Portfolio Project 2018
polycounter lvl 5
I have decided to start a little project to make my portfolio have a really good piece. Currently it only has projects from Uni and I have just graduated a few months ago. They all needed extra work so instead, I decided to dedicate my time to a new project where I can push my limits and learn new skills while making an amazing folio piece. 
any feedback or tips are welcome! This forum tread will just be for posting my WIPs and progress and getting some feedback.
I have been working on it for a week (I work full time so I have to do it outside work hours). Below are some shots of the candles I have been working on today
Props Candles (Handpainted)
Candles in Marmoset for baking
I'll post some of the others I have tomorrow.
any feedback or tips are welcome! This forum tread will just be for posting my WIPs and progress and getting some feedback.I have been working on it for a week (I work full time so I have to do it outside work hours). Below are some shots of the candles I have been working on today
Props Candles (Handpainted)
Candles in Marmoset for baking
I'll post some of the others I have tomorrow.
Replies
Here is the texture and UVs
Here is a shot for the greybox layout in UE4
More work tomorrow
I am also aiming for a more hand painted cartoony feel. Do you still suggest reducing the AO? I haven't completed the art bible yet so I guess its hard to grasp the feel I am going for, but this is the first time I have attempted this style so feedback is welcome
That ao intensity is just too much. Gather some references and study them to get the right colours.
Did you use a reference when sculpting the candle? I'd suggest googling 'old candle' and checking out the candles there. You could definitely work on the silhouette of your candles to make them more interesting, especially if it's for a close up render. The melted sections look too flat and there looks to be too many straight undisturbed lines for such used candles. You'll also want to look into subsurface scattering for UE4 for the candles. Look forward to seeing the end product!
If you want to use your exsisting Candle, use the "Retopology" Workflow.
If your are Working with Maya check out this out:
Video/Channel: FlippedNormals
I made candles recently as well and did exactly this to get my low poly. Just use one or a combination of ZRemesher, Dynamesh and Decimation master. With these three you can crunch down to whatever amount of triangles you want for the low poly
Having extra resolution for a better look means adding in extra loops to avoid showing jagged edges on the silhouette (and better animations with less texture stretching, etc). In non-deforming, static models, you should probably be able to use whatever the lowest output from zremesher or decimation master gives you, so long as you are getting the look you want. Of course, for a portfolio piece, is would probably be better to manually reptopo everything so you can showcase perfect UV layouts.
Check out the enviro art dumps from Naughty Dog. Only thing I was left wandering about that is how they handled UV's, as their modular enviro pieces looked like they came straight from decimation master. Maybe they just UV mastered it and jjammed it all together however it best fit. Perhaps the gains from careful UV packing wasn't significant enough to warrant the time of manually retopoing all of that stuff?
I am going to start over (seeing as I dont have much at the moment anyway) with all your feedback provided.
The best thing you could do is take a gander at the Polycount wiki.
The teacher not grading you on model optimization is a big red flag. School can teach you a lot of junk/outdated information that puts you 5 years behind everyone else.
Thanks PeterK! Ok, I know what not to do now! I'm looking forward to working on getting this right
Thanks Priderice, I will be sure to check this out.
Awesome Alex, thank you for the feedback
Hey Bigtimemaster, Thank you! I will check out the naughty dog reference. I also think from everyone's comments, redoing my models is the way to go! and optimising them
Great! I have some really good direct here from everyone. I'm going to start over!
I hope everyone's having a lovely weekend
Jess
Ok so I redid the candles. So my next question:
I have gotten the 3 candles down to 724 tris all together. I started with the most difficult of the 3 candles. I am going to redo the one on the left. I think I can optimise this one even more. Question is: What do you think a good amount of tris for these would be? Is this low enough? Or should I go lower. I don't think I can push the 2 on the right anymore without effecting the silhouette.
Candle on the left 338 tris
middle 202 tris
right 184 tris
This is a shot of the bake. I have some little issues around the base I need to fix up. (This is in marmoset viewer, please ignore the material, this is just for the bake of the normal map) I haven't started the texturing again.
This is my high poly mesh in Maya just so you can see what I was working from.
I also tried zremesher but it still kept my models at 3k. It was hard to get it any lower without causes issues/loosing details.
I did a lot of research on candles in bed (seeing as there was nothing else to do)
Any suggestions are welcome.
Ps. Try using Zbrush Decimation to see what could be accomplished. It's probably not gonna look pretty , and that's totally ok.
I have moved onto the next asset I need to make - the table. There will be a few tables in the scene but I have broken down the sections into smaller manageable chunks and this one is the starting table.
Here is some work for today. I need to refine the details on the table top and add some more scuffs and marks with different brushes. This will be very easy to retopo. The legs on the table need to be rounded more too.
Whether you are working from reference or your own design, you have a visual goal, right? You know what the level of quality must be. So the question is, what is the most efficient way to meet that level of quality? Will it require 20k tri's, or can I achieve the same look with 2k tri's? Splitting my model into 5 different 4k maps might make hitting my quality level easier, but with some planning and experimentation, could I do it all with just one or two materials? If you put some amount of restriction on yourself like this, it will force you to get better at important work like your UV layouts, and overall planning.
Of course, to get a ballpark estimate of what kind of resources are needed to create current gen assets, try downloading free content like Paragon from Epic Games or reviewing art dumps and breakdowns on artstation. So if you see some work done by a professional that is similar to yours, strive to do your work with the same amount of resources, or less if you can! And better quality while you're at it!
Just focus on efficiency. When you know how to work with efficiency, then you can tailor your workflow to meet any demands.
- You should be focused on refining the blockout shapes, creating a pleasing a composition, and blockout out first pass lighting.
- Having nice candles wont matter if the scene looks like garbage. So don't get too caught up in all the comments about candles... big picture thinking will help you more. Macro read over micro read.
Thankyou
Thankyou!
Thank you Shabba. I will definitely start to refine my blockout. I have always had an issue with having good lighting and that's where I had planned to push my knowledge. I know its not my strongest point. Then when posting here, everyone's directions where about the candles I had not moved on from that. I will start looking more into the pre-production stage again
I'll post my progress over the long weekend
@BIGTIMEMASTER made an awesome point there!! At the start is a good idea to see assets from finished games. That gives a lot of information about how an asset should be. But of course this depends on the style you seek for. Is not the same a realistic finish than a stylized one. You should take that in mind.
I'm sure you're sick of hearing about your candles but I'd like to show you the candles I made recently and to give you an idea of my thought process to hopefully help.
Like yours, these candles were done in Zbrush. However, I did not manually retopo like you with the exception of the plain tall one (700 tris) and the medium one next to it (1378 tri's) where I deleted extra edge loops around the body what were created by ZRemesher. I did not manually retopo because I don't have alot of free time and I have alot of props to make. Consider this though. How long did it take to manually repoto your candles? 30 mins? 60 mins? Just for one? It takes maybe 5 to 10 mins in Zbrush using ZRemesh and Decimation Master for one and then I can move on to unwrapping and baking right away. I wouldn't spend 30 mins manually doing the low poly of a candle (or any prop) when I can do that in 1/10 th of the time in Zbrush. There will be a time a place to do manual low poly meshes, but for things like a candle, where it has a sort of organic shape and can have really annoying geometry from the drips, I think personally, using ZRemesher and Decimation Master is the way to go.
My goal for these props is to use as many triangles to make it look very good but at the same time try not to have wasted triangles, which is how I ended up with these amounts using a combination of Zremesher and Decimation Master. I am not worried about whether this is exactly the triangle range in shipped titles, however, I wanted it to be at least reasonable and if I were to do this in a studio, I could easily decimate further. I also wanted to be able to rotate these candles and still have detail on almost all the sides. So for you, maybe you want to show that you can stick to whats typical of a shipped game, or maybe you are okay with adding a little bit extra triangles to make your props look extra nice.
There is one important thing to understand with triangle usage though and that's silhouette
You can crunch down to whatever triangle count you like but you should always look at your models silhouette and add triangles to help smooth it out or to help define a silhouette more. The red marking I put above are the places where I feel are too sharp looking and could use extra triangles to make it look smoother. And since we work in 3d, you will want to rotate your objects around and evaluate the silhouette in different angles and add or reduce as you see fit.
I know this may be alot of nit picking on a candle prop but the goal is to have a consistently great looking quality on all props, candles are small enough that you can easily and quickly iterate on them until they are great!