August has been a very productive month but there is a long way to go :) Exercises are yielding better results these days and thanks to some stellar feedback from friends I can tackle some of the more important foundations.

Environment WIP // Staging - Elements are in place and with some additional feedback this week I can wrap up any loose ends that do not serve the composition before commitment to the Unreal Engine.

Several repeatable texture sets would greatly benefit the scene so this weekend I tried my hand at one. Layer blending has proven to be very effective, however I still came up with some stretching/inflated plane changes that I would like to go back and correct.

More to come as I move along.

Another night, another exercise :)

 

Rock exercises for the evening.

Reference Used

 Made it out to Rattlesnake Ridge this weekend for some sight seeing and reference gathering :)

With some fresh reference in my head and plenty of images to pull from I jumped into making a couple of rocks. The idea for these rocks was to ensure each side was unique, and could be used multiple times to populate a scene quickly.

Micro detail was avoided at this stage and a focus on silhouette and shape became the goal for this exercise.

These rocks were duped off and decimated down to bring into Maya in prep for baking normals.Once complete, I was able to populate the scene I am working on rather quickly.

And with that, these are the initial compositions that I landed on.

One of my all time favorite games is Skyrim. Which is where most of the inspiration for this scene comes from. The good people over at Bethesda have player immersion down to a science and with Fallout 4 out for release soon I am hoping they will return to the Elder Scrolls series for their next project.  

Having a lot of fun with this project and looking forward to showing more updates as they come in.

Weekend Exercises in Zbrush