Hey all, just wanna post some things I've been working on recently. I've taken Polycounters advice and switched gears towards prop modeling which will hopefully make my portfolio a little more professional in the long run.

Heres what I'm working on now:





This is the high res version of a sci fi - Quake-ish inspired door, trying desperately to get my high poly modeling up to par. I'm not to comfortable with the sci fi theme at the moment, so its gonna take a couple of models to hopefully get a good ground on things.

I've been working on a collection of next gen RTS type models as well, and I'm debating on including this into the collection (making a fairly low poly base mesh for the door).

Here's what I've done in the past couple days (during night when I have some free time).





Again, it's fairly basic stuff but I'm trying my hardest to get away from the "cartoony" style that I've been told I have, and start focusing more on realism... I hope its working.

I'm gonna make a couple more smaller props (sharing some sort of construction, war zone type theme) then move onto some focal point props such as a Crane and something else to fill out a scene.

I hope I'm at least going in the right direction, and would appreciate any crits or and tips This work is all leading to a new, more professional portfolio for myself (thats the goal anyways).

Thanks again

yo jason nice quakish door you have there !! about the road block i only have something to add, dont forget that cars keep bumping into it, and it gets all sort of damage, not only dirt and bullets, right now it seems it came out clean and someone threw a bucket of filth and shot it in 5 seconds , add tire marks , and more dirt from the part that contacts the ground etc, also the broken part could have something to indicate what broke it, was it a rocket ? then burn some rock around it , was a car ? add some car paint smeared in the stone , etc etc...

Looks like your making progress keep it up. I was wondering how you did your fence obviously an alpha/opacity but one of my instructors informed us that it was more cost effective resource wise to have two planes on top of each other with the normal’s facing opposite directions rather than having a double sided alpha. Something to do with the engine doing a double texture call for the double sided alpha.

The progressively damaged prop is interesting. The door looks like it’s coming along nicely. Just keep pushing the detail. It seems like adding small elements that repeat and feel machine made helps the sci-fi feel. Keep posting your progress I would like to see where this goes.

Also what does quackish mean? Is that supposed to be Quake-ish? Or am I just really confused?

Jason nice to see working on your art, Im actually surprised you have not landed a gig yet as your art is actually very nice im loving the props so far, im no feeling the sci-fi door i think you should focus on the props before t you tackle the sci-fi realm best of luck to you my friend.

Ha ha yah quackish means - Quake-ish, apparently I don't know how to spell :P I've been looking over Paul Richards artwork (its unbelievable how talented that guy is) and i feel like it'll help my sub d modeling a lot if I focus on the sci fi theme... machine built type stuff.

Hey Armanguy I'm doing the door more so for training... like Johny said before, i really need to work on my high poly modeling, so that's what I'm doing. More props will be coming along shortly as well, I have to get better at my speed and this is also a good way of doing so... its fun as well so thats always a good thing.

Johny I appreciate all the helps you've given my buddy, I'll make sure I fix up the textures, should there be tire marks though... I know there are bad drivers, but a big concrete block should tell em they should stop :P

Oh and thanks for the compliment Armanguy, but I don't feel like I'm ready for a job.. not yet anyways, i know I can push myself more to produce quality work... I'm hoping these are the first steps to that

More updates coming Thanks again all for the fast response

Hey Wilex, sorry I didn't respond.

What I used there is a double sided material (you can make it double sided in the material editor).

I was told the same thing from my teacher as well... first time I used an alpha in Unreal engine I used 2 planes instead (so you can see front and back). But then he told me you can just make the material double sided.

Now from what i read from before is that with the double sided material, supposedly the lights react differently, but from what I've seen it hasn't effected it at all.

The other thing I was told was instead of using opacity, use masked instead because it takes up less resources... thats more so if its a huge scene.

Ahh interesting, i heard the lighting issue had to do with opacity maps with gradients in them, probably used for plants or something of the sort, not lighting correctly. So then is a opacity mask less costly than having 2 more tri's on your model? I guess that’s why they have lead artist and technical directors to keep all this stuff straight for productions.

I agree with Johny on the center dividers though, add in some tire and paint smears. Also you might want to brighten up some of the hues on the piece overall. Just personal taste but when you darken the grunge too much it gets this odd syndrome where all your stuff looks brown or grey. Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw covers this in his review of Clive Barker's Jericho. It's almost like an epidemic in next gen games.

Here's a link if you haven't seen the review.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/vide...arkers-Jericho

Alirghty some more updates.

I'm actually really happy (and surprised) the normal turned out so well, took alittle while to work things out but I'm pretty happy with it, just gotta smooth out some issues with the normal map file and it should be good to go.



I'll be doing the texture tomorrow, and hopefully it turns out ok. I'm gonna stay with the same construction theme as other props... and once thats done I'll continue on with some smaller props, then onto the crane.

Oh and the map size is 1 - 512.

Alrighty some newer stuff to post.



So this was inspired by one of the Too Human screenshots (http://xbox360media.ign.com/xbox360/...1024926584.jpg) of the cool holographic light things... and decided to make it into some sort of holographic pillar :P So this is the high so far... I'm really starting to enjoy the high res model, I mean the stuff I'm doing now is pretty basic, but I'm still enjoying it.

So yuh thats what I will be working on for now, get the in-game model done as well and continue on.

I've decided to do a couple more models inspired by Too Human (or try and replicate a model from Too Human) since that's one of the companies I would really like to work for hopefully in the near future... and if Too Human is a success (which I think it will be) its said the company will go from 180 to 1500 in the coming years, so if anyone like what Silicon Knights is doing... you should apply there in the near future

Thanks all

good stuff jason keep it up.

More of an update.

I hate how maya handles normals though...

Just a bit of an update.... quick render from Maya.

It looks pretty. I looks like you may have some smoothing errors.

Give your high detail meshes a pass in zbrush or mudbox (some sculpting tool) to get some dents, dings and scratches into it to give it history and scale.

You may get better results previewing in UT3, those (first post) look great.

You're on the right track, keep it up and it'll all come together. IM me if you ever want me to take a closer look.

Originally Posted by cholden

It looks pretty. I looks like you may have some smoothing errors.

I hope I'm not thread jacking but I wanted to ask a newbie question, where are the smoothing errors in Jason's prop? what do they look like? I'm also using Maya and from what I can tell you can either make edges hard or soft and thats about it?

Looks nice I like your props and doors.

Alex

Cool!

Nice work, Now you just need hologram to put in there.

alexk, the smoothing errors are the areas on his model that have odd shadows or shadows that don't obey the lighting. Usually if you go to normals>Set Normal Angle and set it to 30 or 35 it will balance them out fairly nicely but some times you have to go in by hand and set them to what you need.

I always thought it was because I set my smoothing to all soft :P

I'll try and fix that later on, but it reacts differently in unreal though...

I had an instructor that would set all his normals to the same group he said that he just painted in his edges hard. He was a lead character artist for Star Craft Ghost. Maybe thats just for characters though. The instructor i have now always adjusts them according to the surface and how he wants the edges to feel. He primarily works on environments and props.

I'm not sure what the rule of thumb is but i tweak mine for the surface. Setting them all to soft or to the same group gives odd lighting results in my opinion. I guess as long as your final render comes out the way you want it doesn't matter.

Good point Wilex... i heard the same rule for characters, and now that I think about it... setting your smooth groups for environments pieces makes more sense.. because its not organic, and if i have those nice hard edges... they should use separate smooth groups for it.

Or i could be wrong... I'll try it out. Update will be coming soon

Looking good man! Keep up the good work.

Sorry for the lack of updates all Busy weekend, saw Indiana (Aliens... yuh) and then saw Matt Good... awesome show.

Anyways, I'm getting closer and closer, just need to figure out a cool design for the holographic poster type thing, and I should be ready to move on. This taking way longer then I wanted.

Ease up on the worn / scratched edges. Its way too uniform right now. Create a little more contrast w/ the spec map and work on your emissive a bit. The light is all the same color / intensity. Try making the source brighter and have it get darker towards the edges. Can probably turn the multiply down on that a bit too.

Looking good.

yeah so far it doesnt seem you have putted any thought on the texture, like "hey what if it got just scratched only on the edges and no sign of ground contact or other type of grime?" ;) but i reealy like the highpolys, do more of these man.

Hey all, sorry for the lack of updates... I've actually been busy setting up a new online portfolio, you can check it out at www.JasonLavoie.net.



Also I fixed up the texture (hopefully) so it doesn't look as scratched up... and I tried to be a bit smarter where to place my scratches.

I also got the hologram to work, and i used the unreal material editor to make the hologram animated.

I talked to a friend who said that now is the time I should focus on creating an entire scene, from modeling to texturing to lighting to final... which is something I've been planning on doing for while, so hopefully everything goes well.

Here is the concept that I will be modeling, created by Andy Chung, a crazy talented artist... you should check out his website when you have the chance.



And here are some basic pieces I'm working on, trying to make some pieces modular to practice that aspect as well.



So yuh, thats what I'm working on right now.