Ian Maclure's 'Level Up and Post Work' WIP Thread
greentooth
Level up as in I need to get a damn job! 
It's been over half a year year since I graduated and I've been away from game art for alot of that time. But I've also been doodling away at a few programs and hopefully picking up a thing or two, and I need to get serious, get back into the flow and work on something that will actually get done and revamp my poor student folio. To that effect, I've been hitting the tutorials hard since January as a kind of motivational kickstarter, and it's really worked!
So here is what I've been working on since Febuary, and a little todo list:
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The first thing I needed practice with was foliage, so... (click for larger)
I love the mood of this concept. I'm going to be taking liberties with it, but this will be my main inspiration for a forested ruins scene. Concept by Ioan Dumitrescu.
Overview of my scene for this project:
...and a paintover I did of where I want to take it.
Lighting foliage is definitely proving challenging, and so far it's looking like I'm going to need some kind of depth based Post Processing to get the background light and golden glow.
Tree Wireframes:
And once more in the default UDK map:
I'm planning on another, larger, tree and a few small bushes to complete the set. In the mean time I have alot of ruined stone bricks to sculpt.
Edit: Oh yeah, One big thing I need to improve is my texturing. I can't seem to get a consistent style between Photosourced, Mostly Baked, and Mostly hand painted textures. Texture painting is something I really want to practice, which I will try to do with my vault scene I think. Here are some from this scene:
The two images on the left are my own photo sourced and painted textures, whilst the two on the right are the result of following in the direction of tutorials, so that accounts for some of the difference in style, ha.
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The second project started off as a Modelling practice session between myself and bbob - the plan being to give each other pictures to tackle each week. Here is what I got... http://i.imgur.com/C7wpu.jpg And here is my High poly.
The low poly is pretty trivial to make, but I'm having to do alot of small baking tests as I go, because these bloody cylinders! URL="http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=81154"]This thread[/URL] has been my bible!
Anyway, I'm hoping to put this into a very small coridoor scene as a hero prop. Sketch of that to come...
---
Anyway, I have alot to do! My aim is to update this thread with something at least once a day - and find some time to enter the darksiders contest. Crit me!
Oh, and thanks/credit where its due: Thanks to Damien Lazarski(teaandcigerettes) and Ryan Smith(virtuosic) for their excellent 3dmotive tuts, and once more to Ryan for TreeGen, which I used as a base for my tree! Check it out.
Phew...
It's been over half a year year since I graduated and I've been away from game art for alot of that time. But I've also been doodling away at a few programs and hopefully picking up a thing or two, and I need to get serious, get back into the flow and work on something that will actually get done and revamp my poor student folio. To that effect, I've been hitting the tutorials hard since January as a kind of motivational kickstarter, and it's really worked!So here is what I've been working on since Febuary, and a little todo list:
----
The first thing I needed practice with was foliage, so... (click for larger)
I love the mood of this concept. I'm going to be taking liberties with it, but this will be my main inspiration for a forested ruins scene. Concept by Ioan Dumitrescu.
Overview of my scene for this project:
...and a paintover I did of where I want to take it.
Lighting foliage is definitely proving challenging, and so far it's looking like I'm going to need some kind of depth based Post Processing to get the background light and golden glow.
Tree Wireframes:
And once more in the default UDK map:
I'm planning on another, larger, tree and a few small bushes to complete the set. In the mean time I have alot of ruined stone bricks to sculpt.
Edit: Oh yeah, One big thing I need to improve is my texturing. I can't seem to get a consistent style between Photosourced, Mostly Baked, and Mostly hand painted textures. Texture painting is something I really want to practice, which I will try to do with my vault scene I think. Here are some from this scene:
The two images on the left are my own photo sourced and painted textures, whilst the two on the right are the result of following in the direction of tutorials, so that accounts for some of the difference in style, ha.
----
The second project started off as a Modelling practice session between myself and bbob - the plan being to give each other pictures to tackle each week. Here is what I got... http://i.imgur.com/C7wpu.jpg And here is my High poly.
The low poly is pretty trivial to make, but I'm having to do alot of small baking tests as I go, because these bloody cylinders! URL="http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=81154"]This thread[/URL] has been my bible!
Anyway, I'm hoping to put this into a very small coridoor scene as a hero prop. Sketch of that to come...
---
Anyway, I have alot to do! My aim is to update this thread with something at least once a day - and find some time to enter the darksiders contest. Crit me!
Oh, and thanks/credit where its due: Thanks to Damien Lazarski(teaandcigerettes) and Ryan Smith(virtuosic) for their excellent 3dmotive tuts, and once more to Ryan for TreeGen, which I used as a base for my tree! Check it out.
Phew...
Replies
Cant wait to see this finished
I've also added textures, because that's something I really want to improve on. I'll be trying to knock up a dirt texture soon and I'm not sure in what way I want to go about it - this scene doesn't have any sort of unified style at the moment, and most of it is fairly noisy. I think I'll sculpt the hero stuff first and see how it defines the environment.
EDIT: Crap you had a reference image
haha, haiddasalami - I appreciate the paintover though! :P In fact, I think I've lost sight of the concept a bit... Not sure if I like this colour, although it's better than before.
Sorry not much to update today, been busy with small things. Tomorrow - more sculpting!
Therefore I think you should work on the terrain further, first and foremost. Ni No Kuni on the PS3 is a great example of this.
I don't have too much to offer other than encouragement, because it looks like you are headed in the right direction. Don't be afraid to moss up those rocks a good deal, they seem too clean right now compared to the concept.
Can't really disagree with you. It's where the leaves in the grass came from, but I was honestly hoping to cover it all up with grass/moss/ivy/rocks which is probably not the best way to get things done. I will be thinking on this.. (and googling Ni No Kuni!)
ANYWAY so back in the world of the sane, I've been painting a new terrain texture. One that is meant to be mossy with bits of dirt and grass and small plants. I chucked the leaves on from my old texture, but they need some serious work to get right. Here's how it looks now:
With leaves and Without.
And some angled tiling.
Not happy with the colour yet, and everything needs more detail. I'm just a bit unsure how to go about it.
Oh and my work music for this was the Ni No Kuni soundtrack. I didn't realise that was the Studio Ghibli RPG! It looks gorgeous!
[ame="
I Got very ill the other week, Spent a few days getting Mass Effect 3 out of the way, and then just when I was ready to work... I got an interview! It's 3d related, but not a games industry job. :P Still it's better than being unemployed, and I start training on monday. So this thread is going to be much slower than I originally thought
In between sorting that out I've done some more sculpting and what feels like way more retopo that I should have for the well. I've also started a late Darksiders entry which I am blocking out now. Not sure about any of it!
Decimated sculpts
Low Poly
Angelic mace blockout
Just scraps really, but I wan't to keep posting!
What you can do on other hand is to use everything withing single texture. Bake, hand paint and photos.
And then see what techniques can be used just on photos to make it more stylized (you can fake AO, Cavity and so on from normal map, you can use reduce noise, and high pass filter to make it look more stylized).
Main diffrence between baked-painted and photosouces are shadows and high-lights. the first one do not have any at all. That's what make the look stylized.
First off, the bake for the well:
I had soo many problems with this and xnormal, but I really wanted to learn xnormal so I sort of refused to let myself use anything else to bake. Got there in the end with some help. While I was stuck on that for weeks, I did alot of sketching and started speed modelling. I might make a sketch thread for my pen and paper stuff if I can keep the habit up.
Painting test! (unfinished, forever)
Speed Model test! (slower than my normal modelling!)
My speed model sessions really worried me. I basically stopped treating it like speed modelling the moment I got stuck in, and I noticed my tendency to get hung up on a problem instead of trying for an alternate solution. Definitely going to do more of those in the future.
I recorded the last two here: http://www.twitch.tv/fearian/videos
@Alberto Rdrgz: Totally agree. I think fixxing the shadows from the trees will help this, as well as getting some more plants in with some colour variation.
@BARDLER: I like this idea, because the original concept looks quite wet, but getting the effects right for the flowing water would be a challenge I only want to take after nailing everything else in the scene, so maybe, but probably not.
@ZacD: Nice, I agree.
Cheers