Spiral Dream Complete

UE4

I think this project is finished. Again, I was at a point where I was wrapping my mind around what else to do and decided to put the last touches on it. Successfully, after the last three projects, I now understand what checkboxes must be set to allow for decals to work; also, this marks an accomplishment of using splines! The sci-fi environment has now became far easier to manage once I get to it.

Detail Props

UE4

Finalized the 2nd atlas texture and sprinkled the environment with more detail props. Onto the last batch of assets and tweaking this piece!

Spiral Dream: A New Project

UE4

This will be a tinier environment than the last few I have made but I still plan to shove quite a bit of life into this piece towards a kind of story that I have going in my head. Sadly, will not be able to touch this for nearly two weeks as I will be on vacation.

Even if I will be away from the computer this baby will be rolling around in my mind!

Art Test

UE4

I had to take a break from this project as an unexpected art test for a game company came up. Honestly it was probably the most pleasing test I have ever done to date; whether anything comes of it we shall see, till then continuing on this project!

What I took from the art test was that I should practice doing a mixture of tiled and atlas textures to quickly get the environment up and running. Maybe some project in the future I will return to only creating atlas textures first and then modeling it around that.

Design Process and SSD Magic

UE4

The past few days I ended up spending cleaning up the hard drives of my 'puter in preparation for installing the Solid State Drive that was delivered. In those few days I brainstormed on how I would flesh out this environment and tread away from the original concept and make this into a piece I would feel proud of.

I settled on placing elements that are from European cathedrals into the scene and break up the back areas further to element the sky from being dominant in this piece. It'll be awhile but I am excited nonetheless in fleshing out this baby!

More Progress Yo!

UE4

Starting to get fleshed out but need to figure out how to properly have curtains that have slight opacity but still receive shadowing from the lighting. This will require further research.

Base Texturing Galore

UE4

I set in some more texturing onto major architectural elements and added in a bonifer tree from Speed Tree into the scene to help flesh out the general look of the environment. Still a ways to go and loads of time spent in rendering AO, World Space, and Normal maps for Quixel to do its magic.

Texturing the Office

UE4

Started texturing this today after spending a great part of yesterday setting up the rendering process of the AO, World Space, and Normals for several assets. This time around I will spend more time on how I texture this environment as I am trying to create a "dirty" look but keep it in a state of use. I struggle to understand it but maybe as I work on this and the throne room something will click.

Delays But Some Progress

UE4

The last two weeks I have had company over so progress on this environment has been very slow. There are only a small few props I have to create low and high poly models for and then I can move onto the UV mapping and texturing stage. Starting Monday I should be free of having guests over and back to a good schedule.

New Environment, New Things to Refine

I took a week break to let my mind detach itself from the Throne Room environment. I got some good critiques on polycount and will revisit the lighting for it when I finish this current environment that I am now on.

This is far smaller scale but again I will build on what I now know and improve: the biggest thing is lighting composition. The major modeling elements are placed in, with high polys done for 'em, and to just populate the piece with small props and really work on getting the hyper realistic look that I desire to achieve.

At some point a future project will involve animating Miku again as I've been itching to animate a character again.

AO Map Input Magic

I decided to do a test and attach all the AO maps into the material network I created to see what it did. In past projects I never bothered with it but the massive difference in lighting quality has now proven to me that I should use it more often.

Only a few more small detail assets to model and I can call the modeling phase done. Tomorrow I should be on a good start to texturing this environment using Quixel Suite.

Throne Room Progress

 It took a week but I managed to render out the majority of the normals for this environment. I only need to model some detail to attach to the walls but soon the texturing can begin!

I've learned a few new tricks that have greatly quickened the modeling process. One is turbosmoothing based off smoothing groups and creating shapes based off edge selections; the two of these alone have shortened the high poly process considerably.

Throne Room Progress

Started this last week before knowing of the Throne Room challenge but will continue on with this at my own pace. Tomorrow will finish up unwrapping the centerpiece and modeling two other assets and then the long process of texturing!

High Poly Finish

Rendered in 3ds Max

Wireframe

Finished up the high poly for this bad boy and onto the low poly and texturing! Even though this was last week's hard surface challenge I wanted to get this thing finished up and keep at a pace of finishing projects instead of leaving them aside as I did last year.

Week 48 Challenge

dDo

dDo

Rendered in 3ds Max

First time I have tried using the latest dDo and color me impressed.

Hard Surface Challenge Week 48

Rendered in 3ds Max

One more thing to model and I can start the low poly and texturing of this bad boy. This electric guitar will be the first time I try out the new version of dDo!

Sci-fi Goodness

Spent some time on this high poly but this is a small part of the environment that I'm working on.

First Ddo Run

First attempt at trying out Legacy dDo, so far liking the control and ease of use with this program!

Prop Model Grind

Decided to get back into the weekly prop modeling thread on polycount. This time, I will attempt to also texture and import the models I create into UE4 to further help my learning of the engine and to deviate a bit from what I've been doing.

The next environment will be sci-fi as the last project was identical in how it looked when I compared the two together.

Small Break

I will be taking a breather after this update to reflect on what I have done so far. Currently figuring out how to create shrubbery that will be a higher quality than I am used to doing and will need to wait till I get my hands on SpeedTree.

Textured a few more bits and added subtle grime here and there to the scene but will move on to another project. This was always intended to be a quick environment to facilitate learning new techniques like 4 way blend textures.