Building a stronger foundation of confidence in zbrush techniques. Trying to be more conscious of how the eye will move across the form and focusing on addressing primary and secondary shapes up front before pushing into details.

Repeating Texture Exercise

Subtools - 5 for variation

Initial Placement of Elements

 Honing in the maps with Knald

Trying out some new methods this weekend, burned through a couple rocks and landed on this one to showcase.

Lower contrast material

Working out the logistics of creating a path cut directly out of the rock for my unreal project. Great exercise for getting a lot of time in with the transpose tool. 

Placement in Unreal 4

Assets have been placed in engine and some work into materials, terrain, lighting, and a particle system for snow has been made to slowly walk in the desired look for this environment.

I utilized matinee to setup a simple dolly shot for the scene. Dolly shots are great for emphasizing the subject, in this case we have a focal point that is complimented by continuous snowfall. Composition will likely change to cater to the rule of thirds.

 

 Additional setup is needed for audio to further drive a sense of immersion, and although the terrain setup in unreal is awesome I feel that a custom shape out of zbrush will be the ideal solution for snow.

Unreal is phenomenal and with 4.9 being released it seems things keep getting better and better :)  

More to come as always and I will try to get some frames exported out to showcase the snowfall.

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  

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.