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Sins of a Solar Empire (intro and art dump)

polycounter lvl 13
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artquest polycounter lvl 13
Hello all! I'm a long time lurker here at PC so after all this time It's great to be able to show what I've been upto! Stardock officially released the intro for sins of a solar empire so now I can share it with you all. We outsourced the intro to freespacefilms. Who has done an amazing job of putting together the shots.

I was responsible for modeling and texturing the largest ships(6 titans) in the video as well as coordinating the assets for freespace.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og0aMApQCfU"]Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion Trailer - YouTube[/ame]


Here's some zbrush BPRs and maya whatnots.. I'll post some more high rez and in game screen shots soon. Hope you all enjoy!


AdventTurn.jpg
AdventLoyalistCloseup.jpgTechLoyalistMaya.jpg

High Rez model for the Advent Rebel Titan:

PsiRebelHighRez.jpg

and a few stills from the intro:

PhaseRebelStill.jpg

PsiLoyalistStill.jpg

TechRebelStill.jpg

Replies

  • Darkleopard
    Thats pretty neat to see your models in a cinematic. Think you can post a bigger picture of that station?
  • samcole
    Cool stuff. I'm excited to see the updated textures, and the titan ships in comparison to everything else in the game currently. Good to see some guys posting from the company though. I've been wondering where all those glorious sci-fi ships have been.
  • nick2730
    love the game, sweet model
  • artquest
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    artquest polycounter lvl 13
    Darkleopard: I didn't create the station. It's one of the older assets.

    Samcole: Thanks! We made some minor tweaks to the textures but I think the biggest improvement to the game is the shader changes. (I'm not a technical artist yet, but I'm working on it :)) The graphics programmers were all busy so after annoying the heck out of them and asking a bunch of questions here at PC I was able to retool the lighting and shaders in the game.

    Screenshot.jpg

    EDIT: Here's an example of what the old shaders/lighting looked like:
    soaseentrench042.jpg

    Here's a pre rendered shot of one of the titans I did for the game (Getting the shaders setup for a marketing image).
    We didn't have time to create separate assets so everything in the intro video is using the in-game models/textures.

    TechRebelTitan2.jpg
  • SgtNasty
    This stuff is all pretty cool man, good work. Could we see some more break down of the process for creating this stuff, and some texture flats? Would be much appreciated!
  • artquest
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    artquest polycounter lvl 13
    SgtNasty wrote: »
    This stuff is all pretty cool man, good work. Could we see some more break down of the process for creating this stuff, and some texture flats? Would be much appreciated!


    Sure! I textured some of the ships in MARI so if anyone is interested in that workflow I'll for sure go into more detail on it.

    Here's the wireframe for the game rez tech loyalist titan. I modeled the high rez and baked the normal map/amb occ using Xnormal and textured it in Photoshop. TechLoyalistWire.jpg

    The textures themselves are 2048x4096 ingame and we have 1 for diffuse with an alpha for team color, a "data map" where the red channel is the specular map, the green channel is self illumination and blue is a reflection map. The alpha of this image is used to control the bloom post process effect. And finally a 2 channel normal map(DXT5NM format.)

    I was really happy I was able to use such large textures because it meant being able to put the small details in that make these ships feel really large.
  • AlexKola
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    AlexKola polycounter lvl 9
    Looking Great. I didn't think Mari was used too much outside of film, I'd like to hear more about your workflow. :)
  • Weirdboy
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    Weirdboy polycounter lvl 5
    Well, this is a pleasant surprise, I'd thought Sins was done with expansions.
  • artquest
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    artquest polycounter lvl 13
    AlexKola wrote: »
    Looking Great. I didn't think Mari was used too much outside of film, I'd like to hear more about your workflow. :)

    I was using photoshop for the first few assets and it was taking way too long to finish these ships(the schedule laid out for me was very tight). Mostly because of the large texture size and the scale of the ships. We needed a lot of small details to sell the idea that these ships are huge. I was curios about mari and at the time hadn't heard much about 3d coat.

    So I downloaded the free trial of mari. I went from texturing taking a full work week or more to wrapping up an entire titan (4k x 2k textures) in 3 days (while learning the software on the first day) the brush engine is very similiar to photoshop and its easy to learn. I love the fact that I can be editing each new projection as if it were a layer in photoshop.

    The only downside is that mari does not support overlapping uvs in any way. However this is easily overcome with a similiar workflow to baking normal maps on symmetrical overlapping uvs. Just offset your reversed uvs 1 unit in U or V. This will cause mari to treat it as 2 seperate images that you are baking to. I made a suggestion to the foundry to allow the same image on two seperate uv tiles. They added the feature as of v1.4v3 which is really exciting. So now it will update properly if you source 1 image for 2 uv tiles.

    Mari is super user friendly and I really enjoy the projection workflow. It gives you so much flexibility. I can paint a dirt texture and bake it down several times across the model to get a weathered look very quickly. The masking tools in MARI are great as well.

    It's one of those programs that just lets you do what you need to do and doesn't get in your way very often.

    While the benefit of mari is most certainly geared towards high resolution assets, I'm about to test it out to see how well it does with a painterly style on a low polygon model.

    I'll post some images of the assets in mari soon.
  • Animesh
    Those ships look awesome! That is some great inspiration. I like how the metallic texture show that the ships have been through a couple of battles.:D
  • Animesh
    Those ships look awesome! That is some great inspiration. I like how the metallic texture show that the ships have been through a couple of battles.:D
  • artquest
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    artquest polycounter lvl 13
    So I finally got some time now that the game has been released! So like I promised.. here are some images of how things look in mari. It's worth mentioning that MARI doesn't do any sort of texture filtering so it's display can be sorta rough at times. However the output is pretty much the same as what you'd get in photoshop. Sometimes though I'll end up using the feature that lets me kick a screenshot out to photoshop and paint it there for a bit.

    Heres a few new images. First up is the Vasari Loyalist Titan in mari.

    Shaded(with specular):

    PhaseLoyalistMari2.jpg

    Pure Diffuse:

    PhaseLoyalistMari3.jpg

    Close up Shaded(with specular):

    PhaseLoyalistMari1.jpg

    You can also paint on the flats at any point. I love having instant access to the flats in my 3d painting app. Sometimes things can be hard to get to in 3D and you can swap right into 2D at any time. I use this primarily for selection of uv islands(for masking purposes).

    PhaseLoyalistMariFlats.jpg

    Next up is the Vasari Rebel Titan.

    This was the first model I textured in Mari. I had a lot of fun with this one so here's a closeup:

    PhaseRebelMari1.jpg

    So Mari hates any kind of overlapping UVs. It literally will not project anything at all if you try to paint onto overlapping uvs. At first I just made sure to only import the faces/objects that didn't have any overlapping UVs. Later I made adjustments to my workflow. To get around this issue I selected all the mirrored uvs and offset them by 1 unit in U.

    PhaseRebelMari2.jpg

    I added the glowing lights later in photoshop for this model. Later I figured out a shader setup in MARI that lets me paint masks for lights so I can see it all on the model. Here's a couple shots of the final textures in maya.

    PhaseRebelViewport1.jpg

    PhaseRebelViewport3.jpg


    Here's the tech rebel titan.

    At this point MARI still didn't have the link selected patches feature so it was easier to just bring in a 4th of the model.

    TechRebelMari1.jpg

    Here's a mental ray render I did as I setup the shaders for marketing material and such. Everything was almost plug and play with the mia material X shader. Which I loved. It's also super easy to paint a gloss map because of the WYSIWYG workflow.

    TechRebelMayaRender.jpg


    Sorry for dumping all the huge images. Hopefully you guys will find it somewhat interesting. :P
  • Iciban
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    Iciban polycounter lvl 10
    wow amazing models!
  • nick2730
    awesome program never heard of it, gonna have to look into it. Thanks
  • Computron
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    Computron polycounter lvl 7
    Cool, polycounters using Mari.
  • chrisradsby
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    chrisradsby polycounter lvl 14
    That is frickin cool! :D
  • d1ver
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    d1ver polycounter lvl 14
    Hey, Joel, this is looking really nice!
    Thank you for sharing your Mari approach.
    To the wiki you go:)
    http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryReferenceGameArt#Sins_of_a_Solar_Empire_.282012.29
  • cptSwing
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    cptSwing polycounter lvl 11
    great game, great-looking ships, cool program.. all win.
  • artquest
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    artquest polycounter lvl 13
    d1ver wrote: »
    Hey, Joel, this is looking really nice!
    Thank you for sharing your Mari approach.
    To the wiki you go:)
    http://wiki.polycount.com/CategoryReferenceGameArt#Sins_of_a_Solar_Empire_.282012.29


    I am honored! So many talented artists on that page. I feel so small among the giants of our industry :D

    Oh, I was going to post these yesterday but forgot to upload the images.

    This one is my favorite titan out of all of them. It was really fun making a mech-like spaceship.
    PsiLoyalistMari1.jpg

    and last but not least, here's the Advent Rebel Titan. I loved modeling the high rez for this guy, there were so many interesting shapes to play with. Also, if you look on the left of the image you can see the list of mask types available. These are extremely useful and allow you to get in and get out very quickly when dropping down a base texture.

    PsiRebelMari2.jpg

    Since mari has all the sweet blend modes of photoshop, you can create seperate image files (called channels) and layer them together just like you would in photoshop. So I was able to paint some extra panel lines for use with nDo.

    PsiRebelMari1.jpg
  • artquest
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    artquest polycounter lvl 13
    I know this thread is really old, but I finally got around to making some proper renders of the ships in mental ray, so I thought I would add them to the art dump.

    Tec-Rebel.jpg

    Tec-Loyalist.jpg

    Psi-Loyalist.jpg

    Psi-Rebel.jpg

    Phase-Loyalist.jpg

    Phase-Rebel.jpg
  • mats effect
    Nice work always loved the ships in sins
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