Character Artist: Manouk Manoukian wanted something for the character to stand on, I decided to build a small portion in the back for Level04 though it won't really be shown, I took it as something small I wanted to setup just for fun while still providing what he requested, I also got to play and learn a little more with my existing snow particles.
Nothing too major, just piling my new and existing rocks while tweaking the snow shader I had. I'm gonna have to revist the snow shader for the landscape, was pretty much utilizing the sand material from Level02B but coloured white instead.
Was sort of watching Dead Space trailers and remembering my playthroughs and was pretty much remided of Tau Volantis in Dead Space 3.
Did this up as well for character suit light's being red, a homage of sorts to the Rig suits from Dead Space. Just having some fun~
Controlling the strength of the particle snow gust.
How it holds up, still.
An overview of the map, this section built today leads up from the back.
The back portion has nothing much since the player won't really see anything from their angle.
Sat down today for a while to create 2 snow shaders to put onto my existing landscape.
The snow speckle was a technique I learned from Mark Ranson during the Gjallarhorn project period from my second year, I decided to employ it here as
well.
Would definitely look better If I had tessellation enabled but I've been having trouble getting it to work properly and decided to disable it / 0 it out.
Roughness testing.
Utilizing this video as a tutorial to learn for myself and tweaking accordingly, below were the nodes I picked up.
Tessellation is enabled here.
This one came in handy for kind of clumping snow around on one of the material variants.
Sort of my first time utilizing substance in a clean way as opposed to before where I would refuse to spend more then an hour on it to get them in the engine for quick visual results, I made sure to sit down, learn from the tutorial and then create from there.
Sat down today as well to take my time to create a sand material, tessellation is off / 0 out here (infact all of my scenes).
Farther view.
I exaggerated the roughness here just for this since I am dealing with a night time dusk'ish period and wanted more light to be caught.
Roughness Tweaking.
Same as last time, utilizing a sand video tutorial by Get Learnt, below are my results, I've coupled this with my existing sand with slight tweaks inside UE4 engine itself. This one took a while and as impatient as I am, I wanted to listen and watch carefuly to understand the workflow.
Tessellation is on here.
I am also in the middle of re-sculpting the giant alien skull in this level as well as it's ribs though this will take quite some time, I preferably plan to hit that next week as I wanted to spend this week on substance designer.
Nothing too visually fancy compared to the snow and ice for today, just new materials once again ontop my pre-existing ones. Today I went for my grassy level, though you won't really see the ground as I have mostly littered the area with grass cards which also needs an upgrade, maybe next week.
Just some General mud / dirt, no tessellation.
Roughness / Coord in below images were exaggerated just to test close ups.
Using this video from Get Learnt youtube channel once again, below were my results.
Update on the main playable character's body armor. Few back and forths when creating this as I was trying to find a visual style that was hard-surface yet keeping an organic shape. Rather than just putting metal plates on top of eachother, been trying to figure out how everything fits together. Any feedback is appreciated.
The fur was made in part with Xgen (the larger bottom chunk) and Interactive groom, I found that using splines is quicker, but Interactive gave me a lot more hands-on control.
Went to try and upgrade my wood shader today, no tessellation once again.
Most of the above images are close ups, we don't really get to close so the below image is how it looks farther away.
Close ups
Substance Designer graph below, I mostly utilized the workflow from this video from Daniel's Game Art channel on YouTube. Though I added just a little extra things with my own tweak to try move it away from being too stylized.
Did not really get to utilize the one below as the circular designs repeated a little too much, I might have to bring in a custom mask into the node structure into UE4 to control the masking or depend on uv coords though this takes considerable time for myself.
Currently using the below output for the results in UE4.
Just a small quick touch up on the existing rock pillar, I have basically reduced the tri-count on this and made a new base normals for export.
Old New
The old one on the left had 27,834 tris where the newly imported one has 3834 tris (I shall reduce it much further on the new pass after Beta). Please bear in mind this is more of a quick touch up rather then a polish, just wanted to make my asset a little more tolerable since 30k tris is way too high. Both below are at LOD 0.
Inside Level03D, the grassy level where I replace the previous older rock pillars, they are not too visually different from afar.
A closer look, I tried to maintain the shape of the previous one basically, just slightly touching up with the new one.
I absolutely plan to polish up this asset since I do spread this across everywhere but will instead sculpt a new one while keeping the shape in mind as well as reucing the tri-count even further on the next touch up.
For now I just needed something more lighter and less muddy looking quickly in the scene as the last one had been there for many months, I am also closing in on Beta submission so I'd prefer to keep everything in place and touched up wherever I could as it would be a little dangerous to overhaul completely to such a close submission date.
The Bison Beast's in its final stages now, I'm not a rigger or an animator, but I learnt some basics to give it more life.
The fur cards were placed manually one by one in layers, and then mirrored, I divided the sections by top and bottom of the tail, body, head, and ears.
Kept working on the textures, not really liking the brown skin, so it was changed later.
Finished placing the cards, Alex Taylor helped me fix the vertex normals by showing me this tutorial.
Finished texturing for now, might touch up later. Redid the fur material in UE4.
This is the state for the project for Beta, we removed the plane intro scene from alpha since I was told to cut it down, response mostly for the project was to now refine our edit however there are a few things I plan to further push out on my end, I have decided it will mostly be general polish and a new skull for the desert level though forseeably mostly post editing.
An update on the character armour. I decided to add more black elements to the suit to help break up the shape as it started to get a bit too red. Any feedback is appreciated.
I am planning to replace the skull I've last had on the desert level with a new one. I imported a quick low poly to test the shape out before I fully commit to it and to see what I can shift about and what not to spend too much time to sculpt on.
Still largely a work in progress, I think I'll be removing the horn instead and play more on the branching looking bones near the eye region.
The import into UE4, the shader on the new skull shape is just a place holder, I still need to sculpt the highpoly down some more and substance painter it.
If this one doesn't work out I will most likely have to fall back to a more traditional skull shape instead.
Since my Zbrush tool is incompatible with my current version of Zbrush back at home, I did some shifting around in the scene, a bake and getting rid of some useless lights. I also decided to put in some of those glowing branches I've had in the grass level and changed their emissive colour, I'll have to make a proper mesh for it instead of the default plane when I return to this.
Brought by attention from Martin Bowman, I also managed to finally fix up the shadow since it would not draw properly previously on the character as It was a bit finicky when I had multiple spotlights on her, I re-did and removed some of the spotlights for now to have a visible shadow draw from her now.
As I was playing around with the last skull in UE4, I found myself struggling to make it work and that from several viewpoints it was hard to register the look as simply a skull so I decided to approach a more traditional shape to identify a skull at first look where I went for a noticeable Jaw and Teeth.
I am hoping the caging strokes on the skull would help catch some more light as opposed to the last shape where I heavily struggled and felt stagnant.
Will grab down a quick low poly further down the weeks (after the essay brief) to test out placement in the desert scene.
I placed the skull into a blueprint class, I could have probably done this for the other levels that would have much better use of building prefabs this way but only learnt it this morning as I was listening over to Polygon Academy Youtube video while working.
Laughing skull!
Just splattered some quick detail over to then bake down onto the low poly, since the scene is quite dark, most of it won't be too visible as I'd be mostly playing around with the emissive but it never hurts for myself in the long run to have something tolerable.
Did the textures up quickly in Substance Painter and then tweaked it further for the scene in UE4. I exported the Emissive and the rest out.
My last showreel was definitely in dire need of an upgrade and took the time yesterday to do it up, I still plan to further change it down the road when I near my approach to the final gold submission.
Character Update. Just wrapped up the utility belt for the character, with a few minor texture changes to the body. Any feedback is appreciated.
This was just for fun using one of my marmoset renders!
The final version of the character will have a semi opaque cape attached to the armour but next I will be creating a version of the character with the hood down.
I recently recieved the somewhat updated model of the ship from our Generalist Artist: Nabin Phauja but instead utilized it's shape to generate these towering structures in the distance to the scene.
I also twisted and scaled them again here below, was having quite a lot of fun with the contorted shape but this will obviously not make the final cut as it would be quite heavy and time consuming to probably animate. Almost sort of an assault on the alien ships in the distance.
Below is one of our shots from Beta but with an idea from Martin Bowman he mentioned an idea for me to take a look at helicopters taking off in these fog environments with strong light behind. I made the change to it here below by sequencing properties from my fog and light source but also made the decision to also have it blend / fade off fast in order to maintain the original dynamic light values.
Character Head Update. I used texturing xyz's multi channel faces for the albedo and displacement maps. I will now move onto baking my normal map and tidying up the albedo texture. These are just screens out of zbrush, any feedback is appreciated.
Decided to use the pylon shapes and constructed my own asset for blockout, I went with a more damaged variation as what I had in mind is that these structures would have probably been here a while and that maybe they have been recently activated that may have a connection to the strange relic in the middle.
Also removed the walls in between the structures as it ate into the landscape and kinda threw off the overall shot too much, these pylons won't be too detailed and to be more of shapes in the background.
My hard surface isn't too strong so I decided to take this opportunity to try and test out hard surface kits real quick and splattered some shapes ontop. I have not implemented this bake into UE4 yet.
The blockout shapes I constructed in Maya.
Hope to improve my hard surface slightly through this, I've always had trouble dealing with hard surface stuff.
The last shape was sorta killing my vibes so I decided to make another blockout shape. Below is the new Pylon shape with the old ones on the right side in Maya.
I found myself struggling with the last pylon shape and decided to replace it in UE4, below is the shape on its own with some quick shaders to resemble the Orokin Towers in Warframe.
I
I started scaling and rotating the shape of the tower and duplicated them even more to start generating different structures, as if I was duplicating my rocks to construct different rock formations. I was looking at Sean Bigham and Josh Dina and got inspired to do sort of my own take on the orokin towers shape.
II
Below is my result today, I didn't want the structures to pull too much attention but enough to have the viewer look at it and wonder what is there compared to last time where it just really annoyed my eye for the most part. I also moved the ship direction and plan to re-animate it flying from left to right instead to the mysterious looking area in the distance (at the far right).
III
I plan to tweak the tower shapes further in the week, below is the overview of Level03D, you can see the shape is pretty much blockout level at best, I may be leaving it as it is and leave the shader to cover it up more to add in detail.
I plan to create a grunge-ish shader when I return to the labs to dirty up the towers but still leaving enough of itself to viewed as something ornate.
Changed the Shapes for the Towers again, added 2 more smaller ones embedded in the rocks near the relic in the middle. Shifted ship, will play around some more when I return to it.
Towers embedded into the middle area, still wrapping them with the roots at the moment.
Inspired once again by the Orokin designs from Warframe, took some time in the morning to quickly create this one, not too detailed but does the job enough since it is pretty far away, mostly looking for the cracks.
Node graph below, nothing complex.
Old tower shape. (Replaced by new today)
New tower shape.
Since the UV's are just in a tightly packed space, tiling is my go to.
I'll most likely play with the shapes around again while doing up my checklist tomorrow onwards.
First pass at the skin shader for the character. Taking into account previous feedback, I have given the face more anatomical structure and adjusted the eyes giving them more shape. I added asymmetry where needed. Now just trying to push the skin/pore details. All rendered in Marmoset Toolbag. Any feedback is appreciated.
Hitting up my checklist, the lecturer Martin Bowman mentioned that the previous plant was very flat looking and recommended I look at some lily plants. This is my result today.
I was debating whether I should make it as a mesh or out of cards and decided to try the card appraoch for this plant today and am happy with the results. It is also about 8x - 9x lighter then my previous mesh now coupled with vertex shading to pin down areas i don't want wind to affect.
Import into UE4 and comparison!
I believe next up on my checklist is doing up the rock bridge area~
Level03D - Rock Bridge & Quick grass vertex shade.
Not any actual asset creation today, just decided to polish up several areas and then today's rock bridge. Used to be a very old asset from last year bridging the river area here for the player to walk on. Now using my assets this year instead, I reconstructed it and also redid the area past the rock bridge.
Used to have no bridge here as I had a locomotive system that allowed the player to sprint + jump across, though my blueprint is no longer used.
Nothing too visually fancy, just re-placing around things infront here.
Other then the rock bridge area, I've moved around some branches and deleted some stuff as well as turn off UV light channels / turn off shadow casting on some static meshes save performance wherever I can.
Decided to go back to my grass and Vertex shade it.
Still quite a few kinks to work out, probably best if I upgrade and re-make this grass asset as my vertex paint isn't probably reaching some of the cards though most of them are pinned down / rooted and should hold up for now.
Decided to replace my older mushrooms after recieveing some comments from the lecturer Phil Vallentin and Martin Bowman. Below are my reuslts.
Slightly smaller then the last one since it encompasses a bulge at the bottome for the glowy parts. I've made the textures 1k as well since compared to the 2k one last time.
I've decided to just make different material
instances to make it seem like they glow at random intervals where I
adjusted the blinking frequency so they aren't all uniform.
How it holds up~
Top and bottom side display import into UE4. Could probably contort the shapes some more but I'll make do with my rotation and scaling for now.
Still spreading these meshes around the scene but have mostly replaced the spots where the character walks through in the shots. Tomorrow I might (super super maybe since labs are closed for easter period) be doing a replacement for my red vines, mostly under the tree arches.
Character Update. Taking in previous feedback, the eyes were very far apart so I brought those in a bit and made some amendments to the face as I felt the previous version lacked character. The eyes are just place holder for now but I will be going for a striking colour. Any feedback always appreciated.
Not much on my side but our team is approaching gold, most of the shots from our Beta is mostly intact but with a few given changes. The previous Level03D transition to Level02B, Martin Bowman gave me an idea if a transition effect would work, something spacey. I asked our Effects Artist: Kidman Lee in regards to some sort of warp effect and decided to take the time to queue the two shots in together and this was a quick result below.
Level03D out shot is still the same with a few slight additions, the towers. Level02B has a new intro shot as shown above replacing the last one in Beta. I'll probably work with Kidman to see if I can push the strength of the masks inside the shader onto the particle emitter and fix up my camera focal distance in order to avoid noise again tomorrow.
That particle effect is amazing! and the lighting on the skull is....I'm biting the back of my hand
Thank you for checking in, I did relight this new skull in the scene using lesser lights then my older skulls a month back plus some of the emissive that I've splatterd around help gave it some more form!
@KidmanLee That warp effect... is that a procedural mesh of some kind? Or is it just a cylinder with a translucent material that animates a noise texture over time?
Character Update, unfortunately I haven't gotten round to making the edits based on suggestions as I have been spending the last couple days on the hair (which I am still getting to grips with). I plan to improve on real time hair over the next few months. Here is the character in its current state. My main goal now is to get it into UE4 asap and begin the animation blueprinting. If I have time I will make the edits to the face.
Below is my take and edit based on our gold submission for Project: Star Bounty. Looking at the feedback from the Animation Team I decided to make some amendments on my part to improve the edit. You can find the new edit in the link below. Any feedback is always appreciated.
Just want to say this project is really cool, I am loving the environmental models, Your use of nodes is great, I am just getting into nodes, I am one of those last persons to the show, like I didn't start watching Friends until the series was in it's last year. Anyway, thanks for the previews, you have given me some ideas on how to improve my environments... ~Ralph
Replies
Man...I miss Dead Space....
Update on the main playable character's body armor. Few back and forths when creating this as I was trying to find a visual style that was hard-surface yet keeping an organic shape. Rather than just putting metal plates on top of eachother, been trying to figure out how everything fits together. Any feedback is appreciated.
Some updates on the Buffalo/Bison beast creature.
The eye colour is adjustable in Substance.
The fur was made in part with Xgen (the larger bottom chunk) and Interactive groom, I found that using splines is quicker, but Interactive gave me a lot more hands-on control.
Hey everyone!
The Bison Beast's in its final stages now, I'm not a rigger or an animator, but I learnt some basics to give it more life.
The fur cards were placed manually one by one in layers, and then mirrored, I divided the sections by top and bottom of the tail, body, head, and ears.
Kept working on the textures, not really liking the brown skin, so it was changed later.
Finished placing the cards, Alex Taylor helped me fix the vertex normals by showing me this tutorial.
Finished texturing for now, might touch up later. Redid the fur material in UE4.
Rigged the head with the helpful coaching of Katherine Padley.
Did some animations over the weekend.
Also managed to make the animations and blendshapes work in UE4, had to reskin the fur.
The final version of the character will have a semi opaque cape attached to the armour but next I will be creating a version of the character with the hood down.
This is just a contemporary head for the moment (from an old project). Will be spending the next few weeks purely on the head/hair/eyes.
Another play around with one of the renders....
Effect Update - Dust Puff when the ship flying up
I Haven't done the engine thruster for the ship, which might look a bit wired with the dust puff only.
Adding some grasses blow away
Effect Update: Thruster for the Drop Ship
Testing
There are two emitter layers. Inner spawning the gas and the outer is for glowing.
Testing out the silhouette of the face here to see how it looks when light catches it from different angles.
Effect Update:
Warp Effect:
-01
-02
That particle effect is amazing! and the lighting on the skull is....I'm biting the back of my hand
The head model is getting better all the time,
bottom eye lid up a little so it rests on the iris
Nasolabial fold needs more structure, its sort of smoothing into the nasolabial area.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sandiskondrats/head-and-neck-anatomy-a-book-with-3d-augmented-rea?ref=discovery&term=anatomy%20book
As well as a radio beacon
Below is my take and edit based on our gold submission for Project: Star Bounty. Looking at the feedback from the Animation Team I decided to make some amendments on my part to improve the edit. You can find the new edit in the link below. Any feedback is always appreciated.
Anyway, thanks for the previews, you have given me some ideas on how to improve my environments...
~Ralph