Hey guys, been working on this over the past few days.

~4500 tris, 1024 texture

Pretty cool, good job!

I think it would probably help if you accentuated the rivets around the gold trims in the diffuse/specular more - have some grunge and dirt gathered around their edges to make them pop out a bit more. Currently it looks more like someone's done a thick gold paintjob over the whole thing, rather than having metal bits riveted to the surface over a long period of time.

I think it would really help this piece to include the elements from the concept like the fire and glowing eye bits to help contrast the metal and wood ... also the chains from the concept might add some more detail and silhouette interest.

very close to the concept. good textures.
now u need a emissive/illumination for the glowing eyes, just like wut MoP said

I like this prop. World of warcraft style.

Show maps.

Switched over to Unreal so I could use an emissive map. Still working on tweaking textures, will work on adding the chains + the fire later

Some texture and lighting tweaks, avoiding doing actual work on it. :P

i'd make the teeth the same metal like in the concept, the lighter gray color makes them look like nickel which isn't very cool looking.

i'd also have the iridescence in your spec map bulge around the bubbles, trace previous bubbles, and sweep to the edges of the bowl. not sure it'd even appear in such thick oil, but it's a neat effect. should play with punching the spec a little more, it could look terrible though.

Looking great so far but you may want to tune down the gloss in ue3 a bit so the metal reads more like metal, atm it looks like wax or something, should look more like in marmosemt imo.

Otherwise really nice!

Yeah, I've been messing with the spec all day, I think I need to add a cube map to get closer to the look of marmoset. I agree that the metal looks better in that screenshot. I'll give the oil spec a little more lovin', it hasn't really been worked on much, I just added it to see if I liked the look.

Thanks for the feedback guys, keep it comin'!

i personally wouldn't tighten the gloss all that much. metal doesn't have all that tight of a spec, imo. i'd keep it around that setting and make the spec do all the work by adding contrast to the texture but leaving it dark enough to punch edges with high specs. it may help to crank the spec multiplier in the unreal properties up to 2 or 3x its strength.

More tweaks, been working on the specular to try to give it a more metallic feel, worked on making the oil streaks form around the bubbles a little better, still not sure how much I like it. Also, it seems that Unreal compressed the hell out of the textures..

Doesn't that always blow, you work on it work on it, and it always looks better and better until you get it in engine and it just falls flat on it's face.

Anyway, this looks kick arse. I liked your version yesterday better overall though.The horns definitely look better in this new version.

Maybe try putting the ligher version over your older version and mask it to create brighter highlights around the skeletal ridges of the eyes and nose area, get the best of both worlds. Right now the lighter texture makes it look a bit pixelated.

Dunno if this will help, but i'll use the normals at times as a reference at 50% opacity and paint white on the areas that should pop up. Then put black under that and use that layer as a mask for the new brighter layer.

Fixed the colors and the spec map on the trim pieces. Tried everything to disable the compression and streaming, but this is the best I could get.

Lookin good. I like the oil, thats a cool touch

The discolorations in the oil is looking neat. Maybe try running an unsharp mask filter on your textures to get the details to show up more, Unreal is definitely compressing them compared to Marmoset, like the texture size got cut in half or more. Overall it's looking good though, very close to the concept.

Nice job!

Looks great, love the detailing and specularity

Nice work so far! To get more definition on your textures, set their LODGroup parameter to either TEXTUREGROUP_Skybox or TEXTUREGROUP_UI. Although the texture will still have sorta nasty DXT compression, this way it will at least display at its natural resolution. UT3 textures with default settings only stream in up to 512x512, which seems to be the case here.

Looks awesome!

Crit:
- Its never been used before? Or the cleaned it meticulously after the last use? Probably over thinking it...
- Also don't forget about a heat source.

Very cool. Can I borrow this for cooking some spaghetti in?

doc_rob - Thanks . Cool to see that one of the Mythic guys likes it, is this one of your concepts?

kaburan - Thanks man, the spec has been driving me nuts. I think it looks better now, but I'm saving the update for later when I've gotten more done.

ZackF - Yeah I've tried a ton of stuff to get the textures to look sharper, I've set them to the Skybox group, set LOD Bias to -1 and -2, tried deferring compression, etc. It looks better, but I think part of it may just be Unreal and the actual texture. I've also been fiddling with the specularity nonstop trying to get it to look right, I finally just had to stop so I can finish the base and chains.

Vig - Thanks! I thought about adding some oil spillage, let's just pretend they wipe it down after every pour ;). Although, realistically they can't even use it because of the spikes on the front of the pot, lol. I'm working on building a base for it, I should have it done today, I finally had to stop myself from tweaking the textures to try to get it to look right in Unreal.

verybad - Umm.. sure?

i'd tip the hues in the oil into cooler colors, the red/orange isn't working imo, i think that's what's breaking the effect. id' introduce another color in the swirl to, add some contract in it so some areas aren't as specular, so you'll have some variety and interesting steaks of black swirled in there so it pops a little more.

i think some of your highlights are too uniform, the golden rim of the bowl for example has consistent edges. the approach i'd take is to try and brighten the top surface so rather than that value defining "edge here" it'd break it up and define some planes as well, and it wouldn't be so noticable.

i can't tell if you had or not, but the rusty drips from the spikes on the leg supports, those should be black in your spec, rust isn't shiney.

i'd redue the straps on the handle as well. not liking the yellow color, and it looks like the thickness isn't consistent. the blown out white areas, that seem to have been darkened after the fact, maybe it's the shading or lighting has a dodge and burn look which is something you normally want to avoid.

I really dig this though I hope if its unreal you have maybe a panning texture on your boiling couldren to give the illusion of it bubling or atleast moving?

Also maybe a emitter of bubbles on it as well

may I be so bold to ask as how you went through to your process of making that wood sculpted so nice in z-brush?

I have tried to sculpt wood before but not with good results so if you explain that would be awesome

I ended up taking a step back to work on some of the things that killingpeople mentioned and decided to work on the diffuse and specular some more, because I kind of rushed through it the first time because I was eager to see results.

Originally Posted by seforin

I really dig this though I hope if its unreal you have maybe a panning texture on your boiling couldren to give the illusion of it bubling or atleast moving?

Also maybe a emitter of bubbles on it as well

Probably not, just because it probably won't be animated on my portfolio site.

Originally Posted by seforin

may I be so bold to ask as how you went through to your process of making that wood sculpted so nice in z-brush?

I have tried to sculpt wood before but not with good results so if you explain that would be awesome

For the wood I just made an alpha from a wood texture off of cgtextures then used drag rectangle on a standard brush to 'sculpt' the detail. You could also use the alpha to mask it then sculpt it that way.

Great prop. I just have to say it kicks soo much ass in the Marmoset engine. Looks 50x better than Unreal. It really is the best engine ever. I wish it had glow maps. Great work!