On to the next project...

So I finished texturing and rendering the chess set and you can take a look at it on my Artstation here:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/eQP9Z

The next thing I want to add to my folio is a some nice textures. Today I did a pretty simple texture study with some mud and rocks. This is nowhere near a finished product but I needed to get back into Substance Designer with a little practice. Here are a couple renders I did:

Now that I'm comfortable with Designer again I want to create some sand dunes. I had attempted this a few months back with one of my classes but it ended up not turning out too great. This time I want to not just use Designer, but also incorporate ZBrush with some nice sculpted details. I haven't nailed the look I'm going for but once I do I'll post here.

Not quite there just yet...

So I went a little overboard with getting the details on each and every little section that I'm taking some extra time to work on it. That and I'm having some disagreements with Quixel. Suffice to say that I'm not promising deadlines any more. Tomorrow I'm going to try to knock out the rest of the texturing/rendering. I do like Quixel for it's ease of use but it can be dreadfully slow. That more than likely has more to do with working with multiple 4K textures but still...

I was curious to see if my computer could handle it and if the program still had the same crashing tendencies. I'm happy to report that it hasn't crashed yet so I may try and use it more often so long as I get quicker at using it. I could have had this done in Photoshop or Substance by now but alas I want to expand my working knowledge on this program. I also went with a spec/gloss PBR instead of a metalness workflow.

I have a bunch of tweaks I need to make before calling it done like the chess board itself needs some adjustments and I want to move the pieces around like it someone played a game. Some pieces are missing so I need to duplicate some of the meshes around so that all sides have some details. I also want to upload a marmoset viewer to my Artstation so that people can take a good look at it up close.

Anyway here is what I have as of tonight. 

Chess Set Update

Not much to show just yet but I finished all of the High poly and brought everything into Maya to start the retopo/UV process. I did bring most of the pieces into Marmoset just to have something to show here. It' hard to see all of the details with this shot but at least it's something. I decimated things down as much as I could but it still makes the scene chug pretty bad. I'll end up doing a better HP render after I finish the whole thing for presentation purposes anyway. No sense wasting my time with it now. Here it is:

So basically now that I'm pretty much finished with ZBrush my plan after I make all my low poly meshes and UV them I'll start the baking process. Once complete I'll move onto texturing. My goal with this is to break from my normal workflow. I want to go back to either just using Photoshop or try out the new Quixel Suite 2.0. They added a bunch of new features that I really want to try out. Last time I tried to use it, it was buggy, slow, and crashed all the time. I'm hoping I'll have a different experience this time around; I really want to like the program.

If I do go ahead and use it, it might take a little longer than normal to actually texture it as I pretty much have to start from scratch learning all the new functions. But again, we'll just have to see. I hope to be finished with this at the LATEST by next Monday.

Steampunk Chess Set

I recently completely finished my dining room and have updated my folio to show it. I won't post all the images here but you can view them on my website here:

www.matthewsmithgameart.com

or on my Artstation site here:

https://mattsmith.artstation.com/


I actually made a couple of videos explaining my process in creating the books. Just an FYI don't bother watching these vids if you don't understand or have any interest in UE4 materials, I imagine that it might be a bit boring. Anyway here they are:

While I was reworking my website I thought that my props section was a little lacking so I wanted to make something that is a little more advanced. Technically it's a pretty simple piece but it will take some time to reproduce modeling-wise. Reference images can be viewed here:

http://www.steampunktendencies.com/post/98403550494/the-philippines-first-steampunk-art-exhibit

My version with only one day of working on it:

It should only take a few days to complete it and I'll post again when it's done.

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