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[WIP] Trench Shrine - UE5 Scene

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Tul_ polycounter lvl 10
Heyo Polycount, long time no see !

This winter I rediscovered Trench Crusade after seeing that they did a kickstarter campaign not so long ago. To be super honest I loved all the stuff that Mike Franchina has been doing within this theme, but just recently I got really sucked into the world with all the new lore that's been released and ofc all the amazing artwork that's been done.

After a super long artistic rut, this new obsession helped me really get off my ass and get back into modeling. Outside of stuff I usually do professionally, I seldom have any time to do any personal projects, but for some reason Trench Crusade really scratched a lot of itches and I decided to try to model something from this kickass universe.

My main idea was to replicate this scene in Unreal 5, but Mainly I wanted to do the shrine itself ) : 

Trench Shrine by Mike Franchina
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lqymJ

Also if you dig this kind of stuff, please do check out Trench Crusade ( they have a very active discord, facebook group and a couple of kickstarter campaigns ), it's an grimdark universe with an amazing game system as well. Big plus is that from what I can tell it all started off with Mike Franchina's illustrations then it slowly morphed into a fully fledged miniature war game. 

It's basically WW1 with demons, which sounds metal af

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Most Recent Progress ( Still very WIP ) : 




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As a first step I started blocking out the main body of the Shrine with a simple box and started cutting out the shape of the various wooden pieces as flat 2D planes 

I decided there to make break down the pieces into individual elements to sort of emulate how this would be done in real life with actual pieces of sculpted wood

To note at this stage I was thinking of making the shrine way bigger than it was in Mike's concept, but I actually ended up scaling it down later on

At this point I got further along making the wooden pieces. Some of the central pieces that extrude towards the inside of the shrine were a right pain in the ass to make, and required a lot of retopo and manual edits. Imo I've gotten quite rusty modeling :anguished:, but this has been super fun


I haven't done a lot of realistic models, since my main focus has been quite styled and cartoony meshes, but this has been really fun to make so far

Here I've blocked out most of the façade of the shrine.

At this point I was trying to figure out how I'll proceed with the rest of the shrine, and what would the sides and the top of the roof would look like 

After some failed attempts and some variations I did not dig, I got back to the drawing board and got some references.



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  • Tul_
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    Tul_ polycounter lvl 10
    Next I started adding a little bit more structure to the roof. I decided to add 2 support pieces to the roof to make it look a bit more believable 
    Initially I tried to make it with some details that were used in in traditional houses in my hometown 

    To me it seemed it clashed a bit too much with the overall shape language of the shrine and decided to go with something less jarring and a bit more simple 
    I then proceeded to duplicate the element to make the rafters and another plain plank to start making the purlins ( both terms I learned today in English :D )

    Afterwards these two caps for the front and back of the roof 

    Last bit in this session I started working on some roof shingles to start finishing up the roof. 

    Now while it seems a tad excessive to do all the elements of the roof, since I'm not pressured by deadlines, I decided to do the full structure so I might be able to do a destroyed / bombarded version of this shrine later on; or maybe another wooden structure. Not sure at this point as I'm already planning to add way too much to this scene :tired_face:as is the norm with all personal projects 
  • Tul_
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    Tul_ polycounter lvl 10
    Next I moved onto making some sand bags, just to get the general elements of the scene in place 

    I initially planned on sculpting these so I can get a little bit more details since in the reference image there's quite a few stacked on top of each other both around the shrine and on top of it. I was thinking to potentially make the low poly meshes, apply physics to them, make some mounds and then touch them up in Zbrush. 

    I ended up playing with the simulations a bit more and decided to maybe do the bigger piles later on and just keep these as "low polys" for now.

    Hurts me to see so many unoptimized meshes, but hey it's just for show and it's not actually going into a game, and I need to live with the idea haha
  • iam717
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    iam717 interpolator
    For next time since you already made the piles, looks like maya? 
    Is there a similar copy option in maya as in 3dsmax where you can clone an object and instance it so that you can then "edit", the "original" mesh and also be editing the entire pile so that, this situation you speak of with the "ugly-unoptimized meshes", are no longer an issue at the end of the project.  
    Where you can then edit that one mesh and have it sort out the pile meshes and you can then have the best of both worlds and have the nice looking optimized wires/u.v.'s also?

    Edit: forgot to mention
    For max i found a script that replaces meshes, so if you desired to preform this technique you could if maya have a replace meshes option and then you can preform this in your current scene, the script has position constraints on axis also, so it would face correctly the separate (replaced) meshes.  So script spot or similar scripting location for maya might come in handy for you.

    Its what I've been fiddling with lately, the scyla nades/exhaust nozzles are doing this in that project.   (I think its worth getting used to when the situation arises for anyone, if they haven't already, you could also then if you want unique uv's move the uv's to the side and texture some completely differently "making them unique" and even edit to be a single object and have different things like dmg,ect..)
    Only issue I've found is if you do not continue with the projects, which utilize this "technique", can become an issue in remembering what you did last, if you put it on the back burner for a bit. :anguished:

    Looks neat otherwise, i appreciated the animated gif.
  • Tul_
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    Tul_ polycounter lvl 10
    iam717 said:
    For next time since you already made the piles, looks like maya? 
    Is there a similar copy option in maya as in 3dsmax where you can clone an object and instance it so that you can then "edit", the "original" mesh and also be editing the entire pile so that, this situation you speak of with the "ugly-unoptimized meshes", are no longer an issue at the end of the project.  
    Where you can then edit that one mesh and have it sort out the pile meshes and you can then have the best of both worlds and have the nice looking optimized wires/u.v.'s also?

    Edit: forgot to mention
    For max i found a script that replaces meshes, so if you desired to preform this technique you could if maya have a replace meshes option and then you can preform this in your current scene, the script has position constraints on axis also, so it would face correctly the separate (replaced) meshes.  So script spot or similar scripting location for maya might come in handy for you.

    Its what I've been fiddling with lately, the scyla nades/exhaust nozzles are doing this in that project.   (I think its worth getting used to when the situation arises for anyone, if they haven't already, you could also then if you want unique uv's move the uv's to the side and texture some completely differently "making them unique" and even edit to be a single object and have different things like dmg,ect..)
    Only issue I've found is if you do not continue with the projects, which utilize this "technique", can become an issue in remembering what you did last, if you put it on the back burner for a bit. :anguished:

    Looks neat otherwise, i appreciated the animated gif.
    Thank you very much dude ! that's a great shout, I'll scour the net to see if I find anything similar. If not, Blender will probably have a plugin like this, just need to bite the bullet and finally learn the key bindings for it haha

    I tried something similar with Maya's Duplicate Special which instances your meshes, but as soon as I apply the nCloth nodes to it, it all collapses into the original mesh. Otherwise Duplicate Special pretty much does the job if you don't apply the phisics stuff to it

  • Tul_
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    Tul_ polycounter lvl 10
    At this point I got a bit burned out on making and unwrapping the wooden pieces for the shrine so I moved onto the trenches themselves and did some research how actual trenches looked like

    Based on the concepts, most of the Trench Crusade trenches are a little bit more ramshackle with more wooden pieces rather than metal sheets like the more modern ones. Also a lot of scattered crosses and sandbags. In the miniatures, they are a little bit more spread out with less planks, but I prefer the version from the concepts more


    A bit more progress on the overall scene and surrounding areas, I started mocking up the shape of the terrain so I can start building the wooden supports around the trenches

    The idea is that this main piece will be at the forefront of the trench and on the other side of it you can glimpse No Man's Land and eventually the other side's trench. Since in the lore these trenches stretch out miles and miles
    I'm hoping that I can do a modular kit that can be duplicated to the left and right so I can create that endless look.

    loosely based on actual Trench Systems
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