The BRAWL² Tournament Challenge has been announced!
It starts May 12, and ends Oct 17. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
It starts May 12, and ends Oct 17. Let's see what you got!
https://polycount.com/discussion/237047/the-brawl²-tournament
Best Of
Re: What Are You Working On? (3D) 2026
Super excited to share my recent personal project: Maple Trees Diorama. The goal of this diorama was to practice creating the maple trees in TreeIt. I also wanted to experiment with sculpting the tiling bark material and modular bark pieces using Nomad Sculpt, and then texturing them in Substance Painter.
More screenshots and breakdowns in Artstation:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/EzRY9q?notification_id=7815032278&commentId=9286101
More screenshots and breakdowns in Artstation:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/EzRY9q?notification_id=7815032278&commentId=9286101
tythomas063
4 ·
Re: Sketchbook: Celosia
An interlude to the interlude: I got Unreal Engine up and running in the new computer and found... not the latest version of the character project, but almost it. The initial imports are mostly to try and sync the colors I get in Blender with how they look in Unreal. UE is way too aggressive with the contrast and what's a light touch of detail in one program reads too splotchy there.
This is the same skin texture I showed before, after a polishing and detailing pass. There's some contribution of cavity maps and procedural noise added to just good old hand painting.
Can you see the little depression where the nostril meets the cheek? I thought I made a mistake when transferring the UVs from the scan to this head, but this and other oddities in the nose area, eyes and ears are in the original textures. Now I saw this I keep finding them in work of other people too. 😂 I'm very tempted to scratch most of the scan and just sculpt the pores in problem areas now I got hang of making brushes for Blender. I had to erase and sculpt a fair number of areas already because the pores were too large, or the scan didn't have enough definition.
And yes, characters are getting silly caps while they're hairless now because the not-scalp skin creeps me out.
I also accidentally created a sort of broken layers of snow/ground geo nodes generator this week. I just wanted a nice base for sculpting something for work but it looks better than I expected. I'm really enjoying mixing nodes with sculpting.
This is the same skin texture I showed before, after a polishing and detailing pass. There's some contribution of cavity maps and procedural noise added to just good old hand painting.
Can you see the little depression where the nostril meets the cheek? I thought I made a mistake when transferring the UVs from the scan to this head, but this and other oddities in the nose area, eyes and ears are in the original textures. Now I saw this I keep finding them in work of other people too. 😂 I'm very tempted to scratch most of the scan and just sculpt the pores in problem areas now I got hang of making brushes for Blender. I had to erase and sculpt a fair number of areas already because the pores were too large, or the scan didn't have enough definition.
And yes, characters are getting silly caps while they're hairless now because the not-scalp skin creeps me out.
I also accidentally created a sort of broken layers of snow/ground geo nodes generator this week. I just wanted a nice base for sculpting something for work but it looks better than I expected. I'm really enjoying mixing nodes with sculpting.
Celosia
3 ·
Re: How to solve this baking issue?
The issue with this is, too little texture space to compensate for too much shading. Basically you have very strong low poly shading going on. The normalmap tries to compensate but there aren't enough pixels (or bit depth 16bit vs 8bit) to cover it.
You have 2 options basically
Upping the texture resolution and possibly bit depth
Or
Reducing the lowpoly shading
I would opt for the latter, get rid of the long thin triangles. Use some more geo or custom normals to flatten what the normal map has to compensate
Just look at the lowpoly without any normalmap, all that strong smooth shading is what the normalmap needs to carry, help it a bit
You have 2 options basically
Upping the texture resolution and possibly bit depth
Or
Reducing the lowpoly shading
I would opt for the latter, get rid of the long thin triangles. Use some more geo or custom normals to flatten what the normal map has to compensate
Just look at the lowpoly without any normalmap, all that strong smooth shading is what the normalmap needs to carry, help it a bit
Neox
3 ·
Re: My works in Blender for 2025
Wow these are really cool! Love the stylization on these, and the mix of 3d and lighting with hand-painted details.
I would love to see more thoughtful attention to variable line widths. You have some different widths, but each line is the same width along its length. Here's a nice example of how variable line weights improves things:
The other thing I'd love to see more of, is the color treatment you made on the tape player. Love the brush strokes! How cool would it be to see that on your environment pieces?! You have some of it going on, but it's really subtle. How far can you push it?
I would love to see more thoughtful attention to variable line widths. You have some different widths, but each line is the same width along its length. Here's a nice example of how variable line weights improves things:
The other thing I'd love to see more of, is the color treatment you made on the tape player. Love the brush strokes! How cool would it be to see that on your environment pieces?! You have some of it going on, but it's really subtle. How far can you push it?
Eric Chadwick
3 ·
Re: What Are You Working On? (3D) 2026
Finished my Vinyl Jukebox! Although I can see a lot of mistakes, it is one of my first official 3D models so I am just glad to actually finish it 
robertvovk
3 ·
Re: How to solve this baking issue?
You've been a huge help. That was indeed the reason, and the issue has been resolved. Thank you so much.Neox said:The issue with this is, too little texture space to compensate for too much shading. Basically you have very strong low poly shading going on. The normalmap tries to compensate but there aren't enough pixels (or bit depth 16bit vs 8bit) to cover it.
You have 2 options basically
Upping the texture resolution and possibly bit depth
Or
Reducing the lowpoly shading
I would opt for the latter, get rid of the long thin triangles. Use some more geo or custom normals to flatten what the normal map has to compensate
Just look at the lowpoly without any normalmap, all that strong smooth shading is what the normalmap needs to carry, help it a bit
WangQiang
3 ·
Re: Don't Use AI for Replies
I like this policy. One of the biggest things Polycount has going for it, to me, is the fact that you can come here and talk to people who know their shit. They can talk about industry stuff as someone in it who's experiencing it, talk about technical stuff because they actually work with it, give feedback on artistic stuff because they're artists, etc. AI, on the other hand, doesn't know shit and will confidently bullshit you with useless crap that won't lead you to become better at anything. It's basically worthless. And that aside, it's just too sad to replace actual communication between people with soulless robots.
This is definitely the right move.
Rima
3 ·
Re: The Bi-Monthly Environment Art Challenge | November - December (99)
started on this one a while ago but didn't have much time to finish, hope to do so soon (not 6 months later)
v13r1
3 ·
Re: The Bi-Monthly Environment Art Challenge | November - December (99)
Hey everyone!
Wanted to start out by saying what fantastic work everyone has done on this challenge. It's been incredible to see not just the progress being made but the process breakdowns that are so beneficial for more junior and senior artists alike. There are definitely some techniques I've picked up that I hope to try sometime in the future.
Hope you all had a stellar holiday break as well with great company and wonderful food. With the new year upon us it's also time to announce that the 100th edition of the Bi-Monthly Environment Art Challenge has officially begun!
Pinkfox
3 ·
Re: The Bi-Monthly Environment Art Challenge | January - February (100)
Managed to get the general base down for the environment and I wanna tackle the remaining parts in ZBrush. It's come out to around 40k polys with even edgeflow and support loops on most assets which could be dropped significantly if required. Considering however that higher detail will be baked and that modern specs allow for far higher poly's I think it'll be okay. Furthermore I plan to bake the scattered rocks and tiles onto the ground plane so that will lower the total poly count by 11k. 
ThomCorfield
4 ·