fair enough, regardless, I'm going to be re-doing the monolith anyways, after taking a break from looking at the sculpt and now going back to it (and after having more practice at work) I am not happy with my sculpt, and I will be re-concepting the rock itself.
haha wow we're practically in an identical spot. Its looking good! I like the treatment you did with the door entrance and the left wall with benches. Mines just a normal size door and blank wall. Hows the molecularity of your scene? Stuff snapped to the Grid and such?
This is really looking great so far! Might benefit from sharping up the ears a bit, looking a little blobby right now. Its really good practice to sculpt convincing ears. The face won't look quite finshed until then. Hope that helps :D
what would be the workflow for creating and practicing making levels/environments? Do you always start with sketches/concept art? Do you sometimes just go in and blockout geometry and come up with ideas as you go? I'm curious how other's go about it.
You can hold CTRL when moving to grid snap, or use vertex snapping. It all depends on how you work and what'll make you comfortable, there's no "best practice" here. Some people really need to see round numbers in their transform components though...
Well I spent another hour on the low poly, then lost it texturing. :P I think Total productive time spent was around 5 or 6 hours! And not as nice as yours, haha! :P I think I'm going to have to do more practice like this.
theoretically you are right, practically you know damn well what Ngons are in our field and when people refer to polycount that they mean trianglecount ;) tris, quads, ngons, I don't think it has to do with the missing ability to count further than 4 :D
OK, but it's better to make that step now, rather than wait. You don't need to get too technical to make good art in an engine. You can practice the same things. Treat it just like you do with vray... it's just another rendering tool.
Yeah, I thought the reloading thing and sealing doors were pretty cool. Played through the offline practice mode as Crash (the tech guy), and I think I'll be sticking with him when I get into the campaign. Really, really fun - way to go, Valve!
From what I understand the values varies a little from engine to engine. Much as Joe Wilson writes in http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-practice. "PBR is more of a concept than a strict set of rules, and as such, the exact implementations of PBR systems tend to vary. "