Sketchbook: Sean Hummel

humblebee

Hi everyone,

I'm Sean, currently doing an MA in Game Art & Design at the uni of Herts, focusing on environment art; I originally got a bachelor in communication design so I'm just trying to get into the industry. Also working as 3D background artist for comic artist Yuumei.
You can find more on my portfolio or facebook.

I'll be posting WIPS and works, feedback and CC are always welcome.

humblebee

First of a piece I finished last year but only currently got to publish, it's the first work I get to show for Yuumei's upcoming reboot of KNITE.
For anyone curious, I model the scenes for her comic in Maya and render it out in V-Ray, other members of the team add the rigged and posed characters and Yuumei herself paints over them.

Here's a little comparison of my work and the finished piece:



And a few more shots of the scene in day and night, it's the construction site of a skyscraper in a fictious Chinese city









You can find the rest here.

humblebee

I am training myself some industry workflows and more software. My latest work is part of a live brief for a VR company. The aim was to create a hangar based on concept art for a spider-like mech.
The first time I dealt with propper UV unwrapping and big scale texturing in Substance Painter. I created a modular Kit for structure and assets:

There's still a few errors that I couldn't fix due to time restraints but I'm quite happy for a first time work in that scale.

humblebee

Here's a first blockout from before I created the assets


and an overview of the scene

humblebee

I assembled the scene itself in UE4, added lighting, post and VFX (as I'm still learning those all the effects are adjusted recreations of unreal's free demo file effects):




The actual parking bay for the mechs, including access via the catwalk.

A tunnel leading to the hangar



Fueling station


Here's a (too quick) first flythrough of the scene. https://youtu.be/qnipsUelk_Y[/url]

CC welcome as always

humblebee

I took part in the Shogunate Artstation Challenge last year - with quite the overflowing shedule calendar - so now I'm taking care of some retouches to shape it the way it was originally intended.

here's the original submission

And this is what I got so far (in video to show animations and light)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnS2urubajs&feature=emb_title</url>

Replaced a few meshes, textures  and effects (the fire particle on the building-edges was a super late placeholder) and adapted

the light and atmosphere to make it more nighty. Also added the floating lanterns for some light and colour contrast.

What do you guys think? I'm afraid it's turning too blue.

humblebee

Here's a quick comparrison of updated meshes:

Old version:

Updated version:

humblebee

Lot is happening but inbetween some different types of chaos and Covid Lockdown I managed to start enother personal project.

It focuses on two aspects, the one is the topic itself, a short animated music video.

The focus are the instruments themselves. For the muscians I'll be using a workflow I adapted during my last gig with a great comic artist (sadly not yet published) as I'm not focusing on Character Art and needed to get down a quick and efficient workflow. The characters will be a simple Fuse + Mixamo combination.

The other focus is a shader - one of my first bigger Post Process Shaders, emulating a comic book like hatch to the whole scene but limited to certain shadows, mostly on Ambient Occlusion (with enough adjustability). In combination with a typical toon shader, also working on that but heavily influenced so far by Tom Shannon LLC's pack. 

There's a few hatching shaders out there but I wanted to focus on both the limitation to AO to keep it limited, inspired by comic artists like Bilal using it sparcely and combined with normal shading; and also for it to actually stick to the mesh and not move with the camera like a simple mask.

Here's what it looks like so far

humblebee

A lot has changed on the course of this project. After a disappointing search for free music for a short clip I ranted to my friend and former band member, ChePawsky,  who agreed to write a tune for it, this of course blew the project slightly out of proportion, a cooperation with a fellow artist raises the bar quite a bit. The two of us have always been in tune, and many ideas the two of us had for the video overlapped perfectly.

Here's the final result:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE_ACl8QyM8

The Shaders

I ditched the shading attempt for this project, as the current version is relying heavily on viewport distance so moving camera lead to quite a few issues. It looked good on stillframes, but the way I worked it, having it based on screen-space AO, was just too busy for animation. I haven't given up on it, currently trying to transform it to real-time raytracing AO instead, which should provide a cleaner and more static result.  I concentrated more on a heavier cell-shade look.

The toon shader however, was further developed and refined and probably ended up the most comples shader I've made so far, for this one I learned most from underscore's cell shader tutorial as well as unreal's own tutorial.

All of this was combined with a simple master colour blent with all the materials to get a consistent colour scheme for the 'monochrome' scenes of yellow or pink backgrounds with blue characters, having only the instruments remain their original colour to have them pop out more.

The Characters

I am no character artist, but I obviously needed characters for this shot. The last comic artist I worked for (mentioned in my last post) already requested me to put characters in the shots I provided for him, the work with him was a lot more rough and production orientated, more like 3D sketches for him to work his magic on. Back then I came up with a fast workflow, using Adobe Fuse with some modification in Maya and posing directly in Unreal Engine. So I figured, why reinvent the wheel, when it worked last time. Again I adapted the models from Fuse, changing the textures and models to my liking and adding assets like the headphones. The animations were taken off of Mixamo and then customized in Maya and Unreal to fit the movement and hand placements for each shot, fitting them with the music. In the end in most shots there's not too much left of the original pre-composed animations. 

Assets

 The video is heavily focused on the instruments being played, so except for the starting sequence, I didn't need many assets except for the animated spiral in the background and a few extras, like the gigantic record player they're spinning on and of course the rubber ducky with it's short cameo.

The future

I recently treated myself to my very first VR goggles, the beautiful HP reverb, it is amazing how these have and will continue to heavily effect the way we view media. While it is incredibly stunning to sit in a real cockpit of a Tie-Fighter or stand in a different world through these, for me the experience of suddenly standing in the middle of my own creations is even more baffling, feeling like you're just about to be able to touch the very things I created on the computer. Therefore I've already started to dive into the creative use of these. It's an experimental approach, especially when trying to find the balance of freedom while still keeping the viewer from experiencing nausea from wrong or quick camera movement. Because I had so much fun on this last project, I've decided to use it as my playground for this and create a special VR-360 cut of the video. So stay tuned!