Sketchbook: VonPixel

vonpixel

Ive been lurking here for years and years and figured its time to start a sketchbook thread finally.

Decided to build a scene repurposing an escalator model that was created for a project. Its pretty accurate and clean so I wanted to make something where its destroyed and ruined. Gathered some reference and a mood board and started blocking out shapes.

This scene is after a few days of work. I tried to spend 30-60 minutes a day working on something- be it a model or texture or blocking out. Using Modo / Substance / Mixer to make everything and Unity's HDRP to render the scene.

vonpixel

So of course I started this thread intending to post regular updates ( thought quarantine would give me some time) but then shit really popped off at work and Ive been slammed for months.... But this past weekend I managed to do some more stuff. This time I wanted to quickly set up an environment for a model of a mining vehicle I completed awhile back.

This was put together with a few quixel assets and my own photoscans in Unity HDRP. I plan on adding a few more details and then capturing some footage to show off the vehicle its self for a studio reel.

Apofex

Good work! Why do you use Unity?

vonpixel

Thanks! I use unity because its what I use at the studio I work at. We've been eyeing Unreal for years obviously- and I come from a vfx / film background so its even more tempting to me. We make a lot of training simulation stuff and our programmers / engineers prefer Unity.

vonpixel

Here are some shots of the escalator for that scene. A bunch of stuff is hidden in these shots like the steps / handrails / chains / etc. This is a clean version for a project im working on at the studio. For the ruins scene Ill be taking this model and retexturing and probably doing a bit of additional damage and bent pieces.

vonpixel

Ive been knee deep in rushing towards a September deadline so I haven't had much time to work on any of these scenes lately... but the other day I upgraded my ram so that I could do some work on a photogrammetry project and spent a day baking out this massive 150 million poly scan of a massive abandon warehouse (exterior only).

Here are some shots from Painter where I assembled most of the bakes (which were done in Modo for the most part). The roof scans were not that great so Ive seperated that mesh to texture seperately. All together this is 6 UDIMS at 4k each. The scan processing was done in Reality Capture before the cut the limit on photos from 2500 down to 1000 in the steam version.

I also very quickly threw the completed bits into a HDRP scene in unity to see how its coming along:

Not completely sure what the end game will be with this model. Id like to flesh out the inside completely and use this to contuniue learning the HDRP better. Id also like to be able to use this in the future when I start digging into Unreal more. It would also be nice to maybe use this as a center piece in a map for the VR game Onward too if I can find the time. That would probably require a pretty extensive pass at optimizing the textures to not be so UDIM heavy.

vonpixel

Found a bit of time to experiment with some windows

vonpixel

Adding a little more detail. Using some stuff  from Megascans and my own scans.

vonpixel

Baked out a little trim piece from the ground today, Not that much detail on the tires and pylon on the edge but Im hoping to get scanned tire into the scene at some point. I have a pylon from a previous project that  I will probably texture in Mixer.

vonpixel

Today I revisited a boat model for a scene to rework the textures and make it look nicer for a demo build. I know there is an error in the back there... but the camera never goes back there :P

vonpixel

old vs new