New Props

I've been messing around with the Dining Room scene for the last month and here are a few things I've added so far. This isn't everything but I'll show the rest in a more detailed post. I'm getting ready to put these on the portfolio as well but I need to fine tune some things first. The main I've been working on is the books. I have a lot more books than shown below here but they are in engine and I haven't gotten around to renders of those just yet. Some of the ones you see here I actually have on my shelf at home and a one I just made up from scratch.

This is the new floor board that I made for the scene as well. It doesn't look that great here but it fits nicely with the room itself; at least better that the previous material that I had.

There a couple more things I want to fix with the overall scene including the lighting, a couple of the textures, and the addition of a few more props. Then I can finally call this thing finished. I won't touch the subway scene at all at this point. I think it looks pretty good as is.

Looking for Work!

So this week I've been reorganizing, rerendering, and realizing (that I have to find a job soon). Since I graduated last week with by bachelors in Game Art the next step is looking for work. That means creating a portfolio. Now I have dabbled with creating one previously but never really made one to my liking. This time is different and I am finally getting something I like. In fact I'm pretty happy with the layout as of right now and I don't have a problem posting it to the world. But keep in mind as of this post it is a work in progress.

My Portfolio

I don't have everything in there just yet. I still have a couple of texture and material images to post and I have one more prop to add. I'm debating right now whether to add another environment or two as well. I have four completed environments (and a couple uncompleted ones) that I have posted on this blog previously but I kind of want to push forward and finally work on the Dark Souls Library that I posted last time. I also need to post my resume but I can't quite get the formatting I want yet so it's kind of half there. Since all the images I was going to post are now on my folio, the only thing that is semi new is the sculpt I'm working on for the aforementioned Dark Soul environment.

Subway and new environment

So this week I made some, what looks like, minor changes to my Subway environment. I added a lot of grim and dirt to the walls via decals, changed up the lighting, added in a little more trash, and fixed up some of the the pipe meshes I had in there. Oh and I adjusted the arches to better match the reference. All in all it looks like I haven't done much at first glance but it took a fair bit of time to complete.

Here are a few images of what I have at the moment:

I'm liking the lighting I have in there but there is still a couple more things I wan to do before I call this complete.

The last couple of days I have actually been working on a completely different environment. It's been swirling around in my head for a little while but yesterday I decided to go ahead and start on it. This my have to be put on the back burner for a little while after this week but I'm happy with the progress I have so far.

This is inspired by an area in Dark Souls II. It's a library deep inside a dungeon. I thought it was such a cool little area but I think I can improve upon it with some updated visuals and a little of my own artistic interpretation. Here are a few images and a gif. Next time I'll have something in engine but for now all these are just from Maya.

The reason that I might have to put this on hold next week is because I'll actually be working on my second environment for school. I graduate on November 24th so maybe if I get a lot done I can post some updates

Subway Environment Update

This is my progress on the subway environment for Week 2 of the Game Portfolio class.

Over the last two weeks I've pretty much remodeled the entire scene to make it a lot easier to edit. I knew that I would have to make changes as I progressed but the way I did it originally made it very difficult to do so. From the viewers standpoint you can't actually tell but I'm glad I took the time to do so.

Here are my current renders of my UE4 scene:

Again I still have a good bit of work ahead of my of refining the scene. I'm very happy with some of the assets but other things I have yet to figure out how to make them just right. For instance I wanted to add a bit of trash lying around to look like it's been visited by people. From a distance all you can really see are some dark lumps on the ground; and that's only if you look real close.

Here's what they look like inside of Maya:

In order to get a crumpled look I used Maya's nCloth simulation for my four pieces of trash. I basically just took a tessellated plane and dropped it on a misshapen sphere (hidden in GIF below) and let it play. Once done I reduced the poly count to get it to look right I applied the texture and viola; trash!

Of course I still need to figure out how to make them a little more visible in my scene. Lighting, I'm sure will play a large part in this.

The other thing I worked pretty hard on were my plaques. I used Zbrush to sculpt some of the more intricate details like the human figures. They aren't 100% accurate but I really just wanted to get the feel of them rather than spend days getting it perfect. But in the end they are pretty close to my reference images:

Since I have probably 95% (if not all) of the meshes and textures completed, this week will be focused on getting the lighting and post process stuff looking correct. I'm sure my instructor will also have some critiques for me to implement as well.

Victorian Dining Room Blockout

For this week I worked on my Montreal Victorian Dining Room. Again we had to make a blockout for this week setting us up for our final month of class. So far I've made some decent progress but just like my previous environment there is a LOT of work involved. I tried to focus a lot more on replicating my original concpet as closely as possible. Of course that is very difficult to do; especially with using a game engine like UE4. This is my main beauty shot. 

The biggest issue to me is getting the right focal length of the camera. I'm having a quite a time getting it exactly right. Comparing my shot with the concept the scale of the objects looks funny due to this reason. I'm also having trouble with my lighting. Technically I shouldn't worry too much about lighting right now but getting it as close as possible now is going to make it easier in the long run.

Here are couple different shots from other angles. I didn't really flesh out the rest of the room; I was focused on that one angle. Later down the road I can finish up the rest.

Yesterday I pretty much finished up all my architectural details but the props you see laying about were missing. So today I made couple. Here's a marmoset render of some of the props I did today. They were textured in Substance Painter for the most part with some touch ups in Photoshop. None of the them are totally finished yet but it's as far as I wanted to take it for blockout purposes.

Subway Blockout

For the past week I've been working on my blockout for my Subway scene that I will start next month. Right now I've only got the meshes in there with all the materials and textures set up. That way when I start this scene next month I can start working on the finer details. I've put quite a lot of time in this but I keep finding issues as I work on it.

My biggest concern is scale and proportions right now. I see a couple of issues already like the arches on the left of the first image need to be a little less deep and a bit taller. Earlier I had the opposite issue and it seems that I went a little too far with it. But that's all part of the process I suppose. Tweak and tweak, and tweak some more. Also I messed up on the materials on the far back white wall. There is supposed to be a brick part on the bottom. Not sure how I missed that.

The second area isn't exactly part of my original concept but I did find some reference for it here:

This section is where the stairs lead to in the first image. I'm getting close but again there are still a few issues. I also must have accidentally scaled in my arch, you can actually see through it from this angle. Again not sure how I missed that. I'll fix it a bit later.

Next week I'll start working on that Montreal Victorian dining room and post that here.

GPR - Concepts for Finals classes

In Game Production class we are tasked with creating 2 different portfolio assets. We can choose pretty much anything we want to do so long as we have actual photo reference but it does need approval from the instructor. After some back and forth I chose two environments to create.

The first one is the long abandoned NYC Hall subway station. There a are bunch of images out there for it but I like this one for my concept:

The following images are the texture and asset breakdowns:

This seems like a decent amount of work but I can already see how I can work modularly with the arches and walls. I will need to rely heavily on a bunch of tiling textures for sure. I also need to be thinking how I'm going to light it with those windows. Might be tricky.

The next asset I will be creating won't be nearly as big but it looks far more detailed and has many more props to create. The following is my concept image.

This is a dining room of a 1920's Victorian style house in Montreal. Pretty much everything in the house is all oak. Unfortunately I can't find any higher resolution images for this room, but I do have other angles I can use. I will have to change out some of the props; namely the chandelier and clock due to not finding those exact models for reference. I have images for the reference I chose for the moment but I may change my mind on the clock once I get to it. I'll try and get close as possible to the style of each though. The next two images are my texture and asset breakdowns.

So seeing all the work I have set out for me I'll have a busy couple of months ahead. Next week we start our blockouts for the first project; I'll post updates then.