The Bi-Monthly ENVIRONMENT ART Challenge | January - February (64)
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Welcome, all! Happy New Year, and welcome to a new decade! Time to kick off the first Monthly Environment & Prop Challenge for 2020!
A very special repeated thank you to @kadeschui for running these challenges for the past few years!
Remember if you don't finish in the time allotted, just keep plugging away and post when your work is finished. There's always some good progress that falls off the radar - we want to see your work! So keep going and finish those pieces!
Without further ado, here are our official options for Challenge 64:
- ENVIRONMENTS -
HARD SURFACE CATEGORY:
Artist: https://www.artstation.com/asim
HAND PAINTED CATEGORY:
Artist: https://www.artstation.com/nhenderson
- PROPS -HAND PAINTED CATEGORY:
Artist: https://www.behance.net/YanaBlyzniuk
HARD SURFACE CATEGORY:
Artist: https://www.artstation.com/dirty_j
If you want to change up either concept a bit, as some people wanted, then feel free. Interpret these concepts to your liking.
Please read all the rules before starting.
When you are just starting out making a scene, it can seem complicated or imposing, so take the time to break it down.
Think about how you can re-use assets, re-use textures, break it down as simple as possible and plan it out. A lot of people will break it down in their own way when they start out their challenge. Gather some reference images as well for different parts of the scene, maybe gather some refs and make it your own.
Take your time planning and blocking out, it will set you up for success later on.
Here are some specifics.
- Try to post one critique for every post that you make. This will make for a better learning environment and help us all grow as artists.
- It is recommended to use a game engine to present your work. Unreal Engine and CryEngine are very common engines that can be used but feel free to use any alternatives that you want. (Marmoset Toolbag is allowed as well)
- Try your best and finish as much as you can in the time frame provided.
- Post what you are working on in this thread so that way it's a more centralized place for advice and critique. We don't need to have 1000 disjointed threads littering the forums.
- I would strongly encourage you to go and look at other games and see how they make their assets as well as get concept art to give it your own feel, but it must stay very close to the concept, if not super close.
- Well, that's about it. If you think that any rules should be changed, or there should be new additions to the rules, please let me know. As always, please feel free to provide feedback / suggestions in this thread or by messaging me directly.
Let's roll!
Replies
I'm still working on adding some parts.
I'm still learning the ins and outs of the model -> texturing progress, and was wondering if anyone can tell me how I should/how they usually organize their models? When I move to texturing should it be a solid combined mesh, or do you leave parts with different material finishes as separate pieces? For example, right now the metal accents are separate meshes, and all the wood pieces are not "connected" but are combined as a single mesh object
Hey Guys, thanks for the replies!
I'd really like to get this into zbrush and do some nice sculpting for the wood and then bring it into substance painter. I've never really done a multi-material mesh that way before, but I want to try it out! So it sounds like I will want to keep them separate for the sake of baking? And definitely make the ropes their own object.
Looking forward to seeing how you both progress your pieces!
Looking really promising already.
I went with the hotdog truck, finished the highpoly. Taking it to zbrush for further detail and edge polish. Stil debating wether i should work on the interior or not, and make opaque windows.
I plan on participating as well, doing the hard surface environment, but I won't be able to start for about a week. My wife and I are moving across the country to San Diego. I'll be keeping an eye on the thread but you probably won't hear much from me for a while.
Thank you for the detailed feedback. I've already done some of the changes you suggested, curving the overall shape of the truck, some curves/bents however don't translate as well into 3D. Also the curved solar panels and some other pieces will be bent on the lowpoly instead. Rather bake them straight.
I'd love some feedback on the scale and proportions of my blockout, it's something I'm aware I struggle with. Things look okay in the editor but when I pop into first person view in Unreal things look very cramped to me and I'm not sure what to do about it? I've learned to be suspicious of my own judgement as I'm 5'1 and that really skews the scale I build first-person scenes at. I'm hoping to improve my spatial skills with this project. Thanks all!
Keep them as separate meshes in your modeling program. Name the meshes (not the file names, the meshes within the program) with _high or _low after the name. Make sure they all have the same pivot and it's on the origin of the grid. Then export each piece separately for zbrush. Name the files something like a.obj, b.obj, etc. Import one piece into zbrush and use subtool master to multi-append the rest of the pieces as subtools. Now you can freely sculpt them and all that. Then highlight all the lowpoly meshes in your modeling program and export them as one .fbx file. The .fbx extension will make it one mesh but keep the sub-mesh names you gave them. Import that .fbx file into Painter. When you go to bake your maps, make sure you have the "by mesh name" option selected on one of the little drop down menus. It will use the _low and _high name suffixes to bake each piece separately and not cause issues.
Hmm, what is it?
Im trying out the Boat house interior concept.
First thing I did was a small breakdown of the type of shading the concept artist was using. Because I want to try and preserve the style by the artists (including outlines):
After this i setup my unity project and tinkered a bit with Shadergraph to know if would be able to get a satisfying result. I made a cube with grainy outlines and inlines using a simple inverted normal mesh, combined with a noisy fresnel and some custom inline geometry on top of the model:
Together with some AA post-processing and a bit of texturing i was fairly confident that this was heading in the right direction and that any changes to the shader could be made a a later stage.
Here is a screen of the Unity Shadergraph:
Currently it uses a generated noise which eventually i might replace with a custom texture. But I didnt want to tweak it to much because i want to test how it looks on some proper models first. But... at least I have a general directon. So I headed on to setting up a scene to see what kind of lighting setup I would use.
The lighting the concept is completely indirect, so I was pretty sure that it would involve some light baking because i wanted to stay away from realtime GI for now and not waste to much time on research. My initial idea was to have the props in the scene be lit by sampling lightprobes, but this did not give me the right results at this time, so for now I just simply bake everything.
Lighting is mostly some planes behind the window with an HDR emissive material on it and a littlebit of ambient color to light on the edges of the floors etc. I also cut a hole in the roof right were those test cubes are (also with an emissive plane above it). I had to turn the bloom effect way down not to have the visible white planes burn out to much because i had to crank up the strength of the emmission pretty high to be able to light the whole interior. Also I tried disabling the bloom entirely, but I kind of liked the effect around the window... and it looks kind of like the concept artists intended the same thing. The roof and the back facing wall are turned to only render gi and not be visible.
What I got out of this test is a couple of color values that work with the lighting and can be used as a starting point for final textures and also a good idea of how the final scene will be lit. Next Step is to create a proper layout of the room and create some proper models to see if the shading holds up.
Cheers and great work everybody!
Cheers!
It feels a bit off in some places but I feel like I'm getting there. The only thing I'm having a hard time to figure out is the pile of objects in the upper right corner. I guess it's a pile of copper pots with some wood and metal debris?
@MeshMuti I got a very similar result, the width of my scene is 6m and the walls measure 3.30m in height, which is a bit of an odd number but matches the concept pretty well. The big bookshelf is quite tricky too if we consider the biggest book to be 40cm in height, which is quite a lot for a book, the whole thing should not be taller than 2.5m. I really like the mood of your last screen btw!
I don't know if this can help other people, but I also found a focal length of 30mm to be quite close to the one "used" in the concept.
That's one good looking fridge, honestly, i can see a more realistic approach to that concept quite easily, it might even surprass the original in my opinion.
I'm trying to decide if the chest against the wall should be curved or straight (since it seems ambiguous to me in the image).
The octagonal chest from the corner
Any feedback is appreciated!
I made a more detailed object with the shader I set up earlier:
It's Using a 256x256 texture With some simple lines and dirt layers. I really want to focus for this scene not on the detail of the individual objects but of the scene in it's entriety. After I created this first object, I realised I could reuse texture space a bit better by mirroring some elements and not have the texture rotated. But I made kind of a poor mistake by wanting to reuse the Texturemap UV's for the Lightmap UVs. While once you have texture map uv's It's pretty easy to copy the uv's and do a small layout adjustment.
So for the next object I did just that. and stopped working on the 3D outlines for now because I felt that would be a pass i could make once i have all the objects in the scenes uved and with a first texture pass. After this I went ahead and did some more objects and adjusted the scene slightly after more objects started to come in.
On it goes. Objects are made pretty quick for now... once I have everything ill do a pass over them for extra detail. Most of the objects are using a 256x256 texture.
I intended this scene more like a scene from a point and click adventure than a first person game. Altough i'd like the idea of walking trough a hand painted scene... for me it's more about getting at an end result fast and tweaking the scene while everything is there. Like maybe add a different lighting setting. Doing some effects and small animation etc.
Looking great, much more faithful to the original concept than my iteration, mine's ending up with a more realistic look.
Only thing i'd change is the roundness/chamfer of the window corners.
@laurens.tjong i really like the shader you made for the environment it looking awesome.
@blot12345 i really like how the scene is coming! i really like the texture of the fridge.
I might make the ground tiles into a single flat mesh since it's a unique asset anyway, but not sure yet.
Before settling on this scale I tried 4x4 tiles and a wall height of 6m, and looking at them side by side, I think the smaller scale I mentioned before feels more accurate. In the larger scale, everything is more spread out and feels kind of emtpy.
Also the thing on the table where the pots are? It looks kind of like the handles of an old fireplace bellow, but I can't tell.