The Bi-Monthly ENVIRONMENT ART Challenge | July - August (67)

alytlebird

Welcome, all! Time to kick off the fourth Monthly Environment & Prop Challenge for 2020!

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 67:

- ENVIRONMENTS -

HARD SURFACE:

Artwork link: http://conceptartworld.com/artists/wang-rui/

STYLIZED:

Artwork link: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qAd59n

- PROPS -

HARD SURFACE PROP:

Artwork Link: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xzG5wY

STYLIZED PROP:

Artwork link: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lVx6va

- WILDCARD -

HARD SURFACE INTERIOR:

Artwork link: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/BmAeJ4

I decided to relegate the original hard surface concept to the Wildcard category, since it is so complex and the other hard surface concept got quite a few more votes. Hopefully someone will at least take a stab at this one!

Please read all the rules before starting:

-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.

-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. 

-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)

-If you want to change up your chosen concept a bit, then feel free! Interpret these concepts to your liking, especially if your aim is to add storytelling elements.

And here are some recommendations:

-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.

-We 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.

All that matters is that you learn while being able to effectively critique others, as well as accept critiques on your own work. Remember to have fun!

Enjoy!

Donato

This is the beginning of my project. To start I immediately used a more complex model for the central part because I wanted to see if I was able to get closer to the level of detail of the concept.

(for the central panel decorations I used alpha found on textures.com)

What do you think?

Łukasz

@Donato I think that on the concept enviro might be smaller in comparison to human than on your blocokut, also I'd add another human model closer to the camera to get better sense of scale and distance.  Asset looks very nice for the background piece imo.

I started working on the courtyard, used fspy for camera matching and modeled simple shapes in blender,
I want to make enviro that would be suitable for game with tpp view so after running around in engine I decided to make the whole square slightly wider and moved awnings higher so they don't collide with camera also lowered the wall on the left to let more sun light in.
Started playing with floor material but it's just temporary, I will revisit materials after finishing modelling:

Konzui

@"Łukasz" I like your approach on changing the concept to make it suitable for tpp. I don't know how much you want to stick to the concept, but the concept doesn't seem to be symmetrical. There's a piece on the left side that doesn't exist on the right. Personally, it upsets me a bit and I probably change it as well.

I find it really difficult to find the right size of the scene, I might should upscale the whole scene by 10%.

GhostDetector

@Konzui

Looking great so far.  The 2nd story feels a little short (could be the windows being too rectangular)

Attempting to do the environment, 

First step breaking down elements, thinking about what I can make a trim vs tileable texture + separating elements based on material. 

Some questions

Should the roof be a tileable texture or part of a trim sheet? 

For the wooden frames, could I rely on hard normals and a tileable wood texture or should I create it with its own uv set?

Whats "industry standard" for character height?  2 meters/6 ft?  I kind of want a sense of scale.

Donato

@GhostDetector

Personally, I use the height of 1.80 m which is the height of the UE4 manikin (but I don't know if it is the industry standard).

As for the roof, on youtube you can find various tutorials that show how to create the roof very similar to your reference using trim sheets so I would follow this method.

Don't just rely on my suggestion though.

@Łukasz

Thanks for the tip. Actually I have to make the scene smaller but the tubes totally change position forcing me to redo the whole scene. I found a method (connect all the actors to an empty actor and then make it smaller) but I thought that perhaps it is better to do it at the end of the project to avoid problems in the future.

Speaking of pipes, I have a question. I'm currently using a combination of mesh and splines which I think is a fairly wrong method because it requires a lot of draw calls and time. Initially to not have these problems I wanted to use only splines but they allow me to create only soft corners and not more precise angles such as 90 degrees. I have found only similar methods by searching on google. So, does anyone know a better method?
This is what happens:

This is the progress of the project:

GhostDetector

@Donato

Thanks for the tip.    You can use the quick pipe addon to have more control over the curves.

Its kind of hard to get a sense of scale of the place even with the tiny mannequin at the bottom (almost didn't see it).

Update---

Did some blockouts, and separated elements by unique props, constructed by trim sheets, tileable materials.

Next step will probably be finishing out the blockout (have to think of a way to fill the scene, and plan the modular elements.

Donato

@GhostDetector
Thank you. It is a very useful addon. Moreover, I changed the scene size as suggested by you and @Łukasz.
Let me know if it has improved.

Pinkfox

@Donato At this point I think the scale looks pretty close to me!

You might try raising the focal length on the camera you're using though. The concept seems a bit flatter and you should be able to achieve that look by increasing the focal length and pulling the camera back a bit. Might make it easier to compare against the concept.

GUYPHILL

Hey There! 
 I have decided to kick off the July challenge with Aishwarya concept. My plan is to make the base mesh in Maya, then sculpt in Zbrush. 
CC is always welcome. 

Orbit

@Donato Great start once again. The pipe/metal textures seem a bit too noisy - in the concept the 'rust'/weathering seems to be at the ends and joints rather than uniform. Maybe it would be good to take that trim into Zbrush, and make a dented metal trim sheet, or play around with the roughness, cleaning up the central parts of the piping.

PatSaenzG

Hello everyone

This being the first challenge I'm taking part in I started with the potion bottle concept. I've blocked out a base in Maya which will then be taken into ZbrushCore for sculpting. 

Criticism is highly encouraged and welcome.

 

Donato

@Pinkfox
Thank you for your suggestion. I changed the focal length (now it is 35) but I also had to increase the sensor width and sensor height (80mm and 40mm respectively) because it did not fit into the frame even by moving the camera backwards.

@Orbit
Thank you. I changed the texture by reducing the rust of all the pipes except some central ones to give a little variety. I also slightly reduced the roughness. As for the trim sheets, I honestly followed some tutorials on how to make them but I didn't understand how to apply them in a project (especially in this one) so I continued to use only Substance Painter even though I understood that it is not the most efficient way.

This is the result for now:

Let me know what you think.

m4dcow

I knew I recognized that courtyard concept from one of the old school monthly challenges
https://polycount.com/discussion/133117/monthly-community-noob-challenge-april-2014-18

GUYPHILL

I had some fun sculpting this asset in Zbrush. The next steps will be making the game asset, UV mapping, and texturing.
CC is always welcome. 

alytlebird

m4dcow said:

I knew I recognized that courtyard concept from one of the old school monthly challenges
https://polycount.com/discussion/133117/monthly-community-noob-challenge-april-2014-18

Oh wow, I had no idea this was a repeat concept! Pretty interesting scrolling through that old thread and seeing some of the previous results. Should be interesting to see the differences now that we're working with PBR workflows.

Thanks for pointing that out!

danielrobnik

I always have trouble matching the view to reference images, so that fspy tool is great thanks @Łukasz. I've roughly blocked out the space and while it seems too big to me in Blender, the scale seems to feel right when I run around it in Unity.

BananaManyana

Decided to do the potion prop, created a couple of assets in Houdini to make the Potion bottle and draw so tubes on to it to get a rough basemesh for Zbrush. may attempt to keep this somewhat procedural

Lairelosse

Began blocking in the Cuban House concept in Blender. Not totally sure what I am going to do for the area around it yet. 

danielrobnik

m4dcow said:

I knew I recognized that courtyard concept from one of the old school monthly challenges
https://polycount.com/discussion/133117/monthly-community-noob-challenge-april-2014-18

Here is a handy snippet from the linked thread for those doing the Chinese courtyard. One of the posters asked the original artist what the writing means and this was his response:

I'm happy that you would like to do the 3D environment of my concept degin.:) and i of course agree with your ask. Remember adding the my website or marking about what the concept design come from.:)

about the sign on wall is a old Chinese word,條 means ‘stream-like or very soft smooth’. i added this sign for visualizing the feel of this scene to readers, who can understand this place easily and directly.

About the word which written on the board around the door actually is 院茵澗, which means the mysterious fog raising up when stream flows.
Anyway this is a place where full of the mysterious spirit.

The other red sign are:

妙 佳
书 句
鸿 风
戏 行
秋 晓
江 苑
水 花

This is traditional Chinese poem, written by Wang Anshi, an minister in Song dynasty, who was degraded and exiled due to the corruption of government. And this poem he did when he was entertaining his guests in 安江芙蓉楼,a restaurant. It expresses his mood which had disappointed to current government and indulged in the entertainment.

So that I used this poem to suggest that this place which is in the picture is full of sad and disappointed. Do you recognize this kind of feel in this picture? hehe:)

GUYPHILL

TEXTURING in SUBSTANCE PAINTER

 Since I am going for a stylized look, my main focus was painting highlights exaggeration and Values. Next, I will work on the hue and balance the colors. 

BananaManyana

sculpted a couple of snake heads for the bottle, need to get my brain in gear and work out a way to blend them in to a procedural body for snaking around the bottle

Pinkfox

I managed to get to a fairly complete state with this and I'm really happy with how the LED arrows came out, even got them animating in Marmoset, but I still feel like parts of the textures feel flat. I've had my eyes on it too long to know what to approach to remedy that though so I'm definitely open to critique and suggestions!

BananaManyana

worked on getting the heads to attach to the body, and will work on some more controllable scale and orientation next.

Donato

@Pinkfox
In my opinion, you should slightly modify the black and white texture of the large central part of the model. To my eyes they seem a little blurry and not rough enough. Maybe you can try increasing the roughness. However it seems to me really good.

For the first time I tried to use the trim sheets. This is the result:

Furthermore, there is a red reflection on the objects as if there was a red light on the right but there is nothing (in the scene there are red lights but very far from the objects and in addition they are on the left). Can you tell me why? (I'm using UE4)

Let me know what you think especially if I made a huge mistake.

Pinkfox

@Donato I'll definitely look at the roughness and see if I can get a bit more life into those areas.

To answer your question on the reflection problem you're having, do you have another sphere reflection capture placed near those floating objects? If not it might be using a far away one causing you to get those incorrect reflections. That's the only thing I can think would be causing it.

@BananaManyana Are you able to move the points for your snake body away from the bottle? I noticed in the concept that one of the secondary snakes leaves the bottle near the top of it.

@GUYPHILL This is likely something you can do in Painter but I'd make sure to give the cobra the crease where it's head and body join, right not it looks a bit soft in that area compared to the concept. The head portion that @BananaManyana posted just after you are a good example of what I mean.

GUYPHILL

Pinkfox said:

@GUYPHILL This is likely something you can do in Painter but I'd make sure to give the cobra the crease where it's head and body join, right not it looks a bit soft in that area compared to the concept. 

Thank you for your input. I did revisit my Zbrush mesh and made some changes. 

GUYPHILL

https://www.artstation.com/guyphill

MARMOSET RENDER - 

I had a lot of fun going back to some stylized game assets, and thanks for the critiques. Feel free to drop some CC. I may revisit my asset later. However, I hope this render can inspire some people and i will be glad to see different approaches on the thread. 

b_beauchamp

It was hard to choose between the Chinese courtyard and Byzantine-punk environment, but I ended up going with the latter. I think all the crazy details will offer a new challenge, in addition to being a really unique style. My goal is create the building structure as a modular set, so that I can extend the environment to cover a large area. Right now I am thinking that three unique trim sheets should be enough to texture the majority of the set. Here is a birds-eye view of my current block-out. 

Lairelosse

Blocked in the environment around the house. CC/Suggestions welcome. 

GUYPHILL

Armenian District

 For my 2nd challenge, I have decided to work on Max Bedulenko's concept. Below is the first layer of my blocking and my texel density will be 512 px / m.

GUYPHILL

Armenian District

 Blocking Stage
   
So far, I'm happy with the scale and the scene prototype. Next, I will start making materials in Substance and Zbrush.

Roumonk

Hi everyone. I've decided to base my environment on the Cuban house concept

dyceus

@b_beauchamp That's a really ambitious direction you're taking.  I'm excited to see where you take it.  To my eye, the central pillar shape isn't as tiered in the reference as you've made it.  Were you planning on making it a bit different than the concept piece to fit it in with your broader idea for the space?

This is my first challenge here on Polycount, I was looking for a space with some prompts and was glad to find this.  Because I have plenty of time on my hands at the moment (unemployment is killing me) I went for the crazy one to see how I fared.  @Łukasz had a good idea using fSpy, so I did the same for laying out my block out in Blender and positioning my camera (focal length of 26.971649).  Once I was happy with the general greybox, I brought it into UE4 and made a very quick floor grate material in Substance Designer.  I will start strategizing my material and asset creation tomorrow.

fSpy to get camera position and focal length.


Imported fSpy camera into Blender, did my block out, and then transferred everything over to UE4.

kgg_x

BananaManyana said:

Decided to do the potion prop, created a couple of assets in Houdini to make the Potion bottle and draw so tubes on to it to get a rough basemesh for Zbrush. may attempt to keep this somewhat procedural

BananaManyana said:

worked on getting the heads to attach to the body, and will work on some more controllable scale and orientation next.

Ah a fellow Houdini Artist! Your tool looks (from the gif) super intuitive to use. Looking forward to see the tool with fixed orientation of the heads. Orientation can be a pain ^^

Onto my progress:

I'm working with the concept from Wang Rui. (I think the wildcard looks super interesting but I think would not make it in time.)
After some trouble with the perspective I'm quite happy with the result. The blockout is kinda eyeballed and it might not be 100% accurate but I don't want to make a carbon copy. (I'm use references more as a guideline.) In a later stage I do need to work more on the lighting.



One of my goals is to create the majority of the scene procedurally. I had a thought how to approach the workflow for the building and settled on using my blockout shapes to define the building parts. (Kodoos to Simon Verstraete).


After the concepting I started with a tool to generate the the various roof elements based on a spline. It simply does what it need to do, nothing more at the moment. I struggled a little bit with the procedural UV layout (I had to write a custom script in order to layout the UVs into a Trim Sheet Layout. After some hacking I got a quite useful but messy combination of nodes that work for now).

Donato

@Pinkfox
Thanks so much for the tip. It was actually sphere reflection capture. I had one that was probably too big so I made it smaller and added more and got the correct reflections.

I concentrated on the central part of the scene and added some decorations on the tubes. This is the progress: 

Łukasz

@Donato yeah, looks way better than initial scale,

Lately I was mostly gathering more references, just started modelling my modular awnings:

Kruskebunken

Here's my attempt at the stylized prop:

Sketchfab: https://skfb.ly/6TQEu

This time around I just wanted to make a cool looking prop from start to finish. Really lovely concept art with many fun colors to mix together. I'm not worrying about optimizing this prop, simply for fun and to see if i can capture the same feel of the original art, but with my own personal touch to it. Lots of fun this one.

Also I'm always amazed at how cool and well thought out everyone's projects are. You guys are extremely inspiring!

b_beauchamp

@dyceus I am taking a bit of artistic liberty with this project, since in the past I have spent too much time on small details at the cost of the whole scene. Thanks for pointing out the main column tiering, I see now the scale was off.

@Donato If you are interested in learning more about trim sheets I recommend the Polygon Academy tutorial series! I just started getting the hang of trim sheets and found those videos to be really helpful. 

At this point in my project I have finished one trim sheet with three variations. Unfortunately I forgot to add the column base to the model of the arch gateway.  I actually think my version of the arch looks pretty good, but I don't know if cutting out the column is too much of a deviation from the source image. I also finished one of the gold cross emblems. If I have time I plan to make another variation.

Also, if anyone interested put the Armenian words in the image through Google translate and got: 

բարը = "the bar"

ջուր = "water"

թազաը = "fresh"

Donato

@b_beauchamp
Thanks for the suggestion and also for the translations. In my eyes, your trim sheet looks really high quality. I would like to take advantage to ask you one thing: did you get the paint stripping effect in the center of the stone blocks with zbrush and if not with what?

Speaking of trim sheets, I also show you mine with the objects I got from it and my progress (even if it is a small progress).

Let me know what you think.

LokiDokie

hey guys am giving a crack at this too Am pretty new to full environment modeling but i always like to challegen myself to be better I have a block out in maya

I've also been working on the roof

am used to doing handpainted textures where you texture everything seperately so this is pretty weird for me. Am trying my best to make it not look hand painted its pretty hard making natural looking textures.

@b_beauchamp you trim sheet looks really nice, is there anyway i could see your diffuse colours to help with mine? but I'd avoid putting those black seams on the edges of your archway. stone tends to wrap around the sides instead of just being a flat block. Also the inside seam doesn't line up the outside checkered red pattern on the arch.

Łukasz

My weekend progress on roofing and the floor,
I'm reusing tileable textures except for the rooftiles that were textured in SP

b_beauchamp

@Donato Thanks for the compliment! The paint-stripped stone texture is "Damaged Fort Wall" from Quixel Megascans. You can download all Quixel Megascans for free to use in UE4 with an Epic account! After you download a texture, you can import it into Substance Painter with "import resources" under the file menu. Below is an image of the untextured trim in Substance so you can see what is sculpt vs. texture. You are making good progress on the metal wall detailing! I think your trim has room to add some more details if you want. An ornate pattern on the top strip might go a long ways when texturing the lamps, etc.

@LokiDokie Thank you for the compliment! I put the dark edges on the sides of the arches because they will always be flanked by another structure. My idea was that dirt would tend to collect in the corners over time. If I do end up having a free-standing arch I will edit the UVs for that one. The stone edges are turning out darker that I want in UE4, but I think that is a lighting issue. I fixed the red stripes as well, that was a pain since the strips interior and exterior UV strips stretch differently. Below are the diffuse, normal, and AO-rough-metallic maps for the trim. I hope you find them helpful!

GUYPHILL

Armenian District

Floor_Mat_01

I have made a grid material in designer and imported some cards in Unreal Engine to make the first part of the floor.  Later I will make the 2nd part of the floor then, add some elements to the floor to break the repetition. 

kelly_caroline

Hello everyone! I am working on the lighting tower this time around. I'll try to jump in and help critique as well but everyone's work looks nice so far
@b_beauchamp I am really enjoying your textures so far! I think more dirt at ground level too would match the feel of the concept art

I'm still blocking in the low-poly but here is what I've made out so far. I also identified the lighting tower the artist used as a reference for this piece as the V20 lighting tower by Vinco, and am using it as a reference for the fuzzy bits I can't really make out. 

Donato

@b_beauchamp
Thanks for the tips. The texture you suggested I think is perfect for this concept. I inserted it in a second trim sheet with which I created objects that are not completely metal (arches, walls and columns). It is far from the quality of yours but it should do its job.

This, however, is progress:

IanVal

Hey everyone, I am working on the first prop and I just got started with the block out. Here is what I have so far.

Pinkfox

@IanVal I think your scale might be a bit small on the light tower. In the reference you can see it next to a generator, a Cat RP12000E, which has real-world dimensions of 35.7L x 32.7W x 35.8H inches. It's hard to say for sure but the body of the light tower (ignoring the light pole) looks around 1.5 times that height so I interpreted it as around mid-chest level.

IanVal

Pinkfox said:

@IanVal I think your scale might be a bit small on the light tower. In the reference you can see it next to a generator, a Cat RP12000E, which has real-world dimensions of 35.7L x 32.7W x 35.8H inches. It's hard to say for sure but the body of the light tower (ignoring the light pole) looks around 1.5 times that height so I interpreted it as around mid-chest level.

Thank you so much, I started to notice my scale issue while I was modeling the tires and they were super tiny. I appreciate your help with this though. Thanks for the tip an have a great day!!!

IanVal

It's my second day working on the prop, as of know I fixed some scale issues (Huge thanks to @Pinkfox for helping me with that). I started getting my high poly model for the wheel. That's it for today and I'm looking forward to making some more progress tomorrow!!!

Donato

This time, in addition to continuing to add details, I also started adding and playing with Volumetric Fog and Grain Effect trying to get the feeling of sandy wind outside the building (based on my interpretation). In addition, I have also changed the colors of the sky always to achieve a desert feeling.

  Let me know what you think.