Darksiders Genesis Environment Scene
Hi, here is my first topic !
I'm a french 3d student and I'm currently in the middle of my last year of studies (yay !), I'm starting to build my portfolio in order to find an internship or a job at the end of my scholarship, and for this I'm planning to do a new project on UE4. This scene will also be my work for my final exam, I have to explain all of my workflow, my inspirations etc, kind of a breakdown, and if I can have some feedbacks here, it would be so fine !
First of all, I had an idea in mind for several months, I absolutely wanted to do an old bridge supported by hands rocks sculpts and to reproduce the darksiders genesis art style, to visualize my idea I did a quick concept with Zbrush, Quixel Megascan and Photoshop (just remember that i'm a 3d environment artist, not a 2d artist) :
My moodboard for the concept :
I did the blockout with some Megascans assets then I sculpted some parts of them, used a basic noise maker and started the level art, I took a screen from the viewport and started some post process and photobash on Photoshop, I reworked the values and the composition to improve the readability of the concept, emphasized some lights and shadows, added foliage and god rays, here is my progress so far :
It's still a WIP but I have the main idea fixed now, I'm thinking about adding a giant head with an open mouth instead of the big empty gate.
Since the concept was made with Zbrush at first, I could now use the blockout and polish it to achieve the desired style. I plan to use Houdini to create procedurals assets like the stairs, the bridge, the cliff and the walls but I need to learn much in depth the software before creating these tools.
I polished the hand by removing the noise maker I put for the concept, I defined more the edges and trimed a few parts of the fingers to achieve an older look.
The high poly :
The decimated version :
It will not be animated so no need to do a clean retopology, I just did the decimate master plugin in Zbrush and the UVs in Maya 2022. (5000 vertices)
Time to bake now ! But before this I smoothed the mesh to increase its polycount so my mesh maps could have much more informations and cleaner ones (I just use this version for the texture part) :
For the first time, I wanted to try the famous marmoset bake, and I can tell you that I love it, here is a comparaison between Substance Painter bake and marmoset one :
1) Ambient Occlusion map
2) Curvature map
3) Normal map (I had to flip it in Y)
I think I will use it for all my future projects now.
I just tried some masks and generator but this is only the beginning of the texture, I need to watch some let's play of darksider genesis to see more rocks textures even if I have a bunch of references in my PureRef
I hope to find time to work more on this project !