Works in Progress : Big Update

Haven't posted here in a while so here comes a big update. First of all I want to talk about the piece that I made for the art test. I spent some more time on it after I completed it to add some effects a polish up the textures so here it is.

Also here are some screenshots of the highpoly models I used for this scene.

Lots of practice with Zbrush, I also polypainted the models so this would be my first stylized hand painted scene. The basic process was this first day I blocked in the most of the scene in 3D max. The reason I'm saying most because for organic assets like the tree I started out directly in Zbrush because I find it easier to get organic shapes that way. After that I spent about a day per asset detailing it out in Zbrush. After that a day per asset to polypaint it for the major assets. The reason it took so long is because it was my first stylized scene and I really wanted to get it right, so I was watching a lot of tutorials, mostly from 3d motive to get it. The exception would probably be the foliage where it took probably two days to get it all done. After the bake i put it all in engine and the scene was ready for submission for the test, however not ready for my portfolio yet. I guess the main part of upgrading the textures, and I should have done it in the first place was having an nDo2 pass for additional occlusion and cavity maps and that really helped out the textures. Also I spent some more time on specular maps and polishing up the textures in Photoshop. So all that polish took a couple more days. Lastly I went deeper in UDK learned some more about materials so that my textures worked together with it. I also learned some special effects to make the scene feel alive. First thing was making the foliage move with the wind in order to make the scene feel alive. And that was achieved by using the material, specifically having wind direction and speed node and the world position node feed into the sine wave which would be interpolating wuth the reverse sine wave using a third sine wave of a different period as the alpha, after it has a few more interpolations with other sine waves to break up the movement even more, this technique uses vertex color to mask which parts will be moving. Another important note about foliage is that it uses phong lighting model within the material instead of relying just on scene lighting to give it more vibrant looks, and otherwise the backfaces come out dark. I learned the technique from the 3dmotives foliage tutorial. I used a very similar technique to animate things like cloth on the wooden gate as well as the glowing spheres on the tree. Another fairly big shader I set up was the crystal shader. But it pretty much just consists of a network of panners, rotators and a little bit of sine wave controlled by an additional mask texture where the 3 channels gave different glow effects, as well as on one of the specular channels I controlled which part of the crystal is going to glow. Another effect that I added is the fireflies, that is basically a particle effect using the orbit function in cascade. I have about 4 of those effects in the scene: main one for the entire scene, and three smaller effects around the glowing spheres to give the impression of the fireflies gather around the lights. The last effect was a fog volume I added on top of the distance fog, and I used again my effects texture that i used for the crystal because it has 2 different clouds in those channels which was perfect for creating a moving fog.

Some more work that I've done that I want to share, a concept for a little competition on one of the linked in groups:

Basically the theme was to create a keg of your liking, and that was the only guideline. Goblins always seemed really whacky to me, almost like they are drunk, so I wanted to create a keg for them. Maybe I'll model it in the future, haven't made up my mind about it yet. And some more work that I started to do. Another stylized scene, this time following my own concept so sketches down below.

Some silhouette studies of shipwrecks