finished stuff for portfolio:





in other news, i started re-rendering some of the textures in marmoset. it exposed some of issues that are present in them, but there's few textures that finally showed their true potential thanks to toolbag.

Gah all your stuff is awesome man! I want to make it all! Love that turret

Also I am guilty of miss spelling your name so I apologise! Sorry dude!

Man, That last one texture is awesome!

Some great stuff here, I'd love to model some of your environments/weapons sometime.

One crit, and this is in regards to the thread, you should update the first post with the link to the latest portfolio site. Don't make people hunt for the site you are working on now.

^ crap, i was sure i updated it already. thanks.
also, thanks Paul and Dan.

probably final:


i'm kinda sick of scifi armors now, trying something different:




i began to use a simple yet brillant trick that i learned from Feng Zhu video, which is overlaying photos to establish color themes.
it works like a fucking charm!

You've got some really cool stuff in here, but I'd have to agree that you tend toward too much visual noise. This is totally fine if you're presenting a character, weapon, or texture as a stand-alone presentation piece in front of a flat background. But as soon as you put that busy weapon in a micro-detailed character's hand, shooting at another micro-detailed character in behind a busy prop in front of a noisy wall in a game engine, it just gets to be too much.

Everything will just read as noise, and you won't be able to read any of it. All the detail will be lost as the small detail layered over more small detail in the scene will just blend together.

Example of too much busy-in-front-of-busy:



My company worked on this game making hero prop assets. Seen individually, many of them look awesome. But when everything is uber-detailed, and you've got some inconsistent lighting, it just runs together and you can't see anything. That's just something to be mindful of.

that's a good point, and you're definitely not the first person to point that out.
and yet i'm still unable to achieve a good balance between boring and noisy.

maybe concepts and models that i'm using as a reference for what's acceptable also have those issues?

for example age of conan stuff
http://img834.imageshack.us/img834/7...ecromancer.jpg
http://img163.imageshack.us/img163/7...orconcepts.jpg
http://img706.imageshack.us/img706/7194/picthide.jpg

or, in terms of sci-fi design, various Gears of War characters.
are their designs generally considered noisy?

or do they have something that i fail to see that my concepts lack?

Yah, that's all pretty busy stuff. You can get away with a busy character if they are standing if front of a very subdued background. Think swirling gray fog, or a very dark, nearly back background. Just popping stuff in the foreground with lighting, and letting the background recede into darkness can be a way to get your detailed characters or hero props to pop, but not to overwhelm the viewer.

My concern would be to put one of your detailed characters or props in front of say a building made up of several of your more busy textures, then to light it all up to similar luminance levels. Then we lose depth, and just see visual noise everywhere.

Any time you add detail, it demands the viewers attention. If you have visible detail everywhere, particularly if it is a similar scale, the viewer's attention just bounces around everywhere, and you lose that dramatic focus on any one asset or character. It can actually be stressful to the viewer, as their eyes never get a break.

So, I'd just recommend to be aware of this. It can be done well, if you're very conscious of your lighting, and avoid layering the mircro-detail in front of similar detailed objects.

A lot of your stuff looks really great, it's just the fact that so much of it is micro-detailed, I'd hate to see it all put together incorrectly and wanted to make sure that you were award of this, particularly if you should put some of these assets together in a scene.

Heeeaaad CRAAAB!! Sick portfolio dude!

Ye I agree bout the detail comments. U tend to split every shape into smaller shapes and then some, u can try and spare some areas and leave them empty for 'resting' purposes. It works.

As for ur textures - the outlined ones r betta, IMO. Seems to follow ur concepts stylistically too.

Try carrying out some rendering on the largest shapes of ur concepts. Put a core shadow that will separate the 2 major planes and leave some detail out in the dark. Finish off with a nice highlight and this will push up ur concepts to a new level, easily.

^ thanks for tips!

I decided to make a generic modular panel for portfolio.


it's supposed to be fairly large but i think i made edges too sharp anyway.
Some additional normal map details will be added in photoshop.


low poly is currently at 780 tris. is that acceptable for such piece?

i'm leaning towards turning that whole H-shaped cavity into a flat normal-only detail. this way polycount would be reduced to something around 550 tris.
it would also make the panel look more like floor. at the moment it seems too easy to trip on those large holes, if i were to treat it as a floor.

update:


low poly is now at 508 tris. i guess that won't be too much for fps games.



also, i made this thing recently:


i know, too many small lines. but that wood surface was so much fun to paint!

Your stuff is super awesome. I love the colours you use, it's really unique.

I'm really digging your work man. I couldn't help myself and started modeling one of your gun concepts. I hope that's ok? Assuming it's alright, I may do a couple more

^ hey man, it looks great! you have my blessing if you want to model any of them.

maybe some of the small plates and details could be toned down, since as good people pointed out my designs are often too noisy.


meanwhile, i started texturing the panel yesterday:


any feedback is welcomed.
as you can see i added a bunch of stuff before baking, i hope it made it more interesting.

does anyobody know some tricks on how to solve the stripes problem in red circles?

Nice stuff man, i really like that turret and the axes!
I also think that some of your concept work suffers from being too detailed so it becomes noisy. The same applies to the textures, they have a lot of small and very sharp details which makes them hard to read. It might look cool in a close-up, but you should keep the big picture in mind.
Zoom out and look from a distance, this helps a lot. It's all about the big shapes and silhouettes, then the detail.
Detail is cool, but it makes all the difference where you put it. If you have the same level of insane detail everywhere, it just gets confusing and doesn't help the design and readability.
Give the eye some nice big shapes to follow and then have some detailed bits there, just in the right place and not on everything.

I think that you could push your work a lot more if you put some more thought into functionality. I know it's a lot of Scifi stuff and it needs to look cool, but too randomly placed panels, cuts, lines etc. quickly make a piece unbelievable.
Take the last panel as an example - it looks cool. But in terms of functionality, it just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. What is its function? For a floor, it would be unpractical with all the little intendations. Very hard to clean and easy to stumple. For a wall panel, the little drain- things doesn't make much sense.
No need to overdo this and get into rocket science, but as a concept artist you should think more about things like this. Which makes your work much more believable

you are right, that panel started as a wall piece and i turned it into floor only at a late stage of modeling.
i had an idea to cover slots between plates with alpha masked grating but in the end i was too lazy to change the uvw.

that said, i was always under impression that majority of sci-fi designs suffer from 'design over functionality' mindset (including some stuff from your great looking environment). so i thought my panel was acceptable in this aspect.

but i'll definitely keep that in mind next time. unless you have some idea on how to fix it without rebaking everything.

Hi Blaze,
I wil post u some my opinions, if those arent good, just ignore this post
So:
1. as Airage said, this "panel" dont fits as a floor very good, coz there are these bumpy things and it would be uncomfortable for cleaning and so...but maybe you could make such a "set" of theese "panels" and they would be seamless...this one looks like some floor door to lower floor(of spaceship or whatever)...also it looks like it has 2handles so it can be opened....so you could make "panel" which is mostly clear without any extra stuff on it...nice and clean one ....and this "floor door" part could be used just in few places (hope u got it, I am not very good in English :P )

2. about textures (yeah I am not in such level as you are in texturing, but still :P )
so first thing is...it looks like superclean right now(if I count it has wearing and scratches, it is old piece of metal...I think it should get more of dirt at certain places)
second thing is....that wearing looks like scratches on gun...more like flaked paint(you know very hard rough wearing)...and this piece is raw metal and it's wearing should be presented more on spec map, and it should has rly soft and long horizontal wearing (we suppose, its used for walking and shoes makes long wearing and such a rly soft wearing..and it should be pretty strong imo)
well I hope u understood what I wanted to say, if not , just catch me on steam :P

thanks Paul!
i like the idea of making an additional version without bumps, i might try that later.
as for lack of wear, i know what you mean. i've been struggling to make the wear feel natural and it's hard to achieve when whole main panel is mirrored. but yeah, i'll try to add more wear that's result of walking.

anyway, here's progress:


now that i look at it, maybe it looks more suitable as a corridor ceiling?

which one looks better?

The first one is better. Very nice!

^ thanks.

need few more opinions.


meanwhile, i started a new texture. this time i'm going for something kinda art deco-styled. ideally i'd rather go art nouveau instead but organic forms seem like big pain in the ass to model.





there's few sloppy areas that i gotta fix, and also weavy patterns seem too small.

does it make sense to make any parts of this as geometry?
i was thinking about modeling the main goldish "frame" without trims and leaving everything else flat.

also, those four lines at the bottom. do they look better short like on concept, or extended like on hi poly?
upper parts of holes look kinda empty when lines are kept short but i can't decide.

I enjoy watching your art and its progression.Sci-fi panel looking nice(couldn't decide which one is better :P),and the new one too.
You can move forward to something different then a panel in your next project,just a thought

I think i like second ones metal better but the first ones orange color better.

ok, there's no clear favorite so i chose version 1 for now.

here's the progress on pseudo art deco texture HP and LP:

You can move forward to something different then a panel in your next project,just a thought

yeah, i'll definitely try something different after this one's done.
maybe i'll model one of my gun concepts or try making some complex prop.