Sketchbook: Tom Martyn
polycounter lvl 8
Hi there!
I thought it was time for me to create a Digital Sketchbook - so here it is. Included is a range of recent 2D and 3D work, some of which I'm still working on in my spare time.
C&C and feedback more than welcome!
https://tommartyn.artstation.com/
Cheers!
I thought it was time for me to create a Digital Sketchbook - so here it is. Included is a range of recent 2D and 3D work, some of which I'm still working on in my spare time.
C&C and feedback more than welcome!
https://tommartyn.artstation.com/
Cheers!
Replies
I have been working on my skeleton character (MR. Gaunt) a little bit more in my free time.
I decided to take a little break from the skeleton character and do some 2D work (when I get stuck in a rut with a piece I often find devoting a couple of days to something else and coming back to it really helps!)
Meet Kit and Dug.
I was inspired by the Saga Comic series when creating this painting and tried to follow a similar 2 tone shading style.
For Three Winds Games I have been creating some prop assets to populate the world of the medieval strategy game. These assets share a 4k texture atlas with room for more assets.
Vase Sculpts.
Sack Sculpts.
Here is a screenshot of some more medieval assets I have been working on for a strategy RPG game. All assets (including vases and sacks in post above) are within the same 4k texture atlas. The method of texturing and unwrapping these assets was quite different to the more organic vase and sack assets. All wooden assets are using the same tiled wooden plank segment with varying parameters in their material instances in UE4.
All assets layed out individually in Maya. 6 barrels with varying metal strips(3 small, 3 big) were closed and 3 are open with the option of having a variant lid or filling mesh inside.
Topology of Assets in Maya. I try to refrain from adding too many edge loops and beveled edges but it can be tricky! I use soften and hard edges a lot and also delete any inside polys that are not seen.
UV atlas of all the assets, including vases and sacks. I'm still planning on creating more assets including a wine urn, bale, work bench etc which would fill up the remaining UV space. I found I could get a lot out of the same wood texture, especially with material instances in UE4. I find unwrapping hard-surface props much easier than organic. I tend to use UV Layout for organic shaped assets and Maya for hard-edged.
Normal Map
RMAO Map - Roughness, Metallic, AO
I will try and get the assets published on the marketplace soon.
Hope you like them! Any feedback or critique appreciated.
All the props in the scene share the same 4k texture atlas set and can be modified individually with colour tints for their main and supplementary parts along with normal and roughness intensity parameters.
Marketplace link: www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/en-US/slug/medieval-props-collection
Recently created some market stalls for Three Winds Games medieval strategy game.
For the wooden frame I sourced a CCO wood texture which I tweaked in PS before creating Roughness, AO and Normals from it in B2M. The carts seen in the seen also use the same wood material.
For the stall cloth I first simulated the cloth pieces in Marvelous designer so that they simulated on the stall frames. Along with the cloth parameters to determine how the fabric fell on the wooden frame I also used the pin tool to freeze segments whilst simulating to easily tweak and move parts.
After this I added in a folded over segment for the cloth edges - I find this helps to give a fuller/thicker look to the cloth. From my experience cloth can look thin and paper like if the mesh edges are not folded back on themselves.
I then took the meshes into Zbrush and sculpted over the crease and fold details to define them more.
When texturing the cloth I made use of a cotton alpha. This alpha was a nice base to create colour variation, height and roughness variation.
I textured the cloth pieces to be more worn and faded at their edges using curvature masks in Substance Painter.
For the coloured stripes on the cloth I used a colour tint multiplied by a colour mask within UE4. This enabled me to change the colour stripes to whatever colour I wished.
Oh hay!
I have been working on this thatched roof stable asset recently and thought I would share my process for creating it.
I started off by working with xgen hairs on a plane in Maya. Following reference I groomed the strands so that they fall in a straight, layered way, with occasional hairs going off at random angles, and with a small amount of width and length variation for more realistic irregularity.
I converted the xgen strands to geometry and added in a colour ramp for the strands so they are darker at the base and have some hue and saturation noise.
Using a mel-script that selects a percentage of the total strands, I created 3 alpha maps: 1 of all the hay strands, 1 with 10% of the scattered strands and 1 with 5% of the strands. I overlayed the 10% and 5% alphas on the colour map in Photoshop with some hue adjustments for a bit of colour variation.
The normal and roughness maps were created from the colour map (baked in Maya) in Bitmap2Material and I used noise textures to overlay on the Roughness and Colour map, along with an overlayed occlusion map.
The next step was to lay out the thatched roof in Maya. The hay texture I created accounted for around a 12th of the total roof. When duplicating and placing the hay segments I reduced tiling by flipping some segments and by scaling and distorting parts. I cut around the texture to reduce wasted transparent space, and I bent the meshes to fit on the wooden stable frame.
I wanted to add in various strands sticking out of the roof to create a more full 3d look. I did this by taking a new hay segment and cutting various end bits off and placing them perpendicular to the roof.
When importing the stable to UE4 I found the perpendicular pieces were creating dark shadowing due to the way the light was hitting them. To get around this issue, I created a mesh which matched the roof shape of the thatched roof, (seen on the left) using 'transfer attributes' in Maya, I transferred the vertex normals from this mesh to the original thatched roof(on the right). This achieved a much softer/smoother look with no harsh shadowing.
The final thing to do was to add some noise to the Base Colour in the UE4 material. I overlayed 3 noise textures in the material with different scales and rotated in different ways to help further break up texture tiling.
Overall it was a very fun and fairly challenging asset to create and I've definitely learnt a fair bit from the process. Thank you for reading!
My process for creating this hay bale was to use Xgen to create the individual strands. The strands were then converted to geometry before being baked onto the unwrapped cylinder
I separated a base cylinder mesh before grooming the Xgen hairs on so that the baking process would be much simpler. Whereas with the thatched roof (described in post above) I used a hay clump segment baked onto a plane and then duplicated it several times to create the full mesh, with this bale I created and groomed the xgen strands on the whole mesh.
This meant that the hay strands looked less repetitive but the process of grooming and baking the strands was much longer.
4k texture resolution was necessary for the bale as there is a lot of fine detail in the texture.
I baked out an Ambient Occlusion map in XNormals (I found the AO map result in XNormal was far better than Maya or Zbrush) and overlayed this onto the base colour map to create a more defined look.
I used a colour ramp in Maya which was applied to the strands mesh so that the strands were lighter at the tip. For further colour variation I added in some noise of varying scales.
My main aim for this personal project is to create an environment that feels very lived in and atmospheric. The project will be a good opportunity to work on my set-dressing and lighting skills.
I will make use of some assets I created for Three Winds Games, many of which are described above. I plan on also create a few more assets including a well and I will also make use of the megascans library for smaller foliage.
(Portfolio: https://tommartyn.artstation.com/)
Most recently I have been setting up and painting a vertex paintable material for the props using their AO maps as masks for the moss and dirt to paint through.
The decals I added in are track marks for the carts, horse hoof prints, loose hay and puddles.
For the track mark I created a quick tiled sculpt in Zbrush and then applied the same dirt texture to the tile as the base dirt texture on the ground. The hoof prints were taken from Quixel Megascans and I just tweaked the colour and material parameters in Unreal to match the ground.
The hay pile was created using Xgen in Maya. I go into detail further up on how I created hay assets such as the hay bales and thatched stable roof, but in short I groomed the Xgen strands, converted them to geometry, added a colour ramp and then baked them onto a plane.
I created some noise puddle textures in Photoshop and then set up a reflective material for the decals in Unreal.
I sourced some oak tree leaf and branch textures from the Megascans library for the oak leaves and manually placed the branch twigs and leaves in Photoshop.
The trees themselves were created using TreeIT.
For the lanterns I added in a gentle sway using sine with world position offset. The tree branches also have simple grass wind applied to them along with the cloth edges of the market stalls.
For the lantern I painted fading blue vertex colour for the sway and also painted purple for the candle flame. The candle flame is purple as it contains blue which means it also sways in unison to the lantern holder and it contains red for its own flickering motion.
I will use a HDRI which I will use as a skysphere and also plug into the skylight to further define the lighting more. This is a technique I discovered in the brilliant UE4 Lighting Academy tutorials.
Over the past week I have added in some foliage and tweaked the materials a little. Alongside this I changed the terrain so that it is an earth clump with depth rather than a simple circular plane. I have also added in tree roots coming out the bottom of the terrain and I will add in loose floating earth clumps around the roots too.
I'm now calling my Medieval Diorama finished. I've learnt a fair bit working on this project (especially about dynamic lighting in UE4) and had a lot of fun working on it!