicely to the main cylindrical part, also the reference picture kinda looked strange to me at some parts, so I had to make my own interpretation at some points.