Mining Station - Fractured Space

Millenia

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/zADWYZ

Last piece I did for Fractured Space 55k tris, 2 materials.

Concept by Tim Zanconato and Rob Blight with adjustments by myself. All asset work by me.

Eric Chadwick

This is awesome. Love how the design and repeated construction-themed elements have enough variation.

Assuming you used a trim sheet or two like your other ships. Can you share flats? Curious about your layout and blending methods... vertex color for blends?

Millenia

Eric Chadwick said:

This is awesome. Love how the design and repeated construction-themed elements have enough variation.

Assuming you used a trim sheet or two like your other ships. Can you share flats? Curious about your layout and blending methods... vertex color for blends?

Varies how I do the materials, either vertex colour or colour ID In this case I'm using a colour ID map with up to 8 colours (and a bit of custom shader logic to separate cyan/magenta/yellow/black/white)

So the maps I'm using are 1024 set for the opaque stuff and 512 for the alpha stuff (both displayed at 2048 here), 256x256 for the tiling windows. Colour ID (transparency in alpha), Curvature/AO (BC5 normal map compression, 2 uncompressed greyscales), normal, heightmap. 1024 normal + Curvature/AO for the detail paneling, 2048 grunge, both of which get triplanar mapped. There's also a layer of worldspace cellnoise in the Unreal shader to modulate the opacity of the detail paneling, procedural edge wear based off the mixed curvature + detail curvature + AO for both and some worldspace cloud noise applied via the lightmap UV to modulate overall brightness of base colour.

Here's what the trimsheets look like - bit of unused space since I was making these while putting together the station and left a bit of space in case I wanted to add more details.

Here's one of the panels' curvature so you can see it without the detail mapping and grunge applied.

The way I generated the trims this time around was modeling these pieces flat as midpoly, no sub-d or zbrush, bake them out against a plane in Marmoset (height/colour ID/opacity), use Substance Designer to derive normal/AO/curvature from the height and scale/position all the pieces together there. Works surprisingly well! Literally just blurred the heights a little before converting to normal and it looks like a high poly bake almost.

Eric Chadwick

Wow that's a lot of parallax mapping! Kudos, Hans.

Millenia

Eric Chadwick said:

Wow that's a lot of parallax mapping! Kudos, Hans.

Haha yeah, the in-game version uses iterative parallax (just chained BumpOffset in Unreal) which is very cheap, I did use POM for beauty shots because why not   I also only use the iterative parallax on ultra, one layer of parallax on medium and no parallax on low.

Ashervisalis

That looks sick!

DonSmith

This is really great work.  Execution is brilliant.  Could we see the original concept in the post? 

Anchang-Style

Millenia said:

The way I generated the trims this time around was modeling these pieces flat as midpoly, no sub-d or zbrush, bake them out against a plane in Marmoset (height/colour ID/opacity), use Substance Designer to derive normal/AO/curvature from the height and scale/position all the pieces together there. Works surprisingly well! Literally just blurred the heights a little before converting to normal and it looks like a high poly bake almost.

Honestly on my first glance i was like "oh my god did he model all that by hand" well you answered that right there. But the illusion is amazing on a distance.

chriszuko

Whew... thats some serious detail porn right there. Your eye can get lost a bit but overall it looks really awesome. I'd probably crank up the AO a bit to help guide the eye to the bigger shapes, but that is nitpicky at this point. Very clever usage of trim sheets and parallax mapping. Glad I am not the only one still baking things to planes. XD