The BRAWL² Tournament Challenge has been announced!
It starts May 12, and ends Oct 17. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
It starts May 12, and ends Oct 17. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
The Bi-Monthly Environment Art Challenge | November - December (99)
quad damage
Hello everyone and welcome to the 99th edition of the Bi-Monthly Environment Art Challenge for the months of November and December!
This challenge is a way for real-time 3D artists to test their skills and create a piece of work based on concepts provided. It's open to those of all skill levels and we do our best to provide meaningful feedback along the way so everyone can come away from the challenge with actionable points on which they can improve their craft!
- ENVIRONMENTS -
HARD SURFACE ENVIRONMENT:
Dungeon Stage - Foundations Course by Jose Vega
STYLIZED ENVIRONMENT:
Enviroment Art & Worldbuilding by Dardo Studios
- PROPS -
HARD SURFACE PROP:
Skyhaul - Karlsson house - chapter 01 by Daniele Gay
STYLIZED PROP:
Neo Cortex's Castle and the Toxic Tunnels concept art for Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time by Jeff Murchie
- RULES -
Please read all the rules before starting:- Try to post at least one critique for every post that you make. This will make for a better learning environment and help us all grow as artists.
- Try your best to finish as much as you can in the time frame provided, but remember even if you don't finish by the end of the challenge we encourage you to keep pushing and finish your piece!
- Post what you are working on in this thread so that way it's a more centralized place for advice and critique. Please avoid creating a new thread as we don't want to spam out the forums.
- It is recommended to use a game engine to present your work. Unreal Engine, Unity, and Godot are very common engines that can be used but feel free to use any alternatives that you want.
- 3D Viewers (Sketchfab, Marmoset Viewer, etc) are welcome, but please note that their contents can be stolen by those who know how. Please ensure you're comfortable with this potential before using one.
- Feel free to change up your chosen concept a bit if you want! Interpret these concepts to your liking, especially if your aim is to add storytelling elements.
- If you finish your project and decide to post it to something like Artstation, make sure you give credit to the concept artist in the form of a link to their profile. Additionally, it is recommended to ask a concept artist for their permission to post a 3D piece based on their work before doing so.
- RECOMMENDATIONS -
- When you are just starting out making a scene, it can seem complicated or imposing. Take your time planning and blocking out, it will set you up for success later on.
- Think about how you can re-use assets, re-use textures, break it down as simple as possible and plan it out. A lot of people will break it down in their own way when they start out their challenge. Gather some reference images as well for different parts of the scene, don't be afraid to make it your own.
- We strongly encourage you to go and look at other games and see how they make their assets as well as get concept art to give it your own feel.
- The goal is to learn and grow both artistically and in your ability to both give and receive critique, but don't stress about it and remember to have fun!
Replies
Just simple modeling, controlling shading via hard edges, don't intend to do any highpoly/ sculpting. Rendering in Unity engine, baked lighting with Bakery. Next, I would apply surfacing, probably using a hand-painted trim atlas. Final result could be a web build with camera controls, would be sweet to have a pawn to walk around the scene.
Ah, wip on Sketchfab
model
Well, excited to see what others do with the concepts :-B
edit: Oh wow that yellow looks garish. Should have double-checked the color without f.lux enabled. Ok, updated renders
I chose the Hard Surface Prop, which in my head I said I would model in one go. But now that I've started, that doesn't seem as feasible. I'm thinking the thing that took up the most of my time was trying to figure out the scale.
In any case, I'm not trying to take too long on this one. I mostly want to get it finished, so I'm moving on even if things are imperfect.
My goal is literally to just finish a project (y'all know how it is...)
I'm using Maya to model and will be using Substance for textures later on.
Here is my blockout progress and then my started model:
The blockout was used to simply get an idea of the shapes and sizes in reference to one another (I'm telling y'all I was struggling with the scale).
If anybody has tips or feedback on the scale thing when you don't know how big things are, that would be greatly appreciated.
What I did use was the scale of the human on their artstation page, but it still seemed inconsistent, so maybe I'm missing something here.
Below is the model so far. Like I said, I thought I could get this all done in one go, but I lost momentum as the day went by.
Overall it took me about an hour and 20 mins to blockout. About 2hrs to get the model to this state.
Thanks in advance for feedback/tips! Good luck everyone!
I made progress on the canisters and have been UVing some things here and there along the way.
Minor changes, but I'm hoping tomorrow I'll do more re: the wires and affixing things to the frame.
Overall I did another 2hrs of modeling today + 20mins or so of UVs.
Here I have a wireframe as well^
Lastly, the progress on the canister:
On the left is what it was before and on the right is where I ended up today. Everything else I'll be doing within Substance as Normal decals and such.
I'm predicting I'll be working on this for another 3 days and call it finished.
Today I did about an hour and 20 mins of modeling + 20mins of UV mapping.
I focused on the top lamp part, which had previously only been a cylinder. I changed the proportions and fit it onto the main base mesh.
I also started added more details toward the top of the base where all the wires are supposed to come out of.
Speaking of wires, I'm adding those next. I started adding some curves in order to start but had a Friendsgiving dinner to attend to today and did not get to continue.
Will try to finish the model tomorrow + all UVs. I want to start organizing my outliner and texturing right away.
This is it so far:
See y'all tomorrow~
-K
I think my use of the boolean modifier is pretty standard. The newly cut faces receive UVs and Material IDs from the cutter, which makes it possible to control their appearance. Possibly vertex color transfers too, haven't checked that. The main difference to Maya might be that the boolean operation is non-destructive, done with a modifier, and I don't know if Maya has something like modifiers (Iirc Max has). But I think modeling and re-projecting UVs is not much slower, possibly even good to commit to a shape at some point.
I have started some textures and applied it to the model. And of course, I started going down rabbit-holes
Created a simple figure based on third person template to walk around the environment, switched lighting to mixed (dynamic directional light, baked GI), simple skybox texture, added some particles. Did a web build and uploaded it on itch (will update it).
Screenshot of current web build:
My next step could (should) be refining and completing the texture atlas for the structure. Here is the 2D texture I have been using so far (at half res). I wonder if I should model and bake or hand-paint.
Good week!
Today I did about 3hrs of only modeling + doing some tutorials for some of the twisted cable parts, which I think turned out super awesome and learned a new way to make cables/wires that twist: using Sweep Mesh tool, under the Create Menu.
Here's the tutorial I used. I think the cylinder on an EP curve is great, but Sweep Mesh allowed me to add complexity to my cables in one fell swoop. Definitely a tool I loved (I only found out about it for the twisty wires, so I had already done all the others "by hand" lol).
I also started the inner part of the light fixture, which I've decided not to put too much detail into, since I assume it will be hard to see with the light on. I've also added some bevels and more fidelity to the canisters (I have yet to duplicate special them, I should've used instances instead of copies...)
Overall, I think it's going really well. I reached out to the concept artist to ask if I could post this when I'm finished and they said yes! So I'm excited to share it on my page afterwards. I've been working through this as a practice piece more than anything else, but I still think it's worth sharing it, even if doesn't end up in my portfolio.
The next thing I will tackle with this one is UVs and moving on to texturing. Is this going to be a project I finish? *gasp* Stay tuned haha!
-K
As for software, I think I'll either just present it within the Substance Painter Renderer BUT I do want to try putting it into Unreal Engine, so maybe that one.
Your web build is pretty cool! Did you model that character or used a store asset? Did you rig it? Or did it come already rigged?
As for baking vs hand painting... It's a pretty small piece that I think it could even be meditative to hand paint it so... that's my vote!
Personally, I like bringing the assets into a game-engine, since this opens up more options in regards to lighting, camera/ sequences, custom materials, particles and so on. And of course, it's a good implementation practice. Targeting game engine, I find it helpful to setup the assets in engine from the very beginning, then just update them throughout the process, evaluating in engine.
Thanks for checking out the web build
DataTransfer modifier used to copy skin-weights, Mask modifier to remove occluded geo (defined by vertex group) to reduce clipping
Not quite happy with how the cape is deforming yet. Tried using some cloth-sim, but in the build it looked to jittery so I disabled it for now. Perhaps I find a way to improve it.
Do you think I'm able to do the same thing you did in Blender, but in Maya? About using the Unreal Mannequin?
I think you did a great job, are you going to mess with the cloth-sim further? Or just leave it?
In Maya, the function to transfer skin weights from one mesh to another would be Skin > Copy Skin Weights. Transferring skin weights from a proxy mesh is particularly useful when dealing with double sided cloth. Since the Unreal Mannequin was likely created in Maya, I assume the skeletal mesh would import without issue. If it is so, some standard, automatic skin-weighting to the skeleton should be very achievable as well. Then, you need to export so it matches the unreal skeleton (hierarchy), here perhaps the Game Exporter becomes handy (for game asset exports generally). I'm sure there are a tutorials about this.
Today I did about 2hrs of UV mapping shenanigans, fixing things I kept messing up with, and another hour of last minute modeling and organizing my scene.
Clean outliner FTW
I added a separation for the measuring thing on the canister and started setting up Vertex Colors.
Unfortunately I got so caught up with the Vertex Colors that I forgot to add actual materials within Maya so when I baked in Substance Painter it turned out like this...
Yikes!! I'll definitely have to fix this, but I'm pretty tired today so I'll tackle this tomorrow.
Does anyone have any tips for a checklist when texturing/exporting? I think I tend to forget steps from time to time, so I think I'll have to make a checklist for my workflow haha (admittedly forgetting the actual materials is kinda wild of me lol but I think I was just excited to get to texturing)
In any case, hopefully tomorrow I can finish and present this thing!! How exciting!
Cheers!
-K
I can't wait to see your web build with updated cloth sim!