Hey Folks,

So since Jayhawk went and posted, I guess I can now too. I was waiting a while for people to get the chance to play Gears3 and see the stuff ingame first before I spoiled any surprises by showing renders here.

Anyway, first load of images here are from the Char set. After crunch on Gears2 ended ( for me ) I moved on to Gears3 and started on these with the intention of trying to just stick to the style of the folks who pioneered Gears environment art style. People like Danny Rodriguez, Josh Jay, Kevin Lanning, Lee Perry and Chris Perna.

I put together a survey and passed it around all the level designers, scripters and meshers. Just to ask them, what I did right, what I did wrong, what they wanted to see more of and what they wanted less off. The feedback I got from that was that modularity like the Hospital set I'd made allowed them to quickly shell out levels easily and reliably and they liked that they could slap any texture on them.

I had made too many designs with uncapped ends though, I had thought I was saving polys but due to the stagger and sprawled nature of how assets are used in Gears, they ended up having to use an additional mesh to cover those holes

They also wanted to see a real design on the capped ends of objects so they could use them safely however they wanted. So I took that on board and dived in. My own take away was that I couldn't ever trust in how the assets might be scaled ( a lesson I guess I already knew, its the nature of things ) so I set out to push the texture resolution higher. I was also fearful of textures being turned down in resolution so that motivated me to push more resolution also.

And I anticipated that with lightmass soon to be integrated and with it, the return of drop shadows , I should make more negative cuts and deep negative extrudes so each piece would self shadow nicely.

I'm showing a few lows this time also as people here moaned a bit about that. I included some tri numbers on some in case that was the reason people wanted to see the lows, to check up on me and see how greedy I am with the polys
I'm pretty disciplined with that stuff, it was another less learned from Gears2. All the lowpoly shots are from ingame in the generic browser with the base RTT maps I rendered out of max before the texture artist came in and hit on them. So they are not an exact representation of how they look ingame, but they are pretty close.















You can see I took that big blast damage circle out of the normals by the time I made the lowpoly and realized I'd gotten too carried away and had made things repeat in too obvious a way.

Below are a couple shots of how these pieces were used in MP_Overpass

Below are some work in progress shots I took while I was making this stuff that might help show the kind of steps ( and mistakes ) I made while trying to work out a design. I will try to find the brilliant concept Shane Pierce did online somewhere so you can see what I was working off ( he never posts here... though he should!).




































More to come another night

I WAS WAITING FOR THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! so amazing! thanks for sharing kevin. im playing gears 3 right now. im gonna try and spot some of this stuff

FANTASTIC work like always!

love it!

Amazing work Kevin. Your ZBrush work has always been some of my favorite since I saw your Gears 2 post a while ago. Do you use a lot of alphas to add in details like scratches or is it all mostly hand sculpted? Also I'd love to know what some of your favorite brushes are.

I always get excited when you post. Thanks for making my day! Great work!

FUCKING RIGHTS

This stuff is really inspirational! Really helps me with my projects How long does it take you to sculpt pieces like these?

I love these high poly sculpts! :O

[I've spotted some of it... and then got promptly killed for not paying attention to the "game"

my fingers are blue from all the right click save as today.

I was just saying last night how much I love Kevin's art dumps. This thread will be nice!

Originally Posted by Lonewolf

my fingers are blue from all the right click save as today.

+1

Excellent work. I actually liked the part about surveying the level designers about how the models are getting used.
Excellent work sir!

This is Epic! (Pun intended)

sweet work! Waiting to see more

Epic post indeed! Great modeling Kevin! Thats some of the most hardcore filigree Ive seen in a game! Thanks for your tips on lessons learned from your level design survey. You bring up some great points on making this stuff super versatile for modular reuse. Congrats on Gears 3!!

Yeah this stuff is amazing. I'd love to see some other shots of the other MP levels if that's okay. Though overpass is my favorite. Really cool how you guys made the level feel like it's sinking, even though it's the geometry around it raising!

awesome kev, still cant believe the effort you guys put into the assets! amazing.

Very nice art dump! I haven't be able to play Gears 3 yet, but its definitively on my to get list.

These pieces have an Art Deco feel to them, which you pulled off extremely well. I'm not too much of a fan of the destruction on the pieces but with a post-apocalyptic setting in the Gears universe I'm guessing its called for. How were you able decide how much damage to put on the pieces and when was too much?

Also were you able to work on any of the vegetation at all? If you did, did you try to apply the lego like modularity to them as you did with building pieces or was this a completely different work flow?

Kevin: More stuff for me to drool over :P Thanks for sharing.

So many kick ass art dumps, mind sharing texture sheets on some of the larger pieces?

Raising the bar again Thanks for sharing these!

Woah!! fuckin amazazing