Door and Dome

So the last few days I've been working on the door (and the window above it), ceiling, and overall efficiency for my level. I condensed many materials so that I now only have a handful to deal with and I've made many instances to use for my various textures masks. Essentially I'm streamlining my materials so that they can be changed easily on the fly. Today I took some time and created the normal for the dome in Substance Designer. It's not complete yet but I'm liking how it's turned out so far. I want to add some base color and roughness maps to it next and I might end up hand painting the battle scene at the bottom. Not sure yet. Right now it's just some image I grabbed off Google as a placeholder.

I received some feedback that previously my level was a little too dark, especially in the corners. At the time I couldn't find the settings to help increase it inside UE4. Now I've found several settings that can up it from various sources and I think it's actually a little too bright now. But I'm not too worried about all the lighting settings yet. I still have a LOT of work to do with just creating meshes/textures. If you look closely, some of the objects in the scene actually don't even have a material assigned to them.I'll keep plugging away...

A little over two weeks...

Here are a few progress shots on my environment. Since last time I've set up the master material to span the columns, floor, trim, steps, and I'm thinking about adding in the walls to make it easier to organize/cheaper on the draw calls. I've also added in some plant life to make it a little more believable as a livable space. Next I need to work on the door and redo my little railings. After that I want to finally start working on the main focal point of the inside of the building here. Not 100% sure how though, at least not yet. Once I'm satisfied with the inside, I'll start looking toward fixing up the balcony and then the landscape/ocean. 

I have a LOT to do still but I feel with just over two weeks in I have made some pretty decent progress. My workflow is a lot quicker and I'm able to iterate much better with the way I'm texturing. I only have one unique sculpt in the entire environment. Normally I would bake out my normals from HP scultps/models but I haven't had to that much with this geo. I'm just using more polys for edges and bevels.

I've also been using Substance Designer quite a bit recently. It has surely helped out with this environment. Baking maps has never been easier/quicker for me.

Sidetracked!

So I haven't posted in a few days mostly because I didn't have much to post. I was working just not on anything you can really see per se. I did make a few materials including a concrete, gold, and marble. They represent most of the colors I'm going for. The rest I have used masks with some fancy shader magic that I can now customize to my liking. I've also updated some of the geo in the scene. The biggest being the gold trim on the ground, the tiling mosaics on the wall, and the sun roof. I tend to work on one area for a while and move on. This keeps things fresh. It definitely helps when I'm trying to solve a problem and I get frustrated with whats happening. I just move on.

What I was really doing these past few days was texturing and fixing this robot for another project. I had a few geometry issues that needed to be changed for it to suit the animation but we're getting there. It's a shame though that I've spent a LOT of time building this thing but odds are likely that I won't ever put it on my portfolio. I looked at it as more of a learning opportunity though. Still not done but I'm hoping within the next month we'll have everything wrapped up.This image is actually almost a week old but the stuff that I have changed is slight, mostly just minor fixes to the shoulder and knee joint. I also added a jet pack to him but it's not textured yet.

Alexandria II Day 4

Not much in the way of visual change here but I added a pattern to the walls and floor and I messed around with some lighting options. I think the overall brightness level is where I want it to be with the room but I need to refine the dome and perhaps some windows to give it some nice shadows on the ground. The sunlight is to contrasty with the floor; my bloom level might be too high right now. I tend to play around with the light settings too much at the beginning, I know that it will change dramatically down the road. I should start heading into ZBrush to make some sculpts of some of the detailed pieces. I also want to start adding in some materials to the floor, walls, and columns.

I did play around with making a marble material in Substance Designer today. I'm not fluent enough with the program yet to really get anything pretty but I'm getting there. Tomorrow I have to work on the robot for the school project so I don't know if I'll get to much of this stuff done by tomorrow but by Thursday I'll have something more to show.

Alexandria II WIP

Third day in and I have most of my blockmesh into the scene for the main building. I'm still going to focus fully on this main building until I have it polished to a point where I'm happy with it. The landscape/lighthouse/water/other buildings will come after. Getting everything lined up and fitting perfectly was kind of a pain since it's mind numbing monotonous work; especially the outside walls. I think there must be better ways to do it than what I'm currently doing. I might need to do some more research of modular workflows. Tomorrow I'll start working on some trim details or continue refining the meshes. Here are a few shots of my current progress.

Alexandria II

I'm working on a new environment project today. Well I started it yesterday but I forgot to post. It's inspired by the Alexandria set in the movie Alexander but with my own take on it. Here is my progress so far:

My goal for this project is to integrate some new texturing workflows I've been practicing involving substance designer. I'm trying to make this a very modular type environment where I can duplicate around assets to reuse pieces where I see fit. Some of my main goals:

Create landscape with a beach, hills, water (with animated waves and see foam)

Vegetation consistent with this type of geography.

Buildings that can be spread out along the landscape to make it look like people actually live here.

The main building itself is the focal point. I haven't quite decided on if it will be a personal living quarters or maybe a library of sort. We'll see.

A custom skybox that I can animate including a day/night cycle.

A lighthouse in the distance.

There are a few other things but my main focus right now is the building itself. I'm still in the blockout stages and everything is a bit rough right now. I'll try and post progress as often as possible. I know this project will take a while so I need to be diligent on working on it every day. Maybe I'll have something worth looking at in a month or two. I just need to take it a day at a time until it's finished.

Desert Rock Scene

I made a quick Unreal level with rocks and sand that took me about 3 days to build. I'm pretty happy with the results for the amount of time it took. I learned a lot in regards to materials; stuff that can help me immensely moving forward. The whole thing consists of a total of 9 meshes and 2 master materials (1 for the rocks and 1 for the sand). I probably could have done it with one material but I originally wanted to add more to the sand texture at one point. I had tried to use some vertex painting to add some smaller rocks but in the end it looked terrible so I scrapped it. Another thing I wanted to add was a prettier skybox. That would have been cool but it was outside of the scope of the project. I wanted to make a quick scene that looks decent and focusing on complex shader materials. Anyway, here it is...