Current WIP project - Overgrown Mansion

For a long time I've been trying to use Substance more for my work but I was having hard time getting into it. I always felt that Substance was taking longer than other workflows that I'm used to. But seeing all the awesome work ppl were doing with it I was feeling like I was missing out on something.

But for this project I decided I was gonna dive deep into Substance and (hopefully) get some good stuff done. And yeah, now it really feels that I broke the block and Substance is really great once you get into it. Like that wasn’t obvious :d

Most of the textures here are done with substance, except for foliage. I still have hard time with base heightmaps so I went for sculpts. Basically just for the major forms, like wood plans and bricks, I just really wanted to have that control over details, like sculpting out that one corner on that one brick just because it feels like that corner should be broken off. And that it still a great workflow in my opinion, hand sculpting out the big shapes that define the texture and putting details with subtance. Color/roughness/normal is all Substance though.

Feels good finally getting good grip over Substance Designer, definitely sticking with it from now on.

Swamp Finished

Wow, I'm late for this :d

Anyways, Swamp has been finished for couple of weeks now, it's available in Unreal Marketplace here"

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/modular-swamp-shack-pack

Now I (finally) started getting my portfolio together in Artstation, Swamp being the first piece I decided to update it a little bit. I polished up some rougher bits, added extra little details for some shots and removed couple assets, mostly trees for better composition. Added background mountains as topping on a cake. They aren't part of the Swamp Pack in Marketplace though, those come from separate project I did.

Quite happy how this turned out, I spent so much time trying to grab good high ress images as I couln't use Screenshot tool in UE4 since it doesn't use Temporal AA, which is essential for water to look correct. Had to play a lot with Supersampling and whatnot, which made things run at like 1 FPS. And after all that work I found out that Artstation downsamples everything to 1080p anyway, so screwed me a little bit. Got all those high resses anyway, maybe will upload somewhere separately. 

All in all, good stuff I think, spent quite a bitg of effort on this and I think this might be my best piece yet.

Swamp almost finished!

So as I was working towards wrapping the project I kind of realized that it was going pretty smooth so why not do more with this? Therefore I started expanding the map, essentially just using existing assets to create more houses and whatnot and to add extra polish and details.

I started adding extra shacks and modifying landscape while still maintaining connectivity to existing map. Started experimenting with some unique assets like water wheel, windmill, running river (that powers water wheel). Dynamic elements like that really brings environments to life and they tend to be rather easy to do. I mean all water wheel needs to do is spin, which is something you can do with 3 clicks in Unreal, just and Rotator component to dynamic mesh. Same with windmill, you just have to center out the pivot of whatever actor is supposed to rotate as it will rotate arround the axis of that pivot. Did same thing with gears that the water wheel spins. 

Hate the fact that SSR is so reliant on Temporal AA, as TAA isn't getting rendered in high-ress shots, therefore reflections look subpar. Might have to solve this with planar reflections and cubemaps. Tried running it in supersampled resolution but FPS drops like crazy, very hard to take screenshots when it's running at like 1-2 FPS.

But anyways, quite happy how things are turning out. Really liked the workflows in here, stayed very modular from very start while making it look as un-modular as possible, did some fine foliage which was always a challenge for me and managed to get some really cool colors going without it looking noisy as hell. Or maybe I'm wrong and it actually looks like crap but I like it nevertheless :D

Should wrap this up soon, next update should be the last.

Swamp WIP #3

Things looking good. Lots of small additions and tweaks.

Got in some extra assets like proper cloth/net, ropes and metal parts. Set up some vertex shaders to paint wetness/moss on wood and moss/wind on ropes. All painting done inside UE with paint tool. 

Also added mask on wood that enables wood to have paint layer on top of it. It uses bitmap mask for that, I got 3 of them in Photoshop with color range selection, just playing with intensities and whatnot. Idea was to use base diffuse and get correct information from it to then overlay that mask inside editor so that paint layer and diffuse underneath blend perfectly, creating convincing look. As the pain layer is just a mask, you can change it in material instance, you can choose from 3 different masks (all gray packed into single texture) and tweak other parameters like color, roughness, spec etc.

Also tried out new LoD system that came out with 4.14, it's fantastic. Basically like Simplygon but free and works within the engine. Very fast and produces great results, frankly cannot ask more from it (maybe some kind of billboard generation for things like trees, the way Speedtree does it, but that a little crazy I think).

Was a little worried that trees might look too good as they are done entirely by hand and there are issues with shading, but in the end I think results are great.

Swamp WIP #2

Some more updates: got some water in, tweaked lighting quite a bit, did bunch of extra assets.

Lighting really needed tweaking in my opinion, results that I have now are much better than before I think. Some very light color corrections happening too but nothing major.

Water is quite early on too but most of the features are in. Translucent with depth fade, picking up SSR, might try planar reflections and see how those work. There is some nice movement on the dirt on the water, quite happy about that. Strangely enough, giving water certain metalicity value (0.5 for me there) makes the water look much more, well, water-y. Not exactly sure why that’s the case ‘cause I believe every water shader I’ve seen doesn’t use metalicity in any way, but without it it just looks like plastic. Interesting.

Did some cloth, looks alright, might do some more as props and whatnot.

Still a long way to go, but it’s shaping up nicely, more updates in coming days!

Swamp WIP

Things are shaping up nicely. Got a good pipeline for making meshes so keeping things as modular as possible, using combination of unique and tillable textures. Made a simple Landscape to get basic layout down.

Still need to do the water surface and get some better lighting/PP setup.

New year brings new things

Well damn. 2016 is behind us. Hello 2017?

What's better way to start a new year other than by doing new cool stuff. This is something I've been working on for some time:

Kind of a swamp scene. Wooden buildings, all modular, some foliage like trees, grass and moss, some water flowing around (it's a swamp after all). Pretty early shot, still a long way to go but basics are down and looking fine. Was pain to get foliage looking right, especially grass. Had to dissect Epic's shader for it, still not fully understand it but hey, it looks good.

Want to make this all foggy and wet, will see how it goes, more updates soon.

Ruins and whatnot

I've been quite busy, working on bunch of different things. Overgrown Ruins are finished and up in Unreal Marketplace, here is a link:

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/overgrown-ruins

Finished another pack in the meantime too, more fancy statues. Better and generally more polished than previous pack too, imo. I was using cavity bakes for ambient occlusion in Unreal but actual ambient occlusion bakes look so much better, I don't even know why I decided to use cavity bakes for that, silly me. Slightly improved material, but still staying fairly basic. Optimized pipeline to create cloth and hair for statues as hassle free as possible, just gotta plan couple things ahead before doing actual sculpting, like making sure that there won't be any voids inside cloth folds or hair, and if those seem unavoidable there are couple of ways to deal with them too. Here are some shots of the new statues:

Quite liking how these turned out. Couple of close-ups to show off details, they really hold up well. Those AO maps really doing their job here too, they are somewhat exaggerated in post processing but hey, I'll call it artistic touch.

Unreal work

Before I started doing this project, had to think for some time how I want to approach texturing. To be honest, I consider texturing my weakest discipline therefore whenever possible I try to plan texturing out ASAP. With this project I decided to focus on making good sculpts, extract relevant data (normal maps, AO, cavities, other potential masks) and use that to blend bunch of stuff inside shader.

I’ve used this approach before and always had good results with it. I’ve been inspecting Epic’s work on Unreal Tournament and they doing fantastic job with it, lots of great things to learn from there. The approach they quite often use is the one I’m using for this project too, except that they tend to have even more masks and stuff than I do.

So here is the breakdown – I got my masks in what I call mixmap, it’s a texture with a different mask in each channel. I’m sure you’ve seen that stuff before. I got my AO in red channel, cavity in green and edge highlights in blue. Rendered AO and Normal in Xnormal, then passed the rendered normal map into Knald to get cavity and edge highlights (or concavity and convexity info). Used Knald most because it’s so much faster than rendering this stuff from high poly, even AO is pretty slow, but it’s much more accurate than from Knald. I can live with cavity/edge inaccuracies since I’ll be using them as simple masks, but I want AO to be good because I’ll plug that directly into AO slot in Unreal shader. So those are the maps so far – AO, Normal, Cavity, Edge highlights. Here is my shader noodle soup:

I reckon the screenshot itself isn’t much of a help for someone who wants to learn some stuff so I’m thinking of releasing small project with just one asset, fully textured and with the shader done. I can’t release whole project because it’s supposed to go to Unreal Marketplace but I guess one asset wouldn’t hurt things and could prove helpful to some folks.

So here is how the assets look so far, some basic lighting/PP done too:

There also is the leaking stuff. For that I’m using separate (3^rd) UV channel, basically projected from front. The leak texture is horizontally tiling, you can increase/decrease tiling amount. Since its using projected UV map that took 5 secs to make there is some unwanted, dare I say, leaking here and there. Now I was considering several ways to get rid of that and the easiest in my opinion is vertex painting. Leak texture is lerped on top of everything else based on red vertex channel. So you can go to mesh paint mode and manually mask out areas you don’t want the leaking to be at.

Will see how things will go from there, there might be some problems with this lighting/PP setup in the long run but nothing that can’t be solved.

Sculpts, sculpts everywhere!

Almost forgot how much time sculpting can take. Perhaps not the sculpting itself but the process of turning sculpt into game ready asset. This can quickly become into tedious crap that will slow creation process down so my main concern for a long time was to speed up low-polying/unwrapping/baking and while at the moment it’s fastest it’s ever I still sometimes feel like I’m hamstrung by loads of technical steps I have to take for things to be at highest quality possible.

Well, while this might sound like a rant, but I still like sculpting. Might like it less when I do it for a zillionth time but it still feels rewarding once you complete something that both looks good and is optimized and “properly” done.

Here are some sculpts I recently did:

Last one is a quickie I did in over an hour. Fairly simple one but I like it, some kind of rock/rubble thing. There are couple more sculpts but feel like these are most worth sharing. Next step - bringing all of this into Unreal, see ya in couple of days!

Mountains are done

Finished the mountains quite some time ago, but some technical problems got in the way. My GPU crashed and burned so I had to stick with integrated GPU which meant that performance on quite a bit of stuff was rather low. Interestingly enough, performance on Headus UV layout was tragic on integrated GPU, pretty much unworkable.

But anyways, finished the mountain meshes, here are some shots.

Learned quite a few things in World Machine, but still feels like there is a long way to go before I can say that I’m good with it. Workflow is much more different that I’m used to, but it does make sense once you get past the initial barrier. Still haven’t come up with a good pipeline on how to tweak results out of WM, like adding specific features in, say, Zbrush once you done in WM. Tweaking and sculpting the heightmap isn’t really an issue but if after you sculpt it and you think of plugging it back to WM for texturing it gets really fiddly. For texturing you need certain information that heightmap alone simply doesn’t provide, although there are workarounds for that but in the end they still don’t provide great results. So at least for now, I got to be quite careful when tweaking heightmap afterwards, since I’m not doing textures afterwards but rather have to be sure that my tweaks work well with existing texture.

I’m sure there are ways to get past this but my tiny brain can’t figure it out. Yet. 

High are the Mountains

So I’ve been working on fairly low-poly background mountain meshes meshes to put in Unreal Marketplace. Initial plan was to go somewhat more fantasy oriented route, but it proved to be rather hard to pull off, had to scrap and redo a lot of work to achieve something I would like and in the end it’s not exactly fantasy, just a bit more stylized. Here are some latest screenshots:   

 

First screen is one mesh, second screen is another. In each of them just a single mesh was used to create the scene. One of the goals was to create meshes that would work great from multiple angles and would look different. World Machine is essential to create stuff like this, it simulates many complex geological phenomena that would be crazy hard to sculpt and texture manually.

My workflow was to create a quick sculpt in Zbrush that has main features, maybe even some of the smaller ones, render out heightmap, plug in into world machine and let it work with it. I much prefer manually sculpting the terrain rather than using tools or noise inside WM, because you have so much more control in Zbrush and it’s also very quick and easy to get heightmap out of ZB and into WM.

Here is a link to Unreal WIP forums:
https://forums.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?119339-Background-mountains&p=576398

Rooftops up in the Marketplace!

A bit late but you can get Futuristic top-down rooftop pack in Unreal Marketplace now:

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/futuristic-modular-top-down-rooftop

If you like what you see, grab it!

Rooftops are finished!

So we expanded the area quite a bit, added some extra assets, created additional bridges/platforms, added background city. While I created most of the playable stuff, Tomas did the background city. Looks great, very modular, can be used by variety of different projects, not only top-downs.

Quite happy how it all turned out. Nice approach for modeling the assets and overall visual style, will use it for future projects. Current scene relies very heavily on post processing to get that distinct look going, but that’s hardly a downside. Scene is fairly low on clutter but still has that dirty, grimy look and that was pretty much the goal. Most of the details are on the background, not to clutter up the playable space and not to obstruct navigation.

This asset pack should be hitting Unreal Marketplace soon, I’ll post a link once it’s up. Here are some new screenshots:

Some shiny rooftops

Been working on these assets that we intend to sell on Unreal Markeplace as an asset pack. This is essentially a more or less finished short map for a project that quickly hit the dirt and was scrapped, though stuff that was done for it was fairly good quality.

It has been gathering dust in HDD for quite some time, so not wanting it to go to waste decided to polish it up, add some extra assets and put it on marketplace thinking that maybe some other people can find use for it. It's for a top-down game so intended to be viewed Diablo style.

Gotta say, I’m quite liking what we ended up with. We are using modular approach to asset creation, similar to what games like Mass Effect and Deus Ex were doing. Almost all the assets are using same textures, there is an atlas that has defining features, like lines, grates etc. (I’m sure if you’ve researched similar art style you’ve seen this stuff before) and on top it, projected on lightmap UV, there is some kind of unifying noise like dents and dirt for concrete (from tiling normal map), scratches for metal and so on (from tiling roughness).

And of course to bring this all together is strong lighting. There are a lot of color correction happening in post processing to make the scene look pretty stylized and dark and then using strong lighting to light up areas that would be important for gameplay. Almost all of the lights are static (and therefore prebaked), couple of them are stationary.

This is still WIP and there is extended area and background city that Tomas Narbutaitis is making so there is still quite a bit of room for improvement.

Statues up and running!

So the pack got submitted and went online with latest marketplace update. You can check it out here:

https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/greek-statue-pack-vol

And the statues are finished

So the statues are finished and submitted to marketplace, they should go online in couple of weeks. Overall I’m happy how they turned to be and I think they are looking pretty good while staying in acceptable polycount and using acceptable texture sizes. Each statue has baked out, unique normal and cavity maps and also use tiling detail normal and tiling diffuse. Inverted cavity map is used in shader as a mask to give color variation in, well, cavities. I reckoned using tillable diffuse would get the job done and it seems it does in this case. I tried making a dedicated texture map but it I don’t think it was worth it in the long run because it wasn’t that much of an improvement upon tillable texture and even at 4k resolution it just doesn’t hold up to the texture crispiness you can get from tillable one.

On a side note, seems like lots of tech talk for something that is supposed to represent pure art but the tech side I think is rather important for marketplace items, because as I have faced myself you can really get bogged down in technical difficulties when you are working on project that is using large number of pre bought assets. So in this case we wanted to make sure all the problems are solved and assets are as “drag and drop” friendly. 

More work on statues

Quite a few improvements and tweaks for the statues – more details, expanded materials, several material setups. For materials decided to go for a fairly modular approach – each statue has cavity and normal maps rendered out in Xnormal. Cavity map is used for Ambient Occlusion since I just felt it did a better job than Ambient Occlusion maps I tried and more importantly I use inverted cavity map to mask out areas for colorization. Materials have a ton of exposed parameters to customize almost anything so you can do quite a bit of stuff with it. Same materials used for metallic materials, just a couple of expressions toggled off that need to be turned on to get proper metallic look, like usage of separate roughness texture.

First pancake always is...

I have been working on some statues for an asset pack that we plan to put in Unreal Marketplace. Seeing as there were no asset packs that focused on statues specifically, we decided to give it a shot. What I personally wanted to do was to develop pipeline that would allow fast asset creation and iteration without sacrificing quality.

Here are some early screenshots. Assets are in low poly, in engine, default lighting setup and very basic shaders. Posed anatomy models provided by Tomas Narbutaitis.

Initial plan was to make 3 statues with 3 damage variants, making it 9 statues in total. As the work went on it changed to 4 statues with 2 damage variants, 8 statues in total. Idea behind the first approach was that once you had properly done base sculpt, making damaged variants would be rather fast and easy. In the end it didn’t prove to be much faster than actually making completely new assets from scratch. You still had to spend pretty much the same amount of time low-polying, unwrapping UVs etc., “damaging” pristine statues still took quite a bit of time as you had to be quite careful to make things looks natural.

So that changed to 4 statues instead. I felt that this would probably be more beneficial in the end because you would get more varied assets in the end. While I think work could have gone faster (I spent over 2 weeks) overall I think it turned out to be pretty good. Good models, good textures, not many roadblocks so in the end everyone is happy.