Hello Kevin! First of all I love your work, it's pretty amazing. I'm an artist of an indie team. We're making a medieval/fantasy game which I'm aiming to have a strong art side to it. I'm currently in planning stages, and I come from the Doom 3 modding scene so pretty much everything is new to me.
I had a quick look at UT3 to see how things were put together before coming here. It looks like there is a combination between brushes and static meshes to build up the level, but I'm not sure how it's all put together in gears of war.
What my question is, for large structures like a castle tower for example, would it be smart to model the whole thing in detail, create the low poly, UV wrap it, split it into parts and generate the normals/displacement, with high res textures? With that I can just piece things together like you demonstrated on page 3. Or would it be smarter to tile a texture and then have unique textures for the smaller things? I was thinking with things like castle walls maybe tile the main part and then have those square things on the top with unique textures (because they wont just be squares...). Thing is having a bunch of these on the screen might be a little too much, not sure.
Also what are the texture sizes generally for pillars and the like in GoW2? And do you guys use one texture for multiple smaller models like gargoyles?
It's tough planning this stuff as I'm not very experienced with game art, especially next-gen game art and I'm currently the only artist on the team :P
Well that was just an quick example.This is how i try to do meshes like you but i can say im lightyears behind.
*Make a basemesh in Max 2k9
*Export it to Mudbox
*Detail the mesh,Usually ends up in a couple of million polys
*Export a highres and a mediumres model back to Max
*Import both meshes,hide the highpoly and run prooptimizer on the mediumres model
*Now when the mediumres is pretty much a lowpoly model i use the highpolymesh as a projection mesh to extract all maps i need,AO map,normalmap,hightmap and diffuse.
Im pretty much stuck at the optimizer stage
Also can i ask if you can post some wires of your fantastic work?I really want to see wires of the lowpoly meshes
Hey Kevin, after reading through this whole thread, gotta say you're an awesome artist and awesome person. Really cool of you to take the time and answer the questions asked here. You guys at Epic are fucking sick! And show us more pretty pictures!
Thanks for continuing to show your work here Mr. Johnstone. Glad we have artists like yourself and many others of your caliber here at PC. Very inspirational.
Theres a lot of custom brushes used, but nothing was accomplished by brush alone, its a great first pass to make with the lazymouse on so I can trail them over the major forms, but then each was hand sculpted with the clay brush and alpha 28 to make them work with all the other forms they interact with.
it does... I have seen it with my own two eyes. But I am having trouble on the what I think is the last boss. I just can't get away from the tickers and those ink grenades. Any tips Kevin? LOL. Thanks again K-J for the inspirational work. I am going to copy you so that I become more proficient. (by copy i mean clone, so your clone will take my place at work and I will be at home leveling characters in WOW.)
Whoa! I don't remember the Locust stuff looking as noisy as it does here. It's a cool piece, it just looks really noisy with details. It's something I've noticed with all of the Locust themed stuff. Lot's of broad shapes with high frequency/noisey surface details. Neat to look at, just not what I expected when I'd think of the highpoly for those assets.
Out of curiousity, and if you can remember this sort of silly detail, when was the Safe door done compared to the last Locust column you posted? While they're different worlds, and thus different looks, their art style seems very different. (Safe has large, thick details, as if it were attacked by a Transformer while the Locust stuff is very dense, high frequence details).
Couple of vehicles I did near the end, they were kind of rushed, needed not to look exactly like anything in the real world for legal reasons , needed to have doors, wheels, hoods blow off so internals and undercarriage could be exposed. Which was tough to do on one texture near the end of crunch so theres lots of issues with these I am aware of!
Oh yes.... scale, that was another big requirement, these vehicles are sort of correct scale relative to themselves, or rather they started out that way but Cover constraints and other messy things forced changes that just aren't correct.
Actually though, those wheels were based more on the 64 apache I think and I was surprised how small they were too, in relation to the vehicle size. Still, i'd bet money I'm still off on scale stuff throughout, I was pretty tired by the time I took these on.
I love how the vehicules are somehow 'larger than life' in terms of details scale. This certainly translates beautifully to normalmaps. Fantastic and smart execution!!
Curious to see some up close wires of those (bumpers and such)
looks great kevin
quick question
was LIAFAIL chosen because it reads the same both backwards and forwards? Couldn't see mirroring in the models but it seemed odd that such a word was chosen otherwise by pure chance : p
(palindrome?)
All the gears stuff is amazing! I like the locust stuff better but that's just personal preference.
I'm a big fan of vehicles and the work you did was great. You don't often see someone take the time to actually model out some engine stuff. Super badass.
Your work is constant inspiration. I appreciate it. Keep up the phenom work.
Kevin as always your work is amazing and such great inspiration.
Those engines are pretty crazy looking. Were they based off real engines or did you just start making up things that seemed like a more sci fi version of an engine?
Those are "rushed" assets? You over-talented bastard.
Really great stuff Kevin. The flow of the geometry, the mixing of old and new, all very very interesting to look at. Fantastic work.
Underside of the pickup below, I ended up borrowing one of Bill Green's toy cars as partial reference, I really know nothing about cars. I guess I see these things differently because I know Pete Hayes is in the building, banging out proper vehicles hahaha
This was the first one I did, my first car model too, took a shot of the backend as I hadn't highlighted the plates before.
I spent between 5 to 8 days per car to HI, LOW, process, create regular and damaged variants, versions on wheels, on axles, prepped individual bits for Alan Willard to set up to explode with Kismet.
All in max. I'll get wire shots next time.
The engines were a bodge between part of an engine Mikey Spano had done, parts Epic China did in their other more mad max vehicles (Jet_Pilot, those may be the ones you are thinking of), I grabbed some pipes from the Necris stuff in UT, just anything I could find to throw in there, they are not based on anything other than the idea of an engine.
Replies
I had a quick look at UT3 to see how things were put together before coming here. It looks like there is a combination between brushes and static meshes to build up the level, but I'm not sure how it's all put together in gears of war.
What my question is, for large structures like a castle tower for example, would it be smart to model the whole thing in detail, create the low poly, UV wrap it, split it into parts and generate the normals/displacement, with high res textures? With that I can just piece things together like you demonstrated on page 3. Or would it be smarter to tile a texture and then have unique textures for the smaller things? I was thinking with things like castle walls maybe tile the main part and then have those square things on the top with unique textures (because they wont just be squares...). Thing is having a bunch of these on the screen might be a little too much, not sure.
Also what are the texture sizes generally for pillars and the like in GoW2? And do you guys use one texture for multiple smaller models like gargoyles?
It's tough planning this stuff as I'm not very experienced with game art, especially next-gen game art and I'm currently the only artist on the team :P
Well that was just an quick example.This is how i try to do meshes like you but i can say im lightyears behind.
*Make a basemesh in Max 2k9
*Export it to Mudbox
*Detail the mesh,Usually ends up in a couple of million polys
*Export a highres and a mediumres model back to Max
*Import both meshes,hide the highpoly and run prooptimizer on the mediumres model
*Now when the mediumres is pretty much a lowpoly model i use the highpolymesh as a projection mesh to extract all maps i need,AO map,normalmap,hightmap and diffuse.
Im pretty much stuck at the optimizer stage
Also can i ask if you can post some wires of your fantastic work?I really want to see wires of the lowpoly meshes
And thanks again !
I used to think your designs back then were a little too exaggerated, now I see why that was a good thing and I'm struggling to push it..
Locust Throne -
Larger version - http://www.kevinjohnstone.com//Images/Gears2/LOC_Palace/LOC_Palace_Throne1_Big.jpg
class thing to do was register and say thanks.
All I have more to say is skillz!
Are you allowed to post engine viewer shots of all this stuff?
I played GoW 1 and 2 and i can say these are stunning.
very inspiring work
Out of curiousity, and if you can remember this sort of silly detail, when was the Safe door done compared to the last Locust column you posted? While they're different worlds, and thus different looks, their art style seems very different. (Safe has large, thick details, as if it were attacked by a Transformer while the Locust stuff is very dense, high frequence details).
The pickup's wheels look tiny though!
Actually though, those wheels were based more on the 64 apache I think and I was surprised how small they were too, in relation to the vehicle size. Still, i'd bet money I'm still off on scale stuff throughout, I was pretty tired by the time I took these on.
Or did you not even have to do that because they weren't supposed to roll over?
Curious to see some up close wires of those (bumpers and such)
quick question
was LIAFAIL chosen because it reads the same both backwards and forwards? Couldn't see mirroring in the models but it seemed odd that such a word was chosen otherwise by pure chance : p
(palindrome?)
All the gears stuff is amazing! I like the locust stuff better but that's just personal preference.
I'm a big fan of vehicles and the work you did was great. You don't often see someone take the time to actually model out some engine stuff. Super badass.
Your work is constant inspiration. I appreciate it. Keep up the phenom work.
It's the nickname I gave to my wife, my daughters names are on the license plates.
Those engines are pretty crazy looking. Were they based off real engines or did you just start making up things that seemed like a more sci fi version of an engine?
Really great stuff Kevin. The flow of the geometry, the mixing of old and new, all very very interesting to look at. Fantastic work.
This was the first one I did, my first car model too, took a shot of the backend as I hadn't highlighted the plates before.
I spent between 5 to 8 days per car to HI, LOW, process, create regular and damaged variants, versions on wheels, on axles, prepped individual bits for Alan Willard to set up to explode with Kismet.
All in max. I'll get wire shots next time.
The engines were a bodge between part of an engine Mikey Spano had done, parts Epic China did in their other more mad max vehicles (Jet_Pilot, those may be the ones you are thinking of), I grabbed some pipes from the Necris stuff in UT, just anything I could find to throw in there, they are not based on anything other than the idea of an engine.
Thanks for the comments!