Hand painting practice

Browsing through pinterest I found a fun concept of an airplane and thought it would make for some good hand painting practice. This model is completely flat shaded and only has a diffuse texture with all the lighting information painted in it. I plan to have the windshield transparent with the cockpit visible so it looks a little strange now but I will adjust it once im finalizing the piece and its about 70% there now.

Refreshing Maya skills over the break

Here is a little project that I started over the break in order to sharpen my Maya modelling skills as well as learn Maya tools in more depth. So far the highpoly model.

Almost there

Well most of the assets have been made, now I need to put in some more work into a few more materials such as the glass table, window and put the wooden table through substance to improve its materials further. After that its the lighting pass, reflections and I want to add some dust particles to make the room feel more alive. I will leave the statue to last  because I see it as an extra and I am not really a character artist, but I still want to try it out when the scene is finished and if it turns out well I'll put it in the scene.

What a Mess!

So for this update I wanted to mess up the scene with the books, papers and wires. I also made the room a bit smaller as it looked a little longer than in the concept. To start out I created the papers from planes in 3d max, and then messed them up to look a little more natural and messy with the noise modifier for detail variation (especially for the profile on papers) and FFD modifier to create the big shapes. I then created low polygon optimized models by using box modeling techniques wrapping the box around the high-polies. Texturing was primarily done in Substance Designer with some use of photoshop and nDo2 for normal maps for the frame of the hologram in the middle of the room. My plan for next weekend is to add some of the remaining objects such as the ventilation, door and window blinds.

Populating with more assets

I filled up the scene further this week with 2 more sets, one that I call the desktop set, basically the assets that are filling up the space on the desks and the hologram set, which is all the remainder of the assets with the screens or in other words assets that would utilize an emissive texture and and transparency.

First I built the 2 computer tower variations, further exploring the different types of metals I could make in substance by building up materials using masks and filters. Very minimal highpoly work was done for these assets, basically just the main shape for the tall tower to smooth out the corners, and all the remainder of the details waere done using nDo2. With my textures I wanted to add some sparkle into the white metal and roughness to the black metal to show a nice contrast between the two different metals. The plastic digital frame uses both sets, the plastic part is part of the desktop set and the glowing part is part of the hologram set, i tried to limit the hologram set mostly to anything that would require emissive or transparency as much as I could.

The final piece of the desktop set is the angel but statuette that can be seen in front of the main screen. For this I sculpted the highpoly in Zbrush, made a quick lowpoly in mesh lab (since the statuette was never going to be animated this was most efficient as the automatically optimized model saves a lot of time and still looks great, considering it is a pretty small object) I tried to give it a silver look by utilizing occlusion to create a mask that would darken any recessed areas.

 

Here is what the shader/ texture for the desktop set looks like:

For the hologram set I started by creating all the required normal map in nDo2 for the frame, computers and tablets. I then added the glowing elements in photoshop, and further experimented with metals for the large frame.

My next step is going to be to fill-up the scene further with the mess of books and cables, i still need to tweak these shaders some more but I think I can leave it until the polishing phase. For now I want to get the core work out there.