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UT3 & Gears Environment Art

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polycounter lvl 20
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Kevin Johnstone polycounter lvl 20
Hey folks,

I haven't really shown any work publicly since Unreal2, which was a while ago
and since then I've been learning to be a modeller rather than a texture artist.

I showed Per some stuff tonight, told him I'd registered www.kevinjohnstone.com
and suggested I pimp it in the meantime ( the site isnt done yet ).

I'm still sort of rendering as I build the site, so I'll continue to pimp stuff periodically
here while I work on it.

First up are some pieces from the Liandri theme in UT3.

Ybeam



GooTank



BigNose



ChasmBridge








Torlan Support



Torlan Wall


Replies

  • IronHawk
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    IronHawk polycounter lvl 10
    holy shit man! I bow in your general direction.
  • Kevin Johnstone
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    Kevin Johnstone polycounter lvl 20
    Iron: thanks!

    Couple of Necris pieces next. Getting to work on the Necris theme was my favourite part of
    UT3, it was a lot of fun to learn to make flowing forms.

    DecoPillar



    Klaw


  • Jeremy Wright
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    Jeremy Wright polycounter lvl 17
    Man, this stuff is absolutely beautiful!
  • kary
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    kary polycounter lvl 18
    None of the images in the post show up for me. If I edit the page source the images are linked as "https://www.kevinjohnstone.com/~kevinjoh//Images/UT3/Liandri/LT_Gootank.jpg" and when I try it I get:
    "Secure Connection Failed
    www.kevinjohnstone.com uses an invalid security certificate.
    The certificate is not trusted because it is self signed.
    The certificate is only valid for box386.bluehost.com."

    That is with Firefox 3.

    When I put in the URL without the S on http it loads fine, and the work is brilliant :)
  • shotgun
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    shotgun polycounter lvl 20
    hey ror, incredible stuff, this is like all your pixel pushing detail gloriously multiplyed in 3d. technology have really placed you in the sandbox ;)

    hope to see some tutorials from you again, your old site was a great community effort.

    note: i couldn't see your images with firefox, only with IE (??)
  • gavku
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    gavku polycounter lvl 18
    Good to see you posting some stuff. Dig the tall Necris column. The level of detail in all the pieces is really well balanced. All awesome work congrats!!!

    You website just comes up as a bluehost page for me too btw.

    .............. if you see him round, squeeze Hawkprey and get him to show some love too.
  • moose
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    moose polycount sponsor
    i still love that Nec pillar :)

    yay new site!
  • Generalvivi
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    Generalvivi polycounter lvl 14
    Looks ace! nice work :D
  • Nick Carver
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    Nick Carver polycounter lvl 10
    Wow, fantastic work! I'd love to see how you go about making this stuff. The intricacy of the forms boggles the mind.

    Looking forward to seeing more from you.

    Cheers, Nick.
  • MoP
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    MoP polycounter lvl 18
    Really cool work, Kevin. All saved to inspiration folder :)
  • PolyHertz
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    PolyHertz polycount lvl 666
    Whoa, that's easily among the best sub-d work I've ever seen. I'm with Shotgun and Nick on this one, tutorials are in order :)
  • Target_Renegade
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    Target_Renegade polycounter lvl 11
    Very nice! what sort of texture resolution would you use though, to get the details to bake out properly? Everytime i try for minute details they don't come out well, because there aren't enough pixels.
  • SHEPEIRO
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    SHEPEIRO polycounter lvl 17
    very nice
    how long to you get roughly to work on peices like this?
  • Blaizer
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    Blaizer polycounter
    I can not see any image, i'm the only one? :poly006:
  • Okt
  • RickA
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    RickA polycounter lvl 18
    Very impressive art. Is there any chance you could show the low poly as well?
  • Rick Stirling
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    Rick Stirling polycounter lvl 18
    Okt, cheers for posting the links.

    That stuff is lovely, really really nice. I can spot a couple of classic Kev designs in there, like the 'knee' section of the Torlan Support.

    So, how relevant is this old post detailing parts of your workflow? :
    SciFi Support Beam

    Can't wait to see the main site, you good a cool domain name too.
  • Neo_God
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    Neo_God polycounter lvl 18
    Wonderful stuff! The amount of detail put in there is startling. Big thumbs up!
  • RazorBladder
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    RazorBladder polycounter lvl 18
    Absolutely stellar work as to be expected.
    Been waiting forever for you to post this stuff, well worth it :)
  • MLinderholm
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    MLinderholm polycounter lvl 12
    Awesome stuff!
  • Pedro Amorim
    why cant i see the pics?
  • StrangeFate
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    StrangeFate polycounter lvl 18
    I cant see the pics either... the direct links worked tho.

    Great stuff Kevin :)
  • renderhjs
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    renderhjs sublime tool
    veery nice stuff- nothing I could add here what´s not already been said,

    however my opera browser (9.51) thinks that your domain is unsercure, it spits out this:
    (1) The server's name "www.kevinjohnstone.com" does not match the certificate's name "box386.bluehost.com". Somebody may be trying to eavesdrop on you.
    (2) This site is using an outdated encryption method which is no longer classified as secure. It cannot sufficiently protect sensitive data. Do you wish to continue?
    (3) The server is using a short public encryption key, which is not considered to be secure.
    (4) The certificate for "box386.bluehost.com" is signed by the unknown Certificate Authority "box386.bluehost.com". It is not possible to verify that this is a valid certificate.
    maybe I am just the only one then there is not much to worry but if people with Firefox and newer IE versions get the same message it might scare some visitors
  • Jeansson
    Very nice stuff :) especially the pillar..
  • vahl
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    vahl polycounter lvl 18
    very nice stuff Kevin I loved how the Necris theme was looking in UT3 (aswell as the rest of the game.
    one question, how much time does it takes you to build something like the decopillar or the bridge thing ?
    Can't wait to see more goodness from you dude :) please say Hi to Bastiaan (Checker) for me :)
  • ElysiumGX
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    ElysiumGX polycounter lvl 20
    I can't believe how much detail is put onto each piece. How it's done is beyond my understanding.
  • nazeil
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    nazeil interpolator
    thats the hot shit right there.
  • novakaine
    wow these are awesome i wish we could get to create stuff like that for those with no budgeting lol they probably have a team for one object at a time if not they have some really talented people at epic, i'm having trouble making a mp5 for a simpe counterstrike like game lol i'm such a noob, but i just started yesterday also.
  • stimpack
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    stimpack polycounter lvl 10
    nice display of controll. youve got the makings of a great modeler!
  • carlo_c
    Really huge amount of detail, I recognise some of those from in game and they look great.
  • FiOSO
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    FiOSO polycounter lvl 10
    so...awesome. I look at that stuff and I don't even know where to start. :( Great Work!
  • GOBEE
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    GOBEE polycounter lvl 10
    ahhh shit.. this makes me depressed knowing how far I need to go to become great. but at the same time your work is extremely inspiring. I am literally in awe of what I am viewing. I am curious to know your work flow. What software was used?
  • TelekineticFrog
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    TelekineticFrog polycounter lvl 18
    Amazingly nice work Kevin. The amount of detail is gorgeous.

    I too am curious about how long you get scheduled to produce pieces like this. I know it would range depending on the scope / size of the asset. I really would like to know how much time you'd expect to get though for completing these pieces. Also are you given a pretty solid concept to go from or do you yourself come up with most of the detailing?

    In some of these pieces you have a detailed components that are reused in the construction of the bigger pieces and they are deformed along the contours of a surface or surfaces of other components (example the "Big Nose" piece has a series of identical plates running the interior surface sweep curve from top to bottom and the "ChasmBridge" piece has a component that is repeated and follows the contour of the underlying surfaces) How exactly do you go about doing that? I've attempted it using the WSM Path Deform modifier in Max but I seem to get distortion in the shapes that destroy the appearance of the smaller components maintaining their original shape. If this is what you are using to achieve it are there any tips for not distorting your source shape for the smaller components being cloned along the destination path or another way of doing this all together?

    question02.jpg

    Thank you for any insight into this stuff, it is appreciated and once again, awesome work.
  • IronHawk
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    IronHawk polycounter lvl 10
    yeah man. I'd buy a dvd of you making one of these objects.
  • Joseph Silverman
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    Joseph Silverman polycounter lvl 17
    How exactly do you go about doing that? I've attempted it using the WSM Path Deform modifier in Max but I seem to get distortion in the shapes that destroy the appearance of the smaller components maintaining their original shape.

    I could be completely wrong, but the way i'd try to handle forms like that is just do the top 'facade' of the shape in a plane, deform as needed, then add a shell modifier (with a spline input for the ramp) and then turbosmooth?
  • snake85027
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    snake85027 polycounter lvl 18
    very impressive, your models seem so realistic!
  • Blaizer
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    Blaizer polycounter
    OMG impressive, the level of details is great

    simply awesome dude :)
  • OBlastradiusO
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    OBlastradiusO polycounter lvl 11
    WHOA! Holy crap. Damn great work here kevin. I hope learn how you created some of these great creations!
  • CIgano
    these all look great, do you have any final texture renders? :>
  • John Warner
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    John Warner polycounter lvl 18
    man, this is gorgeous stuff. talk about detail.. ho-ley-shit.
  • Ruz
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    Ruz polycount lvl 666
    just saw this thread, looks fanatastic. i dont know how you have the patience for the tech stuff.
    ]
    but yeah really impressive
  • Pedro Amorim
    yeah. man. looks really excellent.
    its because of art like this that ut3 and gears are so successful. Everything is carefully crafted :)
    waiting for your new site, and making off's *wink*
  • steady
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    steady polycounter lvl 18
    rors back woot!
    lovin UT3! great stuff, can't wait for your new website!
  • Geezus
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    Geezus mod
    sex and sauce....sexsauce.
  • foreverendering
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    foreverendering polycounter lvl 12
    Spectacular work, Kevin!
  • Ephesians 2:8-9

    In some of these pieces you have a detailed components that are reused in the construction of the bigger pieces and they are deformed along the contours of a surface or surfaces of other components (example the "Big Nose" piece has a series of identical plates running the interior surface sweep curve from top to bottom and the "ChasmBridge" piece has a component that is repeated and follows the contour of the underlying surfaces) How exactly do you go about doing that? I've attempted it using the WSM Path Deform modifier in Max but I seem to get distortion in the shapes that destroy the appearance of the smaller components maintaining their original shape. If this is what you are using to achieve it are there any tips for not distorting your source shape for the smaller components being cloned along the destination path or another way of doing this all together?



    Thank you for any insight into this stuff, it is appreciated and once again, awesome work.


    I would suspect that technique woudld be possible through Zbrush. Hide the unwanted areas you do not want to affect so that all that is left is the workable region of the mesh. Create a black and white Alpha in photoshop which looks like that shape or silouette. Save in the Zdata\ Alphas folder of pixal logics zbrush folder .In zbrush use the stroke feature that scales patterns by dragging center outward. Standard Brush, Clay, or Layer will probably do the trick. That's just miy take on a way of doing that kind of detail. It's possilbe in a number of ways. I Think it might be done simular to this way because i noticed the spacing on those rivet strap patterns are not exactly even between eacch other.

    It looks absolutly beautiful Mr. Kevin. Nice job sire. What a truely inspirational set of art.
  • adam
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    adam polycounter lvl 20
    Fantastic work Kevin, saved to my inspiration folder.

    I'd bet a lot of folks* would learn quite a bit if you were kind enough to dissect a piece of work of yours and go through the creation process.

    *me included :D
  • -DN-
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    -DN- polycounter lvl 18
    TeleFrog- If you're using max you can achieve this simply with the spacing tool. I use from time to time for things like, aligning a set of bolts or rivets around a structure. All you need to do is make a spline and edit it to conform to the path you want your geometry to follow and play around with the tools settings to tell it how many to place along the path and how they align to each other... number of other settings to toy with. Once you get them in place with the spacing tool you can go in and edit individual meshes to break up the repetition. You can also achieve this plenty of other strategies, this one seems the fastest and most accurate in my experience, the deform modifications seem to break the structure of the mesh when they re-orrient it in three dimensional space ever so slightly rather than just repositioning the original mesh.

    This is all assuming you are working with sub-D's, Im pretty sure maya has a similar feature but its been to long since Ive cracked it open to remember what it's called off hand.
  • novakaine
    well have you tried firefox? when i go to your site it must have been removed or moved because it takes me to bluehost lol i guess that's your cpanel hoster.
  • Kevin Johnstone
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    Kevin Johnstone polycounter lvl 20
    BigNose: Well that piece was one of my earlier works where I wasn't so aware of instancing
    so those plates were all just handmodelled.

    ChasmBridge: This was a later piece, the bits you pointed to I modelled once by detaching
    a duplicate of the area of the curved surface underneath and shaping the way I wanted
    by edge dragging then shell modifier, then I just repositioned the duplicates by hand
    as instances of the first.

    For stuff like bolts and so on, I use a plugin that you can get from scriptspot.com called
    advanced painter, the randomize and scatterer modes in it allow you to select a source
    model, then select a model, then apply duplicates (instance or copy) of the source
    to the normals of the model selected in an easy point and click fashion.

    I tend to try and make things a little irregular to aid the idea that there’s wear and tear.

    Generally I take between 2 and 5 days for these pieces apart from the Klaw piece which took
    around 10-12 days and the chasmbridge which was closer to 15+ as it had to be animated
    and there was some back and forth with the animator and level designer to make things
    work the way they needed to. The Necris metal stuff always took twice as long because
    flowing contiguous forms are about the hardest things to model, lots of clean up and
    edge sliding while constraining to edge or face.

    The majority of the set was modelled by Peter Ellis and myself with Maury being the main
    texture guy doing the defining work initially for Bill Green and Mike Buck to follow through
    on later once they got off Gears.

    We try to work smart and make a number of modular pieces first that can do the job that BSP
    used to do in UE2 while also defining a base architecture too. That leaves more time to focus
    on the more elaborate pieces which we also tried to get 4 or 5 lowpoly variants out of for
    better texture efficiency.

    We generally used 1 2048 per asset then in the engine decide what res to turn that down
    to when ingame on the 360/PC/PS3.

    As long as you remember to make the majority of the forms medium strength, whatever
    hi frequency you place on top of those should still read ingame. Some of the pieces fared
    better than others, my push to be more optimized caused some pieces to do less well and
    I dont try to push as much as I did to a single texture.

    The info I wrote up here before is all still relevant.

    As far as concepts go we get great mood setter scene images that depict how everything
    looks together and with what lighting more than we get individual breakouts specific to
    to the asset we are building because of the large variety of level themes not allowing for
    time to do very specific breakouts.

    We used Kovacs and Feng, also Wallin as contractors for most of the project until later on
    we hired Shane Pierce fulltime and began getting clearer concepts at a more reliable rate
    and they were more useable because being inhouse he could get a much clearer awareness
    of what was helpful to asset creation as he could look at the levels and the assets we
    normally make.

    Often we just winged it and made stuff up ourselves to suit some BSP form the LD’s had already
    made in the level, Bignose, Ybeam were just made up to suit a level for instance.

    Generally you get about 30-50% of the design worked out and need to expand the rest or research
    stuff yourself. The ArchWall piece at the bottom here I found variants of when reading up on
    Islamic art as I pushed to incorporate that stuff in addition to all the giger style Necris metal
    concepts so we’d have a light, low specularity swatch to run through the levels at the height the
    players were for easy recognition ingame. The Necris metal stuff is so detailed and dark that the
    set needed a contrast swatch to sort of allow the LD’s to tame the set.

    I think I’ve covered most of peoples questions?

    I’d just like to thank everyone for the feedback, I’m a bit overwhelmed.
    As far as tutorials go, well we’re in crunch on Gears2 atm, in September my wife is due to give
    birth so I can’t guarantee when I’ll get around to that.

    Couple more Necris Pieces -

    ArchWall -






    BabelSpire -






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