3D Class S2 Class 03 - Modeling a Hard Surface Gun

This week we continued our journey into the land of hard surface and BOY is this stuff HARD (pun DEFINITELY intended)

I chose to do a cool Art Deco Ray Gun that I found called the Atomic Disintegrator.  It looks like it was from a fictional series called Space Vixens or something?  Not exactly sure but I loved the style/look of it.  What I didn't anticipate though was just how difficult the round organic shapes were going to be RIP

These were my references:

And this was my model made in Fusion 360

And this was the gun all combined in Zbrush and polished up.  I also created an Alpha using Orb's tutorial found here to add the logo on the side of the gun:

I made a different version of the gun that had a more round frame to it but when I brought it into Zbrush, I realized I didn't like how it looked and instead opted to go for a more flat side look.

I plan on using my classmate Marchand Venter's tutorial for adding height detail to the low res in Substance Painter which can be found here .  I plan to use that for the center chrome panel on the gun along with the bumpy ridges on the knob since I wasn't able to replicate those features in F360

3D S2 Class 02 - Resurfacing, Baking and Texturing the Knife

This week we took our knife that we made in Fusion and had to retopo, bake and texture it while keeping it within a 3000 tri count limit.

For mine I got inspiration from a knife that I have for wood whittling that has a sweet wooden handle.  I wanted the knife to look like it's been used a lot and has sat outside in the rain/on the ground.

Renders:

Final tri count was at 2980 tris

Capstone Progress - Designing Enemies and the World

So hi I'm the art lead for the capstone game Impin Ain't Easy (title subject to change) and decided to blog/update the development process for the game.

Over the break I made the base art style guide for our game, taking a lot of inspiration from Gigantic and Firewatch, two games with a really pretty aesthetic style that I also believe is not super complicated to achieve.

Link to the art style guide

After that, I decided to do some concept work for our main character and the enemies.  Our main character is a dumb little demon imp so I took inspiration from animals like bats, spider monkeys and goats to get the character look.

Color variation explorations for the main character (Scamp).

Rough model sheet

When coming up with enemy ideas, my inspiration came from early colonial america Puritan pilgrims.  Since our enemies our enemy "holy" wizards, I thought that was a good starting point

And finally I started to do some color exploration for our world/main starting area.

I'm looking into implementing a post process material to give us that color depth of field over our environment along with a cel-shaded post process material shader for everything.  That's the big thing that I'm working on this week along with making some rock assets for our level designer so she can start making the world.

Seeing this all together is wild though.  Didn't realize all the work I did that week haha

3D S2 - Week 01 - Modeling in Fusion 360

Our warm welcome back into FIEA after winter break is modeling a hard surface prop (in this case a knife) in a program called Autodesk Fusion 360

This program is weird and cool???? Sort of???  I don't know.

Anyway this was the finished knife in F360:

And this is it in Zbrush:

2D Final Illustration

3D Class Week 18 - Creating an Environment Part 4

After what feels like a million years I have finally finished my environment.  I ended up changing up the lighting completely, making new grass/trees and rocks and just overhauling the assets.  I also created a simple skydome with a simple cloud texture on it to add to the stylized look.

The new rocks with textures.  The old ones are on the left (still used them to fill the space)

The new final environment:

I'm so proud with how this turned out.  I hope anyone reading this realizes how difficult and how much of a process making an environment is because BOY did I not realize it haha.

I learned a lot about organization and just overall UE4 stuff by doing this so I'm excited to do another!

3D Clas Week 17 - Creating an Environment Part 3

Boy HOWDY!!!!!

This project has been destroying my life these past few weeks.  I've gone back and forth between hating it and loving it (mostly hating) and have almost gave up and restarted twice.

To any future fiean reading this, this assignment is a process.  You are going to hate it cuz it's going to look bad and be empty and ugly for a long long time.  It wasn't until putting in foliage and adding in some lighting that everything started working together and making sense.

Anyway!  This week I switched around the skybox section for the foliage section.  I really wasn't feeling my environment and really wanted foliage in it to make it feel alive.

This is what I have so far with some lighting and fog that I'm working on:

Along with the emmissive glow that I added last week, I also set up a material attribute that has the glow pulse in and out.  I also made that a parameter so I can tweak the color and timing for all the other rocks.

Along with that I also made/added the water material.  I also made the features of it a parameter so I can tweak the settings for the smaller pool of water.  I followed a tutorial for this, trust me, I'm not that smart to just figure this out on my own haha.  I did learn a lot about moving materials making this though.  I HIGHLY recommend looking into making a water material if you're getting stuck on materials in UE4 since it taught me a lot.

And then the big addition was all the plants and foliage.  These were the assets that I made shown in Maya (they look better in UE4 obviously)

And then for all the plants I created a simple material that have a wind speed parameter so they all move.  Super easy.  There's literally a grass wind speed node in UE4:

And this is what everything looks like with everything moving:

I'm finally at the point where I'm really liking my environment!  Legit the second I put in the moving materials and all the plants and the nicer lighting everything started making sense.  All thats left is to make a nicer sky sphere/a moon in the BG and to mess around with more lighting!

3D Class Week 16 - Creating an Environment Part 2

This week we continued working on our environment by starting to actually build it.  We used the terrain tool to sculpt the environment and then created a rock set to put into the environment.

I decided to scrap my initial hand painted forest environment because getting the textures to look correct using Zbrush and substance was proving to be too difficult for my current level.  I was still able to use my textures but decided to scope down to a magical rock quarry/mine.

Gif of the moving rocks

Landscape material blueprint:

Glowing rock blueprint with parameters for me to change color/glow intensity

The chaotic mess of a blueprint for the floating rocks.  They continuously feed into one another but still play/animate at different intervals:

And here is the rock set (the one with the runes looks ugly cuz theres no emissive glow on it RIP):

It's coming along slowly.  I'm hoping I'll like it more once I add in 2 trees I'm making and the torches/do all that fancy post process stuff.  I think it'll turn out cool???? At least that's the goal haha

2D Class Week 15 - Lighting Part 2

This week we revisited our lighting assignment.  Unfortunately, due to a combination of being sick, capstone being selected and the holidays coming up, I didn't have as much time as I wanted to work on this assignment.  I decided to do a painting/study thing of David Bowie from the Aladdin Sane era but went for a more messy/quick approach along with going for a more illustration style I guess???

Painting

Reference

Last round

3D Class Week 15 - Creating an Environment Part 1

This week we used Zbrush to sculpt and make tileable textures.  I made 2 textures using that method, 1 texture using Substance Designer and 1 texture hand painted in Photoshop to try out all the different methods.  Using Zbrush/Substance were my favs just because making a handpainted texture tileable in photoshop is an actual nightmare.

All 4 textures together

The dirt and rocks were sculpted in Zbrush and colored in Substance Painter

This grass texture was made in Designer.  I followed along with this tutorial so all credit is given to him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VJdJSbqMgQ

And this texture I painted by hand in Photoshop