Awesome talk, thank you so much for sharing! You can get the spherified Cube in Maya by taking a default cube, selecting all the edges, beveling, pushing the fraction to 1 and then upping the segments btw. Just make sure you merge the verts afterwards.
for all the games i've enjoyed very few have graphically inspired me, bioshock comes to mind and red dead, but they are both strong narrative driven games so its hard to say if my admiration merely comes from the narrative or solely the graphics themselves.
very cool, looking forward to more updates. Only thing I could say right now is that the rock on the left thats in the background is merging with the foreground rock and makes it seem off a little but thats probably because of the lack of materials. Nice job so far!
Look good! In my opinion ventilation shafts must be darker for better look, at the moment it's merge with whole color of construction, I can barely see normal and spec maps here also it will be nice to post wire, so it'll be clear is' it low poly or so
here's a current render of the cylinder. the two on either side are emitting just a bit of light to make the wires a bit easier to see. the other side looks exactly the same, since i just duplicated the faces and merged the vertices, with the only difference being a larger pivot.
I would merge the metallic and roughness maps into a single texture using substance painter UE4 template, after that like rexo12 told, inside UE4, click on your rough/metallic textures and uncheck sRGB, that will make your textures look good inside UE4.
I don't think merely fitting the game makes a story awesome or great, any more than if I made a box with 20,000 rivets and panels and stuck it in gow2 it would be a great model. Unless those rivets and panels were really aesthetically pleasing or something.
You dont necessarily need to merge the branches into the trunk, you can (re)use banches and stick them into the trunk. To get a smooth shading, you can adjust the normals manually to the direction of the trunk normals (like speedtree does) There will be seems in the UV mesh anyway.
zbrush has smoothing , but no proper tangent. dont expect to get good normal map if you use zbrush obj, either marmoset or pixologic hopefully will fix this issue now regarding to UV, you need to turn on merge uv in zbrush in tools, ( should be on by default )
Surely there should also be a mandatory 'talk like a ninja day', during which everyone merely surveys their prey from shingled rooftops prior to some sort of stealth assassination involving bladed projectile weapons. It's only fair. Pirates get all the glory. And chicks.