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  

Trim Sheet Exercise - Week 1 -

I am in the process of relearning 3DSMax, thanks to the help of some good friends the ramp up time has been minimal. 

Trim sheets will be my focus over the next few weeks

Another weekend, another exercise :)

Looking to find a better understanding of the foundations in design, this time around it is in shape breakup, visual flow, and line weight.

Spent a few hours blocking out and moving the main shapes around to find a favorable breakup of elements, with a hint to secondary details. More to come

Terrain Workflow Exercises // Unreal 4 //

With the weekend coming to a close I wanted to post the results of the Terrain Exercise I have been working on.

Unreal 4 Captures

 

Terrain material setup in Unreal

-Setting up the Terrain PBR Material was my favorite part of the process. It took several hours of tweaking and revisiting maps in Photoshop to hone in the desired look.

-The only problem I ran into was with the Roughness map. Unreal 4 requires you to invert the red channel of your control map by utilizing a 1-x node within the material editor.

-I also recently learned that Substance Designer has a plugin for Unreal which allows you to update your catalog of texture maps in real time, assuming it works without issue you could really reduce the time spent on adjusting textures.


 3rd Person Camera for scale-

Aerial shot 

Wrap Up


1. Zbrush or Mudbox // Create rough displacement maps to be utilized in World Machine
2. World Machine // Node based authoring to generate various maps |height|normal|flow|splat|
3. Photoshop // Authoring, Organizing, and Finalizing .tga files for engine.
4. Unreal 4 // Import height map for terrain tool, import texture maps, and create/author terrain PBR material.

Terrain Workflow Exercises // World Machine // Mudbox

Nothing spectacular at this point, generating some terrains out of World Machine and spitting out some displacements for use within Mudbox. Next will be getting these maps into Unreal 4

Terrain 01

Terrain 02

 

Vector Displacement Map usage in Mudbox

 

 

During production of Halo 4 I had the honor of working with some amazing concept artists.  This door was Designed by Josh Kao, who is still rocking it here at 343.

Out of all the assets I modeled for Halo 4 this one was by far the most fun. The high poly never received a proper render in production as the schedule had all of us moving right along.

I'm looking forward to showing the work I have completed on Halo 5. But until then, here is a proper render this asset deserves. 

 Prop exercise // Ear Defenders

Overdue for some new exercises so here is a speed sculpt from this evening.

 This scene has evolved many times over and it feels like things are finally coming together.

Its time to show some love to the focal point. I tied my hand at some paint over work to help resolve the design of the door, I want the door to feel utilitarian while very much grounded in a sci fi genre.

Breaking up the hard surface work, I dived into zbrush this past week. Head busts are always fun as they allow for quick exercises in anatomy. // Here are the results

Latest WIP // Finally coming together

 Trying my hand at more paint over work to help resolve some of the undefined shapes

Texture sheets are up next for the project

Additional WIP Shots

Environment WIP

This is the latest environment I have been focusing on. This has gone through many iterations, so many that I got fed up with it at one point, left it alone for a few months, and now revisiting. 

Unreal 4

Unreal 4  Materials // Snow


Setting up materials for a project I am currently working on in Unreal.

Getting light to react to snow in Unreal is tricky. The secret however is utilizing a "bumpoffset" node in conjunction with your texture's normal map.