Added the treasure chest! Been tuning the lighting some more as well as the textures on the egg statues. Went with an unlit shader for the treasure chest in the first render and a lit shader in the second. Not sure if I like all the details blown out although it does have a cool glow effect thats nice for treasure. Thoughts?
I still need to adjust the line thickness for the trim sheet as now it seems even more faint. Planning on getting to that when I add some sand next.
@Esselle you're right, I did some test following Fabi_G's reference and it looks way better.
@Fabi_G thank you for the paintover, it looks definitely better with this approach. I tend to be scared to add to much contrast but I think I'm learning a lot with this piece 😁
Your piece looks super nice, I love the spider webs in the corner! Maybe I would add some dust to the air
@squarebender Thank you for your great feedback, breaking these smaller planes is a really good idea, I'll go for it. It's very fun to do handpainted style, to be honest, your work on the environment prompt made me want to try it as well. I think that as soon as I'm finished with the forge I'll go for the environment hahaha
Anyway, I'm looking forward seeing more of your work 😊
@squarebender Interesting to hear a contrasting opinion as I actually thought the contrary! The approach I followed requires many angles to be painted and then unwrapped so I was thinking that it might take a much longer time to complete compared to paint a trimsheet or paint from unwrapped uvs. I still don't know if I want to go realtime for this challenge. My goal was to get practice with sculpting, texture painting and render the final result as nicely as possible. When I finish I think I will try sketchfab as @Fabi_G suggested, but for now I first want to get the most out of the textures and static rendering
Still chipping away at the scene. Currently doing an texture atlas for items on the desk. Then I want improve the window, trims and cobwebs.
@squarebender looking good! If you choose go with the light hitting the chest, you could alter roughness and spec values in the cavities so the color doesn't blow out as much and to control the highlight.
Very exciting to see how your environment is coming along! I really like how you've defined the vine in the corner. The cobwebs are blending in nicely as well. What were you thinking of adding to those? I can see you've added the details towards the upper side of the wall too. Lots of nice details coming in. In that last photo I did notice the paper on the wall seems somewhat reflective. I would imagine that material to be more matte. I think updating the windows with some color/glow could add some pop. Really great work!
Ive added the sand, plants and some particles to the scene. Also fixed the line thickness of the line weight on the trim sheet. I think I'll have to fix the black lines on the egg statues and make them blend in more as well now to match. Gotta figure out the mossy areas and the lights that fill up the ground. Never done those kinds of effects. Thinking about maybe doing decals in unity. Or floating geo with an alpha? Kind of the same but also open to suggestions!
@squarebender Thanks! Good point on the paper material - that definitely should improve 👍️ With the cobwebs, I thought of improving the textures overall , since I just mades some quick ones to build the material with. But maybe that's lower priority.
Sweet atmosphere in the video and foliage looking good also 🤩 Maybe you could look into a vertex paint material with height/mask blend to paint in moss and sand? Plus some additional meshes on top. I don't know if the shader work is too much for this small a scene - on the other hand, you could reuse it in the future. Speaking of shaders, it could be interesting to add some slight material variation by a painterly pattern (world projected?).
@PaulJChris You might already be planning this but if you're keeping the fire as a 3d mesh adding some smaller flames that have broken off or embers might look nice. I also agree with fabi that your getting a bit smooth and rounded in places, mainly the rocks next to the central pillar, I'd maybe use the trim dynamic and trim curve brushes to try and redefine the silhouette.
Slow progress from me, first time making trim sheets but I think I have it mostly planned out now. Ignore the texture colours, I just quickly slapped them on to get an idea of proportions before working on highpoly.
Cool to see another person take a try at this environment! Nice job on your first trim sheet. Egg statue thing is looking very nice and it looks like you've nailed your proportions. Can't wait to see more. Good job so far!
Thank you for the recomendation on the height blended vertex shader! Ive always seen the effect in games but didn't know anything about the height blending part. I made one of them from my trim sheet and used the dark areas as the height map mixed with some splotchy gray areas for the grass/moss and sand to fill in. Later I will save out another video because there are a few animated materials in there as well now that a photo can't do justice to. At this point I feel like I need to add the character and the lizard friend.
This is my last submission very likely as I haven't had much time to work on it recently and won't have much time until next month. I spent quite a bit trying to unwrap the UV and make it presentable in sketchfab but cleaning up at this stage turned out to be too hard and messy and gave up. It's a good lesson for next piece tho! I also played a bit more with lights, mostly toning down the brightness and adjusting the rimlight as I got a bit tired of the previous look. Sadly I don't feel like it improved much :) If you guys have any other suggestion with the best ratio effort/improvement I may try to implement it before the end.
You guys are doing an amazing job by the way! I am very excited to see more progress!
Hey all! I'm seeing a lot of really cool work here. I don't know what to say yet that hasn't already been said... maybe I will be able to share some insights after seeing the next batch of progress posts.
The weapon station concept stood out to me as a great opportunity to learn how to create some simple effects. That said I have extremely little experience in creating effects, but I know they can make all the difference in creating engaging environments.
I plan to spend more time with texturing my model, right now it is pretty much just solid base colors with a slight blend of convex highlights and roughness & metallic info. It seemed important to me to get the lighting environment and effects established first before getting too far along with texturing.
As mentioned earlier, I am no effects artist lol... but I would like to share some screenshots of how I created the flame and lava effects:
I have a heat wave effect that I placed over the various lava pools. That is just one of the fire particle systems that I altered from the starter content. I deleted all emitters but the "Distortion" emitter and tweaked some settings here and there.
The subtle embers are a Niagara System which uses the hanging particulate template. I gave the particles an upward "velocity" as one of the major tweaks.
Whoa I didn't know you could do that heat wave effect with a shader. Very cool and the piece looks good with all the particles you've added. I know the challenge is coming up on one day left but would be cool to see the changes you talk about making. Good job!
Pretty insightfulto see a video breakdown of the technique you explained earlier in the thread. May have to use that some day so thank you for explaining that in more depth.
As for me, I think this wraps up my submission for the challenge. Hard to believe I spent so much time on such a small scene! I'm no VFX artist either but here I am making fire and animated materials. I think I hit all the bases I wanted to hit with this one. If you'd like to see more I posted some other things about it here https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qQr6zy
I've been super excited to watch the progress on your piece. My favorite thing about it is the golden chest and how the silhouette pops with the slight outline... I don't know if that is done by a toon-shader or not, but it is really cool.
At this point, I think a simple adjustment you could make would be to either tone down the intensity of the light that is shining on the golden chest or to darken the chest's base color so that it doesn't get washed out as much by the lighting (could look into lowering bloom settings as well). Being that it is the focal point of the scene, I want to be able to see the details more clearly... that is what stands out to me the most when I'm looking between your piece and the original concept.
As always, there's some nice work from the lot of you during this challenge. I can't wait to see what's in store for November/December so I can finally be more involved in the challenge, instead of lurking.
Congrats on finishing people - nice submissions! Enjoyed sharing with you and it pushed me to improve.
In the end, I tried a different, more dramatic lighting than in the concept. Still much to improve on assets, the scene and lighting. Maybe it will evolve into a vampire castle kit at some point.
So many people have inspired me to participate in the challenge by making such good art. I've procrastinated enough, definitely gonna join the Nov-Dec challenge. Can't wait!
I want to start out by saying it's been wonderful watching this challenge evolve over time. Everyone did fantastic work and we had really nice progress shots showing the process, but more than that there was a great amount of knowledge sharing and helpful critique that made me smile each time I saw it. I believe there are a couple people who may still be finishing their piece up, if that's you please keep us updated here! The work has been wonderful and it's always heartwarming to see it reach completion.
Apologies for getting this one out late but challenge 81 is now available! I opted to go for diorama-style environments this go around so hopefully some people here can take the lessons they learned and apply them to something new without feeling overwhelmed. Hope to see you over there!
Hi @orangesky, didn't use boolean operations when creating the assets. Other than the sarcophagus (sculpted, subd modeling), It's mostly box modeled lowpoly meshes modified to have rounded/beveled edges (bevel modifiers + faceweighted normals in Blender). This shading was then baked down to the lowpoly. The benefit of this approach is that it's pretty fast. In some cases an instance of the same mesh can be reused as lowpoly (just without the modifiers). Surface details are then added during texturing.
A good case to use booleans would be when prototyping complex shapes or breaking up a mesh with insets/cutouts. To end up with a nicely shaded mesh (to bake down or to use as is) one can go a lot of routes, depends on the case. One could either process the new edges with a modifier or use autosmooth with a fitting threshold to get hard edges at the cuts. If going for a sub-d mesh, either apply the boolean operations and manually clean up the topology or rebuild a clean mesh on top of the boolean prototype. There is also the method to remesh the boolean result and polish the edges, this requires high mesh density (and high resolution input meshes for curved surfaces to avoid faceting), I see people doing this in Zbrush. That's what came to mind, I'm sure there is more ways to incorporate boolean operations in ones workflow.
I recommend to research the background of similar models to what you want to do. Maybe the artists shows some progress pics or describe their progress from which you can learn about their workflows. Check out Franky Poligons Sketchbook for some well written examples.
Hi @orangesky, didn't use boolean operations when creating the assets. Other than the sarcophagus (sculpted, subd modeling), It's mostly box modeled lowpoly meshes modified to have rounded/beveled edges (bevel modifiers + faceweighted normals in Blender). This shading was then baked down to the lowpoly. The benefit of this approach is that it's pretty fast. In some cases an instance of the same mesh can be reused as lowpoly (just without the modifiers). Surface details are then added during texturing.
Thank you very much for your answer. It is a clever way to get to a great result by making use of the Bevel and WeightedNormal modifiers and then baking the hight poly to the copy of the model that has no modifiers.
It also occurs to me that similar results could be achieved without baking, just making use of Bevel and WeightedNormal by using one or two segments on the sharp edges and using the resulting model as the final model, the only drawback is that it would add extra to the poly count (nothing to worry about nowadays).
A good case to use booleans would be when prototyping complex shapes or breaking up a mesh with insets/cutouts. To end up with a nicely shaded mesh (to bake down or to use as is) one can go a lot of routes, depends on the case. One could either process the new edges with a modifier or use autosmooth with a fitting threshold to get hard edges at the cuts. If going for a sub-d mesh, either apply the boolean operations and manually clean up the topology or rebuild a clean mesh on top of the boolean prototype. There is also the method to remesh the boolean result and polish the edges, this requires high mesh density (and high resolution input meshes for curved surfaces to avoid faceting), I see people doing this in Zbrush. That's what came to mind, I'm sure there is more ways to incorporate boolean operations in ones workflow.
I recommend to research the background of similar models to what you want to do. Maybe the artists shows some progress pics or describe their progress from which you can learn about their workflows. Check out Franky Poligons Sketchbook for some well written examples.
Good luck!
Thank you very much for this information I like to know what other talented artists like you or any other user who has participated in this challenge think.
Spectacular resource Franky Poligons, what a lot of problem solving you offer, very useful, saved in my artist's journal to refer to whenever I fall into the vicious cycle of doubts.
"It also occurs to me that similar results could be achieved without baking, just making use of Bevel and WeightedNormal by using one or two segments on the sharp edges and using the resulting model as the final model, the only drawback is that it would add extra to the poly count (nothing to worry about nowadays)."
True! My thinking is, when I already decided to use a unique texture set, I want make best use of the "storage", hence baking down the edges. If an asset was created with the use of tiling textures in mind, I would certainly consider using bevels + fwn. Another option would be to bake down some trims and map UVs to those to further optimize UV space. As so often there are many ways to do a thing 🍻
Replies
@PaulJChris
Nice progress 👍️ Are you going to go realistic/stylized? Real-time?
Added the treasure chest! Been tuning the lighting some more as well as the textures on the egg statues. Went with an unlit shader for the treasure chest in the first render and a lit shader in the second. Not sure if I like all the details blown out although it does have a cool glow effect thats nice for treasure. Thoughts?
I still need to adjust the line thickness for the trim sheet as now it seems even more faint. Planning on getting to that when I add some sand next.
Thank you for your feedback!
@Esselle you're right, I did some test following Fabi_G's reference and it looks way better.
@Fabi_G thank you for the paintover, it looks definitely better with this approach. I tend to be scared to add to much contrast but I think I'm learning a lot with this piece 😁
Your piece looks super nice, I love the spider webs in the corner! Maybe I would add some dust to the air
@squarebender Thank you for your great feedback, breaking these smaller planes is a really good idea, I'll go for it. It's very fun to do handpainted style, to be honest, your work on the environment prompt made me want to try it as well. I think that as soon as I'm finished with the forge I'll go for the environment hahaha
Anyway, I'm looking forward seeing more of your work 😊
@squarebender Interesting to hear a contrasting opinion as I actually thought the contrary! The approach I followed requires many angles to be painted and then unwrapped so I was thinking that it might take a much longer time to complete compared to paint a trimsheet or paint from unwrapped uvs. I still don't know if I want to go realtime for this challenge. My goal was to get practice with sculpting, texture painting and render the final result as nicely as possible. When I finish I think I will try sketchfab as @Fabi_G suggested, but for now I first want to get the most out of the textures and static rendering
@Esselle
No sweat! At the end of the day gotta do what you feel is right
Still chipping away at the scene. Currently doing an texture atlas for items on the desk. Then I want improve the window, trims and cobwebs.
@squarebender looking good! If you choose go with the light hitting the chest, you could alter roughness and spec values in the cavities so the color doesn't blow out as much and to control the highlight.
@Fabi_G
Very exciting to see how your environment is coming along! I really like how you've defined the vine in the corner. The cobwebs are blending in nicely as well. What were you thinking of adding to those? I can see you've added the details towards the upper side of the wall too. Lots of nice details coming in. In that last photo I did notice the paper on the wall seems somewhat reflective. I would imagine that material to be more matte. I think updating the windows with some color/glow could add some pop. Really great work!
Ive added the sand, plants and some particles to the scene. Also fixed the line thickness of the line weight on the trim sheet. I think I'll have to fix the black lines on the egg statues and make them blend in more as well now to match. Gotta figure out the mossy areas and the lights that fill up the ground. Never done those kinds of effects. Thinking about maybe doing decals in unity. Or floating geo with an alpha? Kind of the same but also open to suggestions!
@squarebender Thanks! Good point on the paper material - that definitely should improve 👍️ With the cobwebs, I thought of improving the textures overall , since I just mades some quick ones to build the material with. But maybe that's lower priority.
Sweet atmosphere in the video and foliage looking good also 🤩 Maybe you could look into a vertex paint material with height/mask blend to paint in moss and sand? Plus some additional meshes on top. I don't know if the shader work is too much for this small a scene - on the other hand, you could reuse it in the future. Speaking of shaders, it could be interesting to add some slight material variation by a painterly pattern (world projected?).
In any case, coming along nicely, keep it up!
incremental progress today:
Keep it up @PaulJChris! I would pay attention that the edges don't get too smooth.
@PaulJChris You might already be planning this but if you're keeping the fire as a 3d mesh adding some smaller flames that have broken off or embers might look nice. I also agree with fabi that your getting a bit smooth and rounded in places, mainly the rocks next to the central pillar, I'd maybe use the trim dynamic and trim curve brushes to try and redefine the silhouette.
Slow progress from me, first time making trim sheets but I think I have it mostly planned out now. Ignore the texture colours, I just quickly slapped them on to get an idea of proportions before working on highpoly.
@atunnard
Cool to see another person take a try at this environment! Nice job on your first trim sheet. Egg statue thing is looking very nice and it looks like you've nailed your proportions. Can't wait to see more. Good job so far!
@Fabi_G
Thank you for the recomendation on the height blended vertex shader! Ive always seen the effect in games but didn't know anything about the height blending part. I made one of them from my trim sheet and used the dark areas as the height map mixed with some splotchy gray areas for the grass/moss and sand to fill in. Later I will save out another video because there are a few animated materials in there as well now that a photo can't do justice to. At this point I feel like I need to add the character and the lizard friend.
This is my last submission very likely as I haven't had much time to work on it recently and won't have much time until next month. I spent quite a bit trying to unwrap the UV and make it presentable in sketchfab but cleaning up at this stage turned out to be too hard and messy and gave up. It's a good lesson for next piece tho! I also played a bit more with lights, mostly toning down the brightness and adjusting the rimlight as I got a bit tired of the previous look. Sadly I don't feel like it improved much :) If you guys have any other suggestion with the best ratio effort/improvement I may try to implement it before the end.
You guys are doing an amazing job by the way! I am very excited to see more progress!
Hey all! I'm seeing a lot of really cool work here. I don't know what to say yet that hasn't already been said... maybe I will be able to share some insights after seeing the next batch of progress posts.
The weapon station concept stood out to me as a great opportunity to learn how to create some simple effects. That said I have extremely little experience in creating effects, but I know they can make all the difference in creating engaging environments.
I plan to spend more time with texturing my model, right now it is pretty much just solid base colors with a slight blend of convex highlights and roughness & metallic info. It seemed important to me to get the lighting environment and effects established first before getting too far along with texturing.
As mentioned earlier, I am no effects artist lol... but I would like to share some screenshots of how I created the flame and lava effects:
I have a heat wave effect that I placed over the various lava pools. That is just one of the fire particle systems that I altered from the starter content. I deleted all emitters but the "Distortion" emitter and tweaked some settings here and there.
The subtle embers are a Niagara System which uses the hanging particulate template. I gave the particles an upward "velocity" as one of the major tweaks.
@Esselle
I'd say what youve got there is pretty solid! Sounds like you've learned some things you can apply to the next piece which is great too.
@wrd0mth
Whoa I didn't know you could do that heat wave effect with a shader. Very cool and the piece looks good with all the particles you've added. I know the challenge is coming up on one day left but would be cool to see the changes you talk about making. Good job!
@creepyhooman
Pretty insightfulto see a video breakdown of the technique you explained earlier in the thread. May have to use that some day so thank you for explaining that in more depth.
As for me, I think this wraps up my submission for the challenge. Hard to believe I spent so much time on such a small scene! I'm no VFX artist either but here I am making fire and animated materials. I think I hit all the bases I wanted to hit with this one. If you'd like to see more I posted some other things about it here https://www.artstation.com/artwork/qQr6zy
@squarebender Thanks!
I've been super excited to watch the progress on your piece. My favorite thing about it is the golden chest and how the silhouette pops with the slight outline... I don't know if that is done by a toon-shader or not, but it is really cool.
At this point, I think a simple adjustment you could make would be to either tone down the intensity of the light that is shining on the golden chest or to darken the chest's base color so that it doesn't get washed out as much by the lighting (could look into lowering bloom settings as well). Being that it is the focal point of the scene, I want to be able to see the details more clearly... that is what stands out to me the most when I'm looking between your piece and the original concept.
As always, there's some nice work from the lot of you during this challenge. I can't wait to see what's in store for November/December so I can finally be more involved in the challenge, instead of lurking.
Congrats on finishing people - nice submissions! Enjoyed sharing with you and it pushed me to improve.
In the end, I tried a different, more dramatic lighting than in the concept. Still much to improve on assets, the scene and lighting. Maybe it will evolve into a vampire castle kit at some point.
But also looking forward to the next challenge!
@Fabi_G This is so good!
So many people have inspired me to participate in the challenge by making such good art. I've procrastinated enough, definitely gonna join the Nov-Dec challenge. Can't wait!
Hey everyone! 🙂
I want to start out by saying it's been wonderful watching this challenge evolve over time. Everyone did fantastic work and we had really nice progress shots showing the process, but more than that there was a great amount of knowledge sharing and helpful critique that made me smile each time I saw it. I believe there are a couple people who may still be finishing their piece up, if that's you please keep us updated here! The work has been wonderful and it's always heartwarming to see it reach completion.
Apologies for getting this one out late but challenge 81 is now available! I opted to go for diorama-style environments this go around so hopefully some people here can take the lessons they learned and apply them to something new without feeling overwhelmed. Hope to see you over there!
https://polycount.com/discussion/231681/the-bi-monthly-environment-art-challenge-november-december-81
You all have done a great job and I am very happy to have seen the work process of all of you! Congratulations to all of you.
Personally if I had participated I would have chosen the Dracula Hides scene.
I have a question for you @Fabi_G, what is the workflow you use? Do you make use of booleans somewhere in the clock or chair?
When is it good to use booleans? And if they are used what is the process of cleaning up the mesh so that the model is not a mess?
Thank you very much to dispel my doubts!
Hi @orangesky, didn't use boolean operations when creating the assets. Other than the sarcophagus (sculpted, subd modeling), It's mostly box modeled lowpoly meshes modified to have rounded/beveled edges (bevel modifiers + faceweighted normals in Blender). This shading was then baked down to the lowpoly. The benefit of this approach is that it's pretty fast. In some cases an instance of the same mesh can be reused as lowpoly (just without the modifiers). Surface details are then added during texturing.
A good case to use booleans would be when prototyping complex shapes or breaking up a mesh with insets/cutouts. To end up with a nicely shaded mesh (to bake down or to use as is) one can go a lot of routes, depends on the case. One could either process the new edges with a modifier or use autosmooth with a fitting threshold to get hard edges at the cuts. If going for a sub-d mesh, either apply the boolean operations and manually clean up the topology or rebuild a clean mesh on top of the boolean prototype. There is also the method to remesh the boolean result and polish the edges, this requires high mesh density (and high resolution input meshes for curved surfaces to avoid faceting), I see people doing this in Zbrush. That's what came to mind, I'm sure there is more ways to incorporate boolean operations in ones workflow.
I recommend to research the background of similar models to what you want to do. Maybe the artists shows some progress pics or describe their progress from which you can learn about their workflows. Check out Franky Poligons Sketchbook for some well written examples.
Good luck!
Hi @orangesky, didn't use boolean operations when creating the assets. Other than the sarcophagus (sculpted, subd modeling), It's mostly box modeled lowpoly meshes modified to have rounded/beveled edges (bevel modifiers + faceweighted normals in Blender). This shading was then baked down to the lowpoly. The benefit of this approach is that it's pretty fast. In some cases an instance of the same mesh can be reused as lowpoly (just without the modifiers). Surface details are then added during texturing.
Hi @Fabi_G!
Thank you very much for your answer. It is a clever way to get to a great result by making use of the Bevel and WeightedNormal modifiers and then baking the hight poly to the copy of the model that has no modifiers.
It also occurs to me that similar results could be achieved without baking, just making use of Bevel and WeightedNormal by using one or two segments on the sharp edges and using the resulting model as the final model, the only drawback is that it would add extra to the poly count (nothing to worry about nowadays).
A good case to use booleans would be when prototyping complex shapes or breaking up a mesh with insets/cutouts. To end up with a nicely shaded mesh (to bake down or to use as is) one can go a lot of routes, depends on the case. One could either process the new edges with a modifier or use autosmooth with a fitting threshold to get hard edges at the cuts. If going for a sub-d mesh, either apply the boolean operations and manually clean up the topology or rebuild a clean mesh on top of the boolean prototype. There is also the method to remesh the boolean result and polish the edges, this requires high mesh density (and high resolution input meshes for curved surfaces to avoid faceting), I see people doing this in Zbrush. That's what came to mind, I'm sure there is more ways to incorporate boolean operations in ones workflow.
I recommend to research the background of similar models to what you want to do. Maybe the artists shows some progress pics or describe their progress from which you can learn about their workflows. Check out Franky Poligons Sketchbook for some well written examples.
Good luck!
Thank you very much for this information I like to know what other talented artists like you or any other user who has participated in this challenge think.
Spectacular resource Franky Poligons, what a lot of problem solving you offer, very useful, saved in my artist's journal to refer to whenever I fall into the vicious cycle of doubts.
"It also occurs to me that similar results could be achieved without baking, just making use of Bevel and WeightedNormal by using one or two segments on the sharp edges and using the resulting model as the final model, the only drawback is that it would add extra to the poly count (nothing to worry about nowadays)."
True! My thinking is, when I already decided to use a unique texture set, I want make best use of the "storage", hence baking down the edges. If an asset was created with the use of tiling textures in mind, I would certainly consider using bevels + fwn. Another option would be to bake down some trims and map UVs to those to further optimize UV space. As so often there are many ways to do a thing 🍻
@wrd0mth Thanks for the flame shader :d
Good job everyone!
I'm a bit late with my final creation, but it's done:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/3qXGJo
Not really finished but putting this piece down for a bit to work on other things before adding some final touches.
@creepyhooman Nice job, I really like your moss texture.