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.

Dubai Skyscraper Modular Kit [WIP]

Here's some progress on the skyscraper modular kit. I have one more piece to finish (the blue box at the bottom) before I go back and refine some of the other pieces. This is going to end up being made up of just 6 modular pieces.

The master material has grown a considerable amount in order to adapt to the different demands and patterns. I was a little worried at first for spending too much time on it but it payed off in the end. It's an incredibly flexible material and I am quickly able to morph it into something a lot different.

I also added some parallax to fake the inside of the building without having the geometry inside. I also added some tileable normal to give the tiles more detail.

Following up on my RGBA trickery I threw in an ambient occlusion map into one of the channels and multiplied that by a tiled texture in order to achieve the more high poly piece at the top of the tower. Another trick in my list is being able to delete geometry in my master material by simply masking it out using one of the channels of my mask texture so that I am able to have windows with and without a trim piece without having two different meshes.

Skyscraper Modular Kit [WIP]

I started work on a skyscraper modular kit. A lot of planning went into this before getting my hands into any sort of modeling/texturing or material making.

So far it's using a master material to generate the different tile and window patterns. The material is pretty much all procedural using a small 128x256 texture that I used to generate different patterns from using the RGBA channels. With this I was also able to mask out areas in order to designate different paramaters. For example I can designate how much reflection I want, the tiling amount I want, the color of the windows and strips and the color of the grid among other parameters using material instance constants.

I also managed to generate different patterns of tonal variation in the grid using another texture (16x32) also using the RGBA channels in order to add some medium-level detail. 

I am now in the process of adding some procedural finer detail/noise for up-close shots. I am saving A LOT of texture space using this master material and plan to keep this an extremely space efficient kit. 

Here's the Emirates Office Towers reference I am working from:

Column - GAD Challange - WIP

Progress on the Column for the GAD Challange. So far, done with this peice of the column, rest needs to be retopoed, baked etc. Screenshot from UDK.

I´ve been adding a bit of NURBS cruves to my workflow when sculpting some of my other pieces. Also have been experimenting with NEX and a few scripts for maya to further speed my workflow at work.

I´ve pretty much been observing myself and seeing what is tedious, time consuming, or I think could be done faster through some other process and adjusting. For example, I found myself often selecting some of the same objects in a particular scene I am working on by hand, so I looked up some scripts and found one that does that selecting job for you. I plan on learning a bit of MEL to address some of these issues myself.

GAD Column Contest

Very early progress of the column. Based on Modernisme architecture from Barcelona. Planing on having this basic shape of a column from Architecture already present and mix and matching pieces to give it my own spin. 

Learning a lot on faster workflows here. I've learned from my past mistakes and I am using maya to detail some of these hard surfaces a lot more. Before I used to pretty much do it all in zbrush but i've been finding that a lot of hard surface is simply easier in a proper 3D package, no matter how good zbrush has evolved with its hard surface tools.