Industry Workshops

Been a while since updating my Blog, a little too long perhaps

A lot and not too much has happened honestly, been working on one of the polycount challenges to which I have had moderate success, though without any repercussions  to not completing it within a time limit its been rather difficult.

As a result I have decided that the reason to this is not because I lack vision, but because I have lacked skill to achieve the shapes I want in a 3D space, even when it comes to complicated assets such as Victorian era architecture or small details. What has held me back most was not knowing how to retopoligize to use shapes from ZBrush into Maya and then into a game engine.

This lead to me deciding to take an immense financial risk and attend an unknown even to me called “Industry Workshops”, which was being hosted within the Vaults at Waterloo station.

Going to this event was probably the best decision I have ever made, meeting industry people from all sections of the creative digital arts, even Titus Lunter was there. During my time there and talking to these famous artist rely game me some insight into becoming more creative and how to get around lack of motivation due to lack of skill and speed.

One of my most interesting moments was talking to the employees of Splash Damage and the Art Director of Creative Assembly’s Total War series. Both had extremely good input in my portfolio and tips on getting into the industry and how to go about presenting my work, as well as talking about studio life and culture.

All this has motivated me to dive into the arias I need improvement on and work on improving those skills before attempting anything that I do not know how to attempt to create.

A lot of information to process and use, but for now I’ll be working on improving my ZBrush skills and creating more detailed Environment assents for games.

Hear is the results of my improvements so far.

Fairly messy Topoligy, apparently if your not vertex painting or vertex lighting the scene much then its OK, so long as you clean up some of the tris and clean it up a bit. 

Next was some PBR practice so I created a simple Rock Cliff texture that came out much better than I expected.

Now that i feel that i have got the skills in PBR and modeling, I want to work on creating Organic Trees and Foliage and create something along the lines of a Roman ruins.

March 22nd

OK so I’ve been working on it for quite a bit more. Did another lighting overhaul and added a post processing box to edit the lighting more. Had a very big problem with rendering out screenshots within UE4 after I had increased the lighting setting in the post processing box, so I had to take the screenshots using the old FRAPS way. Also managed to render out a small cinematic which I think brings out the reflections and lighting more compared to screenshots.

Added in some “incense pedestals” as well as redoing the throne to blend in better with the rest of the scene, a better way to describe it would be for it to match better with the style of the scene.

Here are the results so far.

Also hears a link to a video i made from the scene.

https://vimeo.com/122896118

March 2nd 2015 Throne Room

OK so it’s been a while since I updated the blog. So far quite a bit into the Throne Room contest and trying to get things under way, and there are some extremely talented people within the community. The objective, for me, is not exactly to win (although that would be nice), it is to learn something from the process of making something specific and to a deadline.

While there is a polycount link to what I have been doing, I’ll also include the images here for you to see.

Polycount: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=148856

Update 2nd of Feb 2015

Well I’m not shore where to start, a lot has happened in the last two weeks, even if I don’t progress any more with the events I have learnt a lot with my skills and ability’s so things are still rely good and motivating at the moment.

Off Job-seekers now so that frees up A-LOT of time to work on my portfolio, but another thing has caught my eye recently. The Throne Room.

The competition that is, you make a Throne room, with a Throne of course, but I like that idea of working toward a deadline and giving it your all without saying “there’s no set date I can come back to this”. I decided to do a test to see if I had it in me to come up with something original based of modernized 1950’s New York Rockefeller style with elements of modern visualization style and an ever so slightly hint of Halo’s Forerunner style, mainly the colour and slight shapes.

So with this in mind I came up with a rather basic Throne, I wanted the business look rather than the all-powerful overseeing overlord, since it far into the future I wanted a more “reserved” look, responding to E-Mails more than watching over subjects constantly. Though of course the room itself will not lack any grace to it.

Here’s the test throne, I’ll probably start working on the rest of the scene now and entering the competition.

So far I'm quite happy with the results, it might be changed in the future, but for the moment I'm quite satisfied with the mood this is giving off so far.

January 8th 2015

Well it’s a new year and with a new year comes a new blog update with progress.

I have recently acquainted myself with Allegorithmic software, all of Substance Designer and Substance Painter, as well as the awesome looking (yet to be confirmed) B2M3 which turns photo textures into PBR ready textures (how awesome is that!!). I have yet to need that part, but since it was in the steam sale I decided I might as well take the plunge and give it a whirl.

So far the learning curve in Substance Designer was not as steep as I had thought. If you know how Unreal Engines material works then it’s pretty much learning a new UI rather than anything major. In essence, it’s Photoshop with Unreals Material UI and Quixels Ambitions. Between the two I think there both on par with each other, though at the moment I think dDo has better control over its masking compared to SD (at my current knowledge, it’s probably going to change)

In the scene so far I’ve added the Fire Exit door with its own texture, my error was that I should of made the “Fire Exit” singe a plane so that I can use the texture over and over again, guess I’ll have to correct that next time. I have changed the lighting setting since it was in the wrong setting the whole time, so the lighting in the scene has improved considerably. I have also added a SD roofing to the scene so that it has some “smallness” feeling to it. Light baking has increased in speed considerable since the change which is nice. Lots of more things to get a hold of, speeding up now with the scene and getting it all together, I recon ill slow down when I hit creating the bed for the scene and the other smaller objects in the scene, though I think it’s probably won’t be a big deal.

My current objective is to get one section of the scene done so that I can put it on my portfolio and have some diverse content on there so spice things up on it; otherwise the feedback from potential employers is going to be the same every time I apply (white noise).

Onward here are some shots of the updated content. Roughly 2 or 4 hours spent on textures to make them look nice and fitting for the scene, SD took longer because I was just starting out (ceiling of the place) but so far so good.

 Ill be making Wire and string textures to use soon for Lights and so on. so far im happy with the results so far.

December the 27th

December the 27^th

Been probably too long getting round to updating this blog with an update or so, times been a little thin but I have managed to put some character into the scene.

Right now I’m playing around with the lighting and UE4’s material instances to see if I can make textures more modular. Especially when it comes to small objects such as Cans, one of the thoughts that came to mind was to have the objects on one texture sheet. While this sounds like a nice idea, I’m not shore that would increase Draw calls in the scene as the texture would be associated with the same 3D objects. All in all this requires more research; I’m currently creating a texture sheet with objects in the same aria of the scene into one to see if this improves workflow and optimization of the scene.

I am also working on the lighting in the scene, not shore if I’ll get it perfect in the end but I’m spending too much time obsessing over it.

For now, here is the updated scene to date.

Definitely need to get into more ZBrush related stuff as creating high poly objects in it are so far pretty amazing to see, though i just need to get my head around the UI of the software and it should be just a matter of skill rather than lack of experience soon afterward.