The Containment Lab

I’ve been working on an environment for a while now since I finished the Resonator at the end of February. However I’m considering diverting my attention to something smaller for a month or so, so now would be as good a time as any to go over my progress so far.

Admittedly I did write an entry on this project a couple of months back in its entirety but I decided to scrap it because it was just a bit rubbish. So surprise! I haven’t been slacking off after all!

With this project I wanted to create some kind of containment facility for an exotic or dangerous creature. The driving image I wanted to work towards was that of the view out the angular window. The architecture of the lab would be clean and light, with a simple modern or near future theme so as not to distract from the focal point of the scene.

The ultimate goal of the project was, of course, to potentially be able to replace my Offworld Safehouse FMP in my portfolio, which looked good from a distance but was sorely lacking in showing off my technical skills in almost every regard. This level was going to feature modular building elements and an area of greenery, which would be kept on a small scale so I could really focus on the little details.

The start of the project was very slow due to not having produced modular assets before, resulting in a somewhat trial-and-error approach to texture efficiency. Once I understood the importance of modular textures over modular meshes things started moving much faster. It’s tempting to go back and re-bake some of my maps differently as there are still some issues but that would probably be a poor use of my time. As for the greenery I still had some problems and I’m still not 100% satisfied with the assets I’ve made so far but with the help of the new foliage material settings in UE4 things are looking far better than in my FMP.

At the stage I am at now, most parts of the build have been touched upon but aren’t quite there yet. I haven’t properly worked on the enclosure facing/outer walls of the lab at all, so they will likely be the next aspect I concentrate on. I’m also quite concerned about the emptiness of the lab room so I need to think up some props to populate more and also to sell the “story” better, as I think my theme still comes across as quite vague and not immediately obvious.

Ultimately this project still needs a lot of work, but I think it’s a good idea to take a brief rest and work on something a little different. After working solo on one thing for an extended period of time without access to immediate feedback like at university it starts to become increasingly more difficult to tell what looks good or not, a fresher perspective would definitely be nice. Plus, my self-imposed “deadline” for getting my portfolio up to scratch is still Industry Workshops in August, and I wanted to get more than one piece done by that time. Focusing on the smaller idea to get it out of the way first doesn’t seem like a bad idea to me.

The “mini project” I’m considering taking on would be to compensate for the remaining shortcomings of my portfolio. I need to include something that is more grounded, less futuristic or fantastical. Possibly something historical to balance things out. But I’ll be keeping it on a very small scale regardless, and focusing on individual assets rather than just the finished composition.

As for the specifics, my current best idea is to make an ornamental fireplace, something that is interesting enough to stand on its own but would also make a great hero asset in a small scene. That way I could call the project “done” but easily be able to return to and expand on it later. It should be pretty fun.

Getting the Momentum Going Again

It has been a while since I posted last.

To give a bit of an explanation why- Shortly after my previous post I successfully acquired a part-time job, which I sorely needed. However not long after that there were some problems resulting in me being forced to work essentially full time. That combined with some personal issues and the general misery of the pre-Christmas period, and my work completely ground to a halt.

By January I knew I needed to do something to pull me out of the rut. I decided to put the money I’d earned doing all those extra hours towards my art, just to make it feel like it was all worth something. It’d long been a goal to buy myself a laptop to work on my art anywhere I wanted, but I decided to take it one step further and buy myself a surface Pro 4.

I won’t go into a full review but I’m quite pleased with the performance, it is very enjoyable to use with Zbrush or Photoshop. My main gripes would be the slight delay when starting a stroke in Photoshop, and the hold to right click function getting in the way of painting small dots. This can’t be disabled or the program will start bugging out. If you buy one of these you’ll be having a lot of fun wrangling drivers before you can get cracking!

But that investment gave me the boost I needed, and I started wanting to work again as sculpting directly on the screen definitely feels more intuitive to me. Then my workplace finally got its act together and started reducing my hours back to how they had been. With things looking up it began to positively affect the rest of my life too, and right now I feel more driven than I have in a long time.

I still need to work very hard if I’m going to get my portfolio to a state I’m happy with by the end of summer but I have plans and it’s definitely achievable.

Update-Wildstar Resonator Project

 I finally got around to finishing the sculpt after a fair bit of trial and error, trying to work out how to model obscured or less defined parts of the concept. The tri count of the finished piece was stupidly high so decimating had to be done piece by piece.

Once that was done I had to create the low poly. There were some asymmetrical parts and others that needed to be symmetrically duplicated so I had to pay attention. I was worried I was going to end up with it being far too high poly- the result was a little under 4,400 tris, though not knowing the average tri counts from the other weapons in game I can’t be sure how this stands. I don’t think I could’ve gone much lower without losing a lot of the form.

Unwrapping wasn’t too difficult, maybe there could’ve been some changes with my bake in mind but for a fairly small asset I feel it was adequate. After tweaking the smoothing groups a bit I started trying to bake. I used xNormal, first without a pre-generated cage. Then I made a cage in Max and imported that. I edited both together to make sure I got the best parts of each. I was going to bake in Max too, but found out it had been a mistake to use the cage modifier manually- the cage reset every time I selected the high poly and I couldn’t find a way around it, and it wasn’t going to be a good use of time to remake the cage again so I chose to move on.

Then it finally came to the main challenge of this project- the stylised texture. I used the normal map to generate a rough AO to use as a guide, then got stuck in. My general rule of thumb at the start was to lighten outer edges and darker inner ones, then start adding some shading and gradients to highlight the forms. I kept having to go back to different reference images to make sure I was doing exactly what the game does- I was unsure whether to add shine highlights and what style to do them in at the start, but later found better reference to guide me.

My current model is starting to look complete, but it needs some finishing touches first. I’ve gotten some advice from some helpful users on Polycount as to what I’m missing, so I have a clear path as to how to get my stylisation looking accurate.

--

Once I am done with this model I’ll be concepting for my next project, which will most likely be a small environment piece that will make up for the shortcomings of my FMP.  I have a vague idea of what I’d like to do, but I’ll leave that for the next time.