The middle top part (that moves up) is not aligned with the rest of the thing and i feel that the green charge things in the middle are too far away from each other so it makes the whole model a bit too long.
I have the same idea about the right side handle but i have other ideas as well so it could go either way.
About UE4, i think you should export it as a fbx with animation and import in UE4 as a skeletal mesh. For the color to change you will need some kind of blueprint to change the color of the material at runtime so google that.
Hi! It's my first time attempting the challenge. I'm struggling with the blocking so far, the perspective is driving me nuts! Thought I'd still post my progress
This is where I am at currently. I have deviated from the concept a little, mainly with the internals as I though they looked too flimsy so I've bulked them up a bit.
I even have a little animation now!
Cheers @warbossdil. Yeah, it's slowly coming along, though I'm pretty happy with the proportions. Nice idea with the handle you have on the end of yours, though I do agree with @teodar23 that you have a bit too much space between the charging elements. Cool animation too.
I'm still not 100% on the scale of the thing. Going by some of the hand-holds and general look, I've sized mine at around 0.6m long. But the other concept seems bigger considering there is the touch screen in there. Thoughts?
About the size, i know that the concept was done for titanfall so i decided that its a pretty big piece that both a human and a titan can operate (dont ask how, i'm still figuring that part out).
For the second piece, i used the cable housing (red belt thingy) from the first piece as a guide. here's a sneak peek:
Yeah, I also used the cable to estimate the size of the other piece, but it made that touchscreen tiny. Haven't been able to find any other references or clues, so I'll stick with the size I have.
Looking good, far ahead with it all, and different take to the front. I like the cable texture, but the metal texture overall looks a bit too noisy, though I expect you are still working on it. Like the yellow part I could imagine would be more like yellow paint which flakes at the edges, maybe worn down more where you grab it. I'm not keen with the holes on top of it, to me it looks like coat buttons.
Yeah I didn't want to do that one because I couldn't see how it would work practically. About the proportions I think that the lower part is too long, it feels too tall, not bulky enough, if you get my meaning? Might just be the angle of the shot though.
Cheers, yeah the scale of the whole thing is a bit tricky, and trying to not make it too fragile, but I figured what the heck, got some artistic freedom to do our way with it anyway.
Interesting way you did your opening mechanism, but don't you have an issue with it getting to close to one of the heating elements? Looking forward to see how you deal with the attaching them to the top/bottom shell.
As mentioned, it's from titanfall and I was mainly going for something that could be manually pulled/pushed open/closed, have no idea how it actually works ingame. I'm might be done with what I want to do with the highpoly, though thinking about making the middle beam a bit more thicker, to get a bit more mass. Will then start with the lowpoly and get some unwrapping done, until the fun part of texturing.
@GuillaumeLD Looks good, the lighting is nice as well! What are you working on next?
Here is my scene so far, I've still been working on it daily except weekends. I decided to leave the motorbike until last since I want to spend all December doing a very detailed one. I was not really happy with some of the quality of the assets I made, like the memorabilia wall by the front door. Although I have it ingrained in my head to work on assets based on importance to the scene (since I directed an indie game). I forgot about the actual main neon dive bar sign so I'll need to fix that next. The translucent blinds I'm not sure about just yet, I may remake those into verticals, or try to polish up the current material. I think my main set dressings are done, some final things I want to add are fog/smoke particles along the top of the roof, large scale cobwebs and dust. This is also my first time really working on a scene for Unreal since I've only used Unity for work. So I'm trying to figure out the lighting and baking artifacts that are present over the meshes. The glass shader I had a bit of trouble with and still not happy with it. If anyone has feedback please shoot it! The whole point of this enviro challenge is so we can improve, so fire away. Also, some bottles are floating I know
@tynew Your environment look pretty good I suggest to warm the light on the left and use emission static light pool table light. I wonder if you use a lot of trim sheet with your texture and how do you do to a lot of props so fast? I feel I am slow when I see a lot of props that I need to do.
The next step I will do the props on the left. maybe redo the door, and create the other neon.
Hello everyone, I want to join, even though I'm the brand new Dive Bar
Welcome @annebakerim ! I think your picture didn't load. @GuillaumeLD Thanks! I wanted to keep a blue hue from the TV to offset the strong orange/yellow colors coming from the rest of the scene. Also the pool table light is emissive, but I made it a bit stronger now. I saw a cool tutorial online about getting lights to shine through a fake "lampshade" effect. Might be worth trying to extra quality. I have two main trim sheets, the first one covers the main textures. I wanted to experiment and see if it was efficient to have 2 wall textures on 1 sheet. I would not recommend this as it requires extra wall meshes to support it. Next time I will stick to just one main wall texture per trim sheet. @PixelMasher This is what I was meaning, anyway thanks for the help on your tutorials. It really helped me to break down my scene The second one I used for the bar countertop, which has the white laminate top, metal counter (which I also used on some props), and the wood along the main bar. Also for my props I used 2 4k texture maps for around 50 props. The couch, jukebox, both doors and pool table have a full 2k size texture each. For stuff like the lampshade/bathroom light I just reused the door texture map since you can't see normal map detail on it due to lighting. I spent around 10 days doing all the props, but I gathered a lot of online reference and wrote a list of all the things to make. So it was quite fast.
I finally finished all my assets (or so I think). Cleaned up the problem areas, did the neon bar sign, blinds, tweaked some textures. I rechecked all my albedo values in Substance's PBR validate tool and found I had some wrong values. Added some fog and cobwebs. Now really all that's left is the motorbike and final lighting bakes! Still open to feedback!
A blockout for the fountain pillar thing. Going to sculpt it today and then work on the foliage as well. Maybe I can get the other one done as well, build like a small environment or something.
This my result so far. I still need to do more props. I don't think I will do the motorcycle, since I want to focus on the environment. One off my error I did, is to not create a good trimsheet.
@tynew I got a question for you. Where do you take your
texture. I feel my texture seam off and I always feel that the texture I
use doesn't look real. Especially my wood. I think I really need a critic on my scene.
Hey! I hope everyone else is still keeping at it! I'm somewhat okay with my current progress though I've still got a way to go. Most importantly I have to start placing this into Unreal, which I've never used before, only ever done things in Unity. I would like to also add animations of the water flowing and the leaves moving, once I'm satisfied with the textures. At the moment I think they're still way too basic, plus I have to make some moss to add to parts of the rocks and structure.
Thanks! @Nasser Your blockout is looking good. It looks like you might have missed some individual bricks along the ends of the pipes, and under the archway along the left side.
@Zimzelen I think you could push your textures a bit more to make them pop. For your leaves, you should make a high poly and bake it down so it has more depth, plus make the roughness of the texture shinier. Your center columns and roof also need chamfered edges, the shading transition is really harsh (if you aren't baking these too).
@GuillaumeLD When it comes to believable wood it can be due to the wood grain size, whether or not the wood is varnished, or if it takes the grains into account in the roughness. Did you have a look at the real chair I posted on page 1? It's a varnished chair, so the roughness of the wood is smooth. I always test different types of wood, with different sized grains to see what looks best. Sometimes textures online or procedurally generated look too cartoony, and unrealistic. In your screenshots, your wood grains are too small.
Why did you not make a high poly and bake a normal map for your chair and couch? You will get a lot more detail coming through. This is an interior scene, so you can have more detail than usual on assets. My couch is 10k tris and there are 6 of them in the scene. Remember, in a real game you can always remove detail by optimizing the mesh or LOD, but never add. If this is for your portfolio, it's okay to have very detailed assets, as long as you know how to optimize them.
I started the block out of my motorcycle. I went for a 2019 Harley Davidson sportster, I am still deciding whether I want to make this a background prop or a very detailed object. If it's a background prop you would bake this down with a normal map (like in rainbow six siege). Racing games on the other hand don't use normal maps as everything is driven through the shaders.
@tynew took your advice and sculpted&baked leaves and bricks. I'm okay with the bricks but the leaves roughness still looks a bit off. For the pillars I gave it a champfer and sculpted it a bit but I think I have to redo the normals because I've just noticed some bad baking on the corners. Started pulling everything into Unreal but it's going slow, hope I can finish this with some animations added in! Also I'd like to give advice to you all but so far I haven't really noticed anything which bothered me, but I will try to at least use my critique skill!
@tynew Oh yeah I left those out on purpose because I wanted to see if I could capture that detail with a simpler mesh and a detailed sculpt. Nice couch btw, do you model in Max?
@Zimzelen Hey I really like your leaves, did you sculpt and then bake them down onto a plane? I think I might just go a simpler route and paint them in photoshop to try and maintain a more loose, painterly look like in the concept.
Anyway, I sculpted and baked, I'm happy with it. Will start texturing it tomorrow. Going to try and get it done in an hour so I can then move onto the foliage and getting it into Unreal. Then maybe if I have time I'll start on the other one. I don't know why but I ended up with a kind of foggy effect when overlaying the depth pass from zbrush on top of the diffuse pass, which I thought looked kinda cool so I kept it lol.
@Nasser Yes I sculpted a single leaf and then arranged it around in a clump and baked just like you said. Your sculpting and normals look excellent by the way, it's making me want to redo mine just so I could have a more cohesive look like you do. I'm curious, did you sculpt and unwrap the whole thing as separate pieces or as one object?
@Zimzelen I took the low poly blockout into zbrush as separate pieces and sculpted them. Probably not very efficient to sculpt everything like the individual bricks, I could've maybe just did one and then pasted it around and modified slightly. But it's a relatively small prop so what the hell.
I kept the blockout as the low poly, joint the separate objects together in Blender and then unwrapped it. Speaking of unwrapping in Blender, does anyone know of any good unwrapping plugins for Blender? I'm used to unwrapping in Max with TexTools so blender was a bit difficult to work with.
Sorry for double posting. I think I'm done with it now. I wanted to add some splash effects to the water and some more prominent sway in the foliage and just better looking water and foliage overall. I have to move on, got other projects to work on. Hope this link works - a video recorded in Unreal
I'm alive! Missed y'all! I had my final Capstone project due this past week, so that's eaten up my last couple weeks. But I'm through it and back to working on the Dive Bar.
I finished up the hanging lights today, and the background neon lights were done before I disappeared, I just didn't get around to posting that update.
The lighting got a bit screwed up due to redoing the lighting coming from the hanging lights, but I'll fix that sometime later.
Hello guys, first challenge I take on polycount, hope I can finish!
Made it the blockout of the battery: Trying to make with the lowest poly possible, the details I gonna make it with normal map on substance painter later.
Hey, it's been a while since I posted. Last time I was playing with the idea of doing some crazy environment shaders and so on. I've switched gears because while material design is something I'd like to get more confident in, I have goals already established for myself this year regarding unreal and more console-quality art.
I'm typically a Unity artist/designer but lately it's become pretty important to show cross-engine capabilities. It was also fun to be able to rig up the prop from a mechanical perspective.
The textures are still WIP and I want to hook a material transition to go alongside this animation -- I created the materials and shaders to be able to support any color and to be able to go from 'dim' to bright. Stretch goals would be electricity or VFX.
Just about finished, I'm satisfied with the overall look. I'll change the brick and central block texture, try to make the foliage sway more and add some more lighting. Also the moss texture looks weak so I'll keep tweaking at it, though I'm still figuring out the various nodes in UE. Loved how simple it was to make animated water, enjoying using UE so far.
@tynew Here my progress so far. I redone my sofa add more detail. I just need to add more stuff near the flags, finish the tv and the jug box. After that I will add few more detail put ball the pool table. So far so good.
@alytlebird I am curious about the result of you light when you will redone.
Hey guys, first time doing a challenge it was very fun. Here is my progress so far, i will tweak the lighting more and maybe some of my materials. And it goes without saying feedback is always welcome hahahahaha
I want to inform you all that moving forward @alytlebird will be taking over the Environment Art Challenges responsibilities.
I wanted to give everyone a heads up for any future questions and post an official "passing of the torch" I will still be active on the forums and participating in each Challenge - as always feel free to message me with questions/comments/etc and I'm happy to help as I can
It's been a pleasure keeping this challenge going over the years and I hope to see it continued for many to come.
Cheers, kade
Edit: PS - Look for the new voting thread which @alytlebird will be posting soon!
@D3lux Model looks real good, I'd pump up the brightness and maybe add another light just to better show it off.
Here's my final submision. I spent about 24h in total and I'm not sure if that's decent or not. I quite like the original style though, kinda reminds me of Styx Master of Shadows, which is probably why I wanted to do this piece. Anyways, this was fun and I'm glad for the feedback, wish I could have given back more, hopefuly next time! Happy new years everybody!
Managed to finish this one on time. Blender and Substance Painter. Rendered with Cycles as I'm having problems with the glass transparency and reflections in Blender Eevee and Toolbag.
There aren't really winners for these things. The "challenge" aspect is more about challenging yourself to improve on your existing skills and improve through doing these short-term projects.
Its been a journey since i wanted to do a couple of things different this time.
First off, I've used a plugin called Custom normals tool by Ben Boscher: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lV9Bl5 to get those rounded corners and avoid baking.
The main body and the doors have 3 UVs and use 4 textures:
1 masks texture to derive each color on them
1 for normals that are used for the "cuts" in the mesh
1 packed for some tileable roughness maps
1 for curvature (done in vray).
The roughness maps are blended based on the masks and then blended
with the curvature tex to give it more definition. The small details
like bolts and holes are done with mesh decals in UE. Two main materials
are used, 1 for the opaque mesh and 1 for the decals. The doors use 2
instanced mats and one of those has its roughness UVs shifted a bit so
that symmetry is not apparent.
The cables use vertex colors for... colors as a quick & dirty way of
doing things. only using a roughness map on them. same for the cable
housing and other small parts.
Replies
Looks good, the lighting is nice as well! What are you working on next?
Here is my scene so far, I've still been working on it daily except weekends. I decided to leave the motorbike until last since I want to spend all December doing a very detailed one. I was not really happy with some of the quality of the assets I made, like the memorabilia wall by the front door. Although I have it ingrained in my head to work on assets based on importance to the scene (since I directed an indie game).
I forgot about the actual main neon dive bar sign so I'll need to fix that next. The translucent blinds I'm not sure about just yet, I may remake those into verticals, or try to polish up the current material. I think my main set dressings are done, some final things I want to add are fog/smoke particles along the top of the roof, large scale cobwebs and dust.
This is also my first time really working on a scene for Unreal since I've only used Unity for work. So I'm trying to figure out the lighting and baking artifacts that are present over the meshes. The glass shader I had a bit of trouble with and still not happy with it.
If anyone has feedback please shoot it! The whole point of this enviro challenge is so we can improve, so fire away. Also, some bottles are floating I know
The next step I will do the props on the left. maybe redo the door, and create the other neon.
@GuillaumeLD
Thanks! I wanted to keep a blue hue from the TV to offset the strong orange/yellow colors coming from the rest of the scene. Also the pool table light is emissive, but I made it a bit stronger now. I saw a cool tutorial online about getting lights to shine through a fake "lampshade" effect. Might be worth trying to extra quality.
I have two main trim sheets, the first one covers the main textures. I wanted to experiment and see if it was efficient to have 2 wall textures on 1 sheet. I would not recommend this as it requires extra wall meshes to support it. Next time I will stick to just one main wall texture per trim sheet. @PixelMasher This is what I was meaning, anyway thanks for the help on your tutorials. It really helped me to break down my scene
The second one I used for the bar countertop, which has the white laminate top, metal counter (which I also used on some props), and the wood along the main bar.
Also for my props I used 2 4k texture maps for around 50 props. The couch, jukebox, both doors and pool table have a full 2k size texture each. For stuff like the lampshade/bathroom light I just reused the door texture map since you can't see normal map detail on it due to lighting. I spent around 10 days doing all the props, but I gathered a lot of online reference and wrote a list of all the things to make. So it was quite fast.
I finally finished all my assets (or so I think). Cleaned up the problem areas, did the neon bar sign, blinds, tweaked some textures. I rechecked all my albedo values in Substance's PBR validate tool and found I had some wrong values. Added some fog and cobwebs. Now really all that's left is the motorbike and final lighting bakes!
A blockout for the fountain pillar thing. Going to sculpt it today and then work on the foliage as well. Maybe I can get the other one done as well, build like a small environment or something.
@tynew
I got a question for you. Where do you take your texture. I feel my texture seam off and I always feel that the texture I use doesn't look real. Especially my wood. I think I really need a critic on my scene.
Thanks for your help
Hey! I hope everyone else is still keeping at it! I'm somewhat okay with my current progress though I've still got a way to go. Most importantly I have to start placing this into Unreal, which I've never used before, only ever done things in Unity. I would like to also add animations of the water flowing and the leaves moving, once I'm satisfied with the textures. At the moment I think they're still way too basic, plus I have to make some moss to add to parts of the rocks and structure.
@Zimzelen
I think you could push your textures a bit more to make them pop. For your leaves, you should make a high poly and bake it down so it has more depth, plus make the roughness of the texture shinier. Your center columns and roof also need chamfered edges, the shading transition is really harsh (if you aren't baking these too).
@GuillaumeLD
When it comes to believable wood it can be due to the wood grain size, whether or not the wood is varnished, or if it takes the grains into account in the roughness. Did you have a look at the real chair I posted on page 1? It's a varnished chair, so the roughness of the wood is smooth. I always test different types of wood, with different sized grains to see what looks best. Sometimes textures online or procedurally generated look too cartoony, and unrealistic. In your screenshots, your wood grains are too small.
Why did you not make a high poly and bake a normal map for your chair and couch? You will get a lot more detail coming through. This is an interior scene, so you can have more detail than usual on assets. My couch is 10k tris and there are 6 of them in the scene. Remember, in a real game you can always remove detail by optimizing the mesh or LOD, but never add. If this is for your portfolio, it's okay to have very detailed assets, as long as you know how to optimize them.
I started the block out of my motorcycle. I went for a 2019 Harley Davidson sportster, I am still deciding whether I want to make this a background prop or a very detailed object. If it's a background prop you would bake this down with a normal map (like in rainbow six siege). Racing games on the other hand don't use normal maps as everything is driven through the shaders.
For the pillars I gave it a champfer and sculpted it a bit but I think I have to redo the normals because I've just noticed some bad baking on the corners.
Started pulling everything into Unreal but it's going slow, hope I can finish this with some animations added in! Also I'd like to give advice to you all but so far I haven't really noticed anything which bothered me, but I will try to at least use my critique skill!
@Zimzelen Hey I really like your leaves, did you sculpt and then bake them down onto a plane? I think I might just go a simpler route and paint them in photoshop to try and maintain a more loose, painterly look like in the concept.
Anyway, I sculpted and baked, I'm happy with it. Will start texturing it tomorrow. Going to try and get it done in an hour so I can then move onto the foliage and getting it into Unreal. Then maybe if I have time I'll start on the other one. I don't know why but I ended up with a kind of foggy effect when overlaying the depth pass from zbrush on top of the diffuse pass, which I thought looked kinda cool so I kept it lol.
Your sculpting and normals look excellent by the way, it's making me want to redo mine just so I could have a more cohesive look like you do. I'm curious, did you sculpt and unwrap the whole thing as separate pieces or as one object?
I kept the blockout as the low poly, joint the separate objects together in Blender and then unwrapped it. Speaking of unwrapping in Blender, does anyone know of any good unwrapping plugins for Blender? I'm used to unwrapping in Max with TexTools so blender was a bit difficult to work with.
I finished up the hanging lights today, and the background neon lights were done before I disappeared, I just didn't get around to posting that update.
The lighting got a bit screwed up due to redoing the lighting coming from the hanging lights, but I'll fix that sometime later.
Made it the blockout of the battery:
Trying to make with the lowest poly possible, the details I gonna make it with normal map on substance painter later.
Any feedback is always welcome
I'm typically a Unity artist/designer but lately it's become pretty important to show cross-engine capabilities. It was also fun to be able to rig up the prop from a mechanical perspective.
The textures are still WIP and I want to hook a material transition to go alongside this animation -- I created the materials and shaders to be able to support any color and to be able to go from 'dim' to bright. Stretch goals would be electricity or VFX.
Loved how simple it was to make animated water, enjoying using UE so far.
Here is my progress so far, i will tweak the lighting more and maybe some of my materials.
And it goes without saying feedback is always welcome hahahahaha
I want to inform you all that moving forward @alytlebird will be taking over the Environment Art Challenges responsibilities.
I wanted to give everyone a heads up for any future questions and post an official "passing of the torch"
It's been a pleasure keeping this challenge going over the years and I hope to see it continued for many to come.
Cheers,
kade
Edit: PS - Look for the new voting thread which @alytlebird will be posting soon!
And I'm glad to be taking the reins! I posted the new Concept Thread, head over there and let's figure out what concepts we want to work on!
Also, I'm open to any suggestions for things to change/add to these challenges, so please let me know if anything comes to your mind!
Here's my final submision. I spent about 24h in total and I'm not sure if that's decent or not.
I quite like the original style though, kinda reminds me of Styx Master of Shadows, which is probably why I wanted to do this piece.
Anyways, this was fun and I'm glad for the feedback, wish I could have given back more, hopefuly next time!
Happy new years everybody!
Managed to finish this one on time. Blender and Substance Painter. Rendered with Cycles as I'm having problems with the glass transparency and reflections in Blender Eevee and Toolbag.
https://polycount.com/discussion/216589/the-bi-monthly-environment-art-challenge-january-february-64/p1?new=1
Finally calling it done!
Its been a journey since i wanted to do a couple of things different this time.
First off, I've used a plugin called Custom normals tool by Ben Boscher: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lV9Bl5 to get those rounded corners and avoid baking.The main body and the doors have 3 UVs and use 4 textures:
1 masks texture to derive each color on them
1 for normals that are used for the "cuts" in the mesh
1 packed for some tileable roughness maps
1 for curvature (done in vray).
The roughness maps are blended based on the masks and then blended with the curvature tex to give it more definition. The small details like bolts and holes are done with mesh decals in UE. Two main materials are used, 1 for the opaque mesh and 1 for the decals. The doors use 2 instanced mats and one of those has its roughness UVs shifted a bit so that symmetry is not apparent.