Unreal Engine 4 - Parallax Grass

Tau WIP3

I've finally finished the Textures on my Fire Warrior! Now onto the dreaded process of rigging for UE4. I've done one pass at a rig, but it's not going to cut it for the game, so I'm going to re-bind some of the skin.

The final helmet in all its glory!

A test pose, so I can gaze upon him without his arms sticking out in an 'A'

A full view of the test pose.

I'm especially proud of the scopes, as not only did the barrel details come out great, but I invented a multi-layered iris using a bump-offset node to create the illusion of true 3D layers inside the lens.

Beauty Shot!

Tau Texturing Cont'd

Today I learned a lot in substance, the most crucial being the "select based on UV shells" tool.

Anyway, I'm getting really close to a fully shaded/textured Fire Warrior.

Here's the full front texture, though you're seeing the textures a bit lower res than they actually are. I'm having a bit of trouble biasing the LODs of the textures to keep him looking detailed from far away. This won't be so much a problem in an action-packed game, but it's a problem when trying to showcase my work for the day.

Here's the back so far. Once he's rigged and in for the player character, I'll have to see if all the yellow on the back makes it look too flat.

I'm pretty proud of how nice the chest and shoulder guard look. Overall, I feel I got the material to look a lot more like the physical material I was imagining than I thought I would. I imagine it's a mix between a matte-finished painted metal and a sort of flat stucco, which is a really confusing imaginary substance to create.

I'm especially proud of how the gloves are turning out, because I always hate doing the hands of a character the most, and I hunkered down, really putting time and effort into making the gloves look like gloves, putting finger-wrinkles into the joints, and I feel the result is totally worth the effort.

Tau Fire Warrior Unreal WIP 1

For the past couple of weeks, I've been doing a bit of early R&D and modeling for an Unreal Editor project I've had in my head. When finished, it would be a playable level to deliver the ultimate Tau Fire Warrior experience (or as close as one man can get to delivering such a thing).

I've started with a Fire Warrior character model that will be used in variations for every Fire Warrior in the game, as well as the game-res vehicle model for the Orca Transport ship.

 

A robot game

 Toward the beginning of the month, I finished texturing the upper body pieces for the most part, but looking back on it, I think I've made him a bit too dirty, even for what I wanted to use him for.

Nevertheless, this was really good practice with Substance Painter.

More recently, I've been working on a Survival/Crafting Robot game which is teaching me a lot about the Unreal 4 Engine and how to setup Blueprints

Slowly making progress on the Trooper

I am using Substance Painter to make a texture for each piece of the trooper's armor. We'll see if this is efficient enough to work in the end. I may have to combine them all into one texture to cut down on file size and render times.

The gray pieces are currently UV'd, while the white pieces with no texture are not yet.

Add some Photoshop and what have you got?

Meanwhile,

I have posted the final episode of

Chapter 1 of Kiergo on Tapastic.com!

Suddenly addicted to rendering Legos

Apparently I can't get enough of this.

And apparently from now on, my blog posts will always be at 2 in the morning.




Here's a little bit of the process I finally got to work:

Step 1: In LeoCad, I build the model I want to render. In this instance, I based my model very closely on Horcik's Space Sweeper, as I wanted to focus on rendering rather than designing.

I only build one side of symmetrical portions, and I don't get too caught up in how the interior of the model fits together, as long as the superficial layers look like they work.

Step 2: I export a wavefront OBJ of the model and import into maya. I then spend a few hours duplicating all symmetrical parts to the other side, fixing normals (because CAD), and reassigning materials for Vray.

During the process, I will grab pieces at random and 'loosen' them to create a more handmade look.


Because of CAD, the topology of pieces is all over the place, which makes for very fake looking renders. The lighting can be used to work around this, but I find that after a couple preliminary renders, I can figure out which pieces break the illusion and fix/replace them, so that I don't have to model EVERY piece from scratch in Maya.

I will also bevel the key edges of the pieces that I feel look too perfectly sharp. I don't do it to every piece for time purposes.

Step 3: My favorite part -- bringing it all together in Photoshop. Here I can add a simple Tilt-shift to create the illusion of Depth of Field, alter the exposure, add glowy bits, and finally do a final curves adjustment to get a nice color in the shadows and highlights.

Then, voila!

Vray 3.0 and my stormy

After a few mix-ups, I've gotten my hands on the newest version of Vray, and I'm super excited.

Here's a bit of a storm trooper that I've been working on.

Below, you can see the progress that I've made tonight. Nothing is textured except the helmet and the sash.

It's been far too long

Well, I haven't updated this thing in a long while, so I figure I'll catch you up with a series of videos.

Also, the teaser for a short film I've been working on for a year.

Color TV No Vacancy Teaser