Monthly Community Noob Challenge June 2014 (20)
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Welcome to the Monthly Noob Challenge June 2014 (20)!
I'm testing out a secondary prop challenge for the month!
Join our Skype group too if you want! Add me on Skype and I will add you to the group.
Skype: alexmasterofcats
You don't have to join the Skype if you don't want to though, you don't need to ask to participate or anything, just start doing it and post in this thread!
This month's concept:
Artists name is arsenixc
This month I added a secondary prop challenge if you don't have the time or skill to take on a whole scene. This is something people had been requesting, I'll see how it does.
Feel free to approach this however you like but I'd recommend making it as modular as possible to save time and keep things optimized:) It's up to you, as long as you are learning then it doesn't matter right?
Also if you want to change up the concept a bit as some people wanted feel free, interpret this concept how you want.
There are some things that I would like to point out to for newcomers,
if you only want to do a few props as best you can, go for it! This way you can work on building up to a full scene.
RULES:
Please read all the rules.
When you are just starting out making a scene can seem complicated or imposing, so break it down.
Think about how you can re-use assets, re-use textures, break it down as simple as possible plan it out, a lot of people will break it down in their own way when they start out their challenge. Gather some refs as well for different parts of the scene, maybe gather some refs and make it your own.
Take your time planning and blocking out, it will set you up for success later on.
All that matters is that you learn and give and get advice and are willing to be critiqued.
So here are the specific rules:
I'm testing out a secondary prop challenge for the month!
Join our Skype group too if you want! Add me on Skype and I will add you to the group.
Skype: alexmasterofcats
You don't have to join the Skype if you don't want to though, you don't need to ask to participate or anything, just start doing it and post in this thread!
This month's concept:
Artists name is arsenixc
This month I added a secondary prop challenge if you don't have the time or skill to take on a whole scene. This is something people had been requesting, I'll see how it does.
Feel free to approach this however you like but I'd recommend making it as modular as possible to save time and keep things optimized:) It's up to you, as long as you are learning then it doesn't matter right?
Also if you want to change up the concept a bit as some people wanted feel free, interpret this concept how you want.
There are some things that I would like to point out to for newcomers,
if you only want to do a few props as best you can, go for it! This way you can work on building up to a full scene.
RULES:
Please read all the rules.
When you are just starting out making a scene can seem complicated or imposing, so break it down.
Think about how you can re-use assets, re-use textures, break it down as simple as possible plan it out, a lot of people will break it down in their own way when they start out their challenge. Gather some refs as well for different parts of the scene, maybe gather some refs and make it your own.
Take your time planning and blocking out, it will set you up for success later on.
All that matters is that you learn and give and get advice and are willing to be critiqued.
So here are the specific rules:
Try to do one crit for every post you make, this will make for a better learning environment and help us grow as artists.
Must make your own textures, no stealing, we can't keep you from it, but the goal is to learn, even tileables, I mean you can take someone else's image and make it tileable, that's fine.
You must use a game engine OBVIOUSLY. UDK or Cryengine will probably be the most used, but feel free to use any.
You must try your best and finish as much as you can in this month.
Post what you are working on in this thread so that way it's a more centralized place for advice and critique and we don't have 1000 disjointed threads littering the forums.
Well that's about it, if you think the rules should be changed let us know.
I would strongly encourage you to go and look at other games and see how they make their assets as well as get concept art to give it your own feel, but it must stay very close to the concept, if not super close.
Please stay away from Ddo, yeah, it's great if you know what you're doing, and for a production pipeline supplement, but other than that, please don't use it. Ndo2 is allowed. This was talked about in the other thread, please don't complain.
Must make your own textures, no stealing, we can't keep you from it, but the goal is to learn, even tileables, I mean you can take someone else's image and make it tileable, that's fine.
You must use a game engine OBVIOUSLY. UDK or Cryengine will probably be the most used, but feel free to use any.
You must try your best and finish as much as you can in this month.
Post what you are working on in this thread so that way it's a more centralized place for advice and critique and we don't have 1000 disjointed threads littering the forums.
Well that's about it, if you think the rules should be changed let us know.
I would strongly encourage you to go and look at other games and see how they make their assets as well as get concept art to give it your own feel, but it must stay very close to the concept, if not super close.
Please stay away from Ddo, yeah, it's great if you know what you're doing, and for a production pipeline supplement, but other than that, please don't use it. Ndo2 is allowed. This was talked about in the other thread, please don't complain.
Replies
I am very interested in environment modeling so I want to try to figure out what I should be looking at for polycount in my scenes
I want to make it low enough for a playable level, so as low as I can go without losing quality.
I kinda wanna do the prop too
Might use this to practice Substance Designer/Painter as well for shiggles.
problem??
I blocked the concept art out using 3ds max's Pespective match tool and projected the concept art onto the blockout mesh:
Onto the highpolies for some of these things, and some low ploy vertex chamfered, nDo'ing for others.
So far I've started by gathering some references. :icon15:
CONFIRMED: 2010's Halo Video Game will have forerunner fusion coils.
Someone get Kotaku on the line!
First time using UE4 for a project and loving it so far. Using this challenge to get used to the engine so things are going to be a bit slow at times but going be a lot of fun messing around with some of the new features & improvements.
Game on
Wanna go?
As long as it ain't too slow?
Ahh ... thank you
I'm gonna have to take that perspective match tool on a date...
Also i might jump in this one, probably for the prop
Here's some tips
Since this concept artist is brilliant and obviously started from a 3D sketch, you can pretty much align everything perfectly (as you can see.)
The way I have it set up is I have a Camera Map (WSM) modifier on top of every mesh object's stack.
If you naively set this up as a 100% self-illuminated diffuse texture, this can lead to some bleed through on occluded areas:
Notice the Bunk bed bleeding onto the lockers and the last locker bleeding over into the corner wall.
3Ds Max does not support Z-Buffer occlusion in the viewport, so this is bound to happen.
My solution? Set it to a diffuse texture like normal, without any self illumination, create a target spot light and use the align tool to match it up with the camera you create when you are setting up the Perspective Match tool and set it to rectangular projection (there is even a slot to match the aspect ratio to your concept art picture), turn off light decay and set it to full bright 255,255,255 white and enable a high resolution shadow map for it in the viewport.
Now you got occlusion masking:
You can draw out the shape of the room in your perspective matched viewport very quickly, flip the polygons and turn on backface culling in the viewport.
All the props are easily sketched out with some basic spotting and perpective lines (it would be nice to have vanshing point lines radiating out, but IDK if that's possible)
For things like powerlines on the walls, you can turn on autogrid and literally sketch splines onto the walls, as though you are tracing a wall mural from a projector. its really satisfying.
Also nice, in 3ds 2015, you can enable viewport antialiasing (although the resolve is pretty meh, even at 8x) and if you got enough VRAM (I got 4gb) you can crank up them viewport texture and shadow resolutions up to 4K or 8K by going into viewport settings. Pretty important for perspective match as the default resolution is abysmal for viewport backgrounds and the shadow resolution is even worse at 512^2.
Also crucial for good camera projections is tesselation. My wireframes aren't so dense for no reason, they have to be pretty dense for the camera projected concept art to not come out skewed, so on every object I have an instanced tesselation modifier (right below the camera map WSM). I work on a much lower poly mesh.
The coolest part of this is that with the projection you can pretty much see exactly what the final model should come out looking like since all the small details are projected onto their mesh exactly where they need to be cut in.
Its seriously awesome.
I think all environment concept artists should block their stuff out in 3d and once they paint all the details, it would be nice if they had a quick way to project it back onto the blockout scene to handoff directly to the artist, it would save so much time.
It would be cool if all concept art would just be 3d paint overs of low poly blockouts in mudbox/zbrush/mari.
Now, if anyone knows whether its possible to export the camera location into Unreal Engine 4 through FBX or something, that would be nice for presenting the finished environment when I get it all modeled and textured.
I'm thinking of doing a video where I fade from the concept art seamlessly into the in engine enviro...
You do not need to update max
When the outer sides are fitting, the inner doesn´t and so on. It´s no complaining, I just wish there would be a clean front view instead of a 3/4 view
So is it supposed to be a bit more "Freestyle" modeled?
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I'd be down to G+ some tonight. Been meaning to get a start on that piece, would be fun to have someone to work through the kinks with.
PM me if you want to, i'll be off work around 6pm pacific today, would be down to jump on right after.
Really gives me a hard time with all those pieces..
If you're talking about my pics, like I mentioned in my post, the extra tessellation is because of the projection. I tessellate the blockout in order to avoid skewed textures.
However, the entirety of that mesh is simply a blockout designed to get a rough idea of what the final result will be. None of what you see there will actually show up in the final enviro.
Thanks a lot for that great post ! i will definitely try that technique myself, but i wonder if its possible to bake the texture projection down to the final lowpoly and use it as a guide or base for texturing ? Do you know if that works ?
Yup, you can definitely bake out all the projection out to unique UV space and even paint in the occluded gaps with Mudbox or MARI. In fact, this is becoming a pretty typical workflow for CG Films.
However, with video game engines, I don't really see it as being a viable workflow, at least without some workflow specific engine and tools (like IDTech/megatextures).
The scene as I have it now is already a pretty good guide for modeling, and the way I think I will be doing my texturing will probably incorporate more modularity. maybe even UE4's layered materials.
I'm starting the environment by making it all "high poly" first, then later I will clone everything and "optimize" the cloned meshes down to "low poly" details. This way, not only am I planning to bake the high poly details onto the low poly meshes, but it works for me to think 90% - 99% creative (as oppose to technical) to get past those "empty screen intimidations" at the start of a new project. Some people can start right away with a low poly scene. I've tried it multiple times and it slows me down because I'm thinking too much about tri-counts instead of good art. As long as the end result is a low poly scene in a game editor. So, my first posts of images to come will be of a high poly scene, even though the end goal is a low poly game.
My two cents.
@Waltz Yes, assuming you want to create a game ready piece. I think you've got a really good start on it though. What I'd look out for is how the angle changes thick/thinness of the fusion coil. If you notice the 3/4th view looks a lot thinner than the side view which is a good indication of how thick and meaty the outer plating portion of the model is.
Got the big shapes down, thanks to akh, the script worked perfectly
I'd love the challenge!
Dude, get manic time. It will record time spent in each program and even fetch the name of the file your working on inside the program. It can export to excel if you need.
How did you manage to do so using units that will make sense in your game engine? I guess I'm missing something, it's late and can't compute.