Beautiful Biome [Final]

Here's the video of it in action! Watch it in HD on youtube.

Beautiful Biome [WIP]

Progress on the hand-painted biome. The composition is currently getting fixed, ugly foreground plant is getting moved and refining everything. Also adding some cool vertex painting sand, sand color variation, blowing sand effects and replacing those two place-holder trees in the back.

Beautiful Biome [Super WIP]

Current progress on my Biome Project. It's a pretty short project, we only get less then two weeks.

Composition Layout - "mini oasis - desert"

This will receive a paint-over in photoshop to further refine the composition.

Rock Sculpts

Made sure to have different shape, form, and detail from different angles for re-usability

Highpoly progress on the Palm tree stump

Looking at the composition, I might make it a little taller to give it more screen space, since I want this to be my "hero-asset". I quickly desimated an earlier version of this just to throw it in the map composition to see how the shape plays out, which was a great idea, because based on the feedback I got from placing it in the level I immediately went back and made those observed changes. 

I also made sure I got the most out of this sculpt by making sides different then the other, so if I rotate this I can get a different looking stump, with also a pretty different silhouette just from rotating 

Props!

I again kept the optimization going, while retaining a high visual fidelity.
High versatility and visual sophistication was the main focus here. Have an asset be flexible when duplicated around the scene by making it vertex paintable, breakable, or toned.

A few tricks: Inverting the AO map inside the material editor and plugging a power node to adjust its contrast to essentially generate a "free" spec map that gives me those nice specular highlights on the edges on the metal. Of course, then I used a lerp node to blend between that generated specualr and a tiled noise specular.

Constantine, Algeria - 2,237AD

Constantine, Algeria, 500 years after the volcanic disaster. Completed this painting in half the time it took me to paint the last one, making big improvements on prioritizing exactly where to focus my time on.

Constantine Aftermath

Here is panoramic concept painting I completed with the theme: "What happened here?"

Completed in roughly 6 hours.

Then I gave it a detail/lighting pass (which also including some unnecessary noodling which I am trying to cut back on) taking me to about 9 hours.

Dubai Skyscraper Modular Kit [Final]

These were my final construction shots for the 14 day modular kit project.

Pretty proud with the outcome. Especially proud about my extremely efficient use of texture space. Ended up using only 2,400 total pixels, that's less then a 512x512 pixel texture for an entire kit!

I can make my master material into procedural windows, brick, tiles, window patterns, sci-fi trims, different colors etc with material instance parameters, all of this while retaining texel density since everything is procedural and tileable. (edit: updated material sheet to better show this off)

Lots learned! On to the next project!

Dubai Skyscraper Kit pt.2 [WIP]

The building now has an entrance, and I am now in the process of making a kick ass scene along with making one last piece and lots of tweaks. As a note, the entrance did not require any new textures, I just made a new instance parameter from my two master materials. Loving my materials so far, very flexible.