Contemporary House and PBR Materials WIP 1

I have been revisiting an architectural model that I did a while ago, and using it to practice Physically Based Rendering Materials in Unreal Editor 4. I must say, these materials look awesome! It has already been well known that all materials are reflective, but the cost of having reflections in materials--even fake--was just too expensive. Even the materials that did have reflections had to fake it by using a cube map. Now, the reflections are a true capture of the surrounding scenery and computed real-time. You can even move the location of the reflection capture and recompute it, which is cool. I've really been pushing for every material to have normals created in Zbrush or baked from a hard surface model in Maya using xNormal, instead of the less-desirable results from a quick CrazyBump conversion.  Here is what I've got going so far:

Chair 01 WIP

Doing this chair for a living room environment I've been working on. Heavy use of Zbrush and dynamesh. The texture is a 2048. I baked the normals and polypaint from Zbrush using xNormal. The ambient occlusion was baked from Maya. Rendered in Marmoset. I am calling this one done for now and I may tweak later but want to get all of the other main props for the environment finished.

Robot Arm WIP 5

I'm calling this one finished! Got around to creating the specular map, added a subtle diffuse for the cable and altered small text on labels and added some missing cracks and re-baked the normal on the big black pivot bolt to dial in the mesh. Here's the outcome:

Robot Arm WIP 4

Latest update: textured the claw. Next I will be tweaking the diffuse (I am thinking more weathering or at least variation on the flatter hues) and also creating a specular map.

Robot Arm WIP 3

I've added a claw and just threw in some flat colors and baked out the normals from Zbrush. Next I will use spotlight to get a better Diffuse and then move on to the gray cable diffuse and the overall specular map.

Robot Arm WIP 2

I've got around to quickly texturing this bad boy and it seems that the diffuse looks great with the spotlight feature in Zbrush and just painting onto the 3D mesh and extracting the diffuse in xNormal. Of course I still have to do some editing and adding small details like text and labels and overlaying the ambient occlusion map. Already the model is looking way more interesting with the Diffuse texture added.

Next, I plan on texturing the cable and adding label text where the blank labels currently are. I will also add a specular map and that should really pop the dark black medal and add more variation and interest across the entire model.

-Jonathan

Robot Arm WIP 1

I thought I had created a work in progress post about this already, but I have been a lot more work in Zbrush and particularly with hard surface sculpting and using the Dynamesh feature with Zbrush 4R5. I decided to make a challenge for myself so I picked the most interesting piece of machinery that I could. These are the arms that are used to work on cars and do other repetitive tasks in assembly lines of factories. I have got to the stage of created a low res mesh and baking the normals with xNormal. I never knew the power of xNormal but I am very happy with the results, as I don't have to worry about the UV correlation between the high res and low res mesh, only the low res. The object is currently 3,194 tris and 1,589 verts. This was down from about a 15-25 million poly mesh in Zbrush. :) Here are the screenshots, from the Zbrush viewport and in Marmoset Toolbag:

-Jonathan

Female Bust WIP

I've been doing more Zbrush practice. Here is a female bust that I've been working on. I plan to get a low-poly version into Maya with UVs.
Added eyes and softened the cheekbones: I didn't like the proportions, so I rounded out the face and shortened the neck. I also refined areas like the mouth, nose and eyes. I also added more detail to the hair:
I used Polypaint to add texture (the shader is the flat-lit "chalk"). I forgot the eyebrows so I roughed them in using Photoshop:
Next, I intend to fix the holes in the hair and to add differences in material properties using specularity and glossiness for the eyes and lips.

Surfer WIP

I am starting new concept work with a series of surfers. I have started this concept in photoshop based on a photo that I found online.

Project Aron

I am posting this after it has already been a while since my involvement in Project Aron: a mod for the PC that is developed in UDK (Unreal Developers Kit). The mod is still in development but I have left for other business. I was responsible for creating modular buildings and modeling and texturing the majority of the environment, as well as world building and shader setup (using our teammate's custom shaders) in UDK.

Here are some videos of the test level that we had produced:





Jonathan

Contemporary Architecture WIP

I created this a while ago and was starting on the textures. I am putting it up here to remind me to finish it. The model is mainly complete and I have been running around it in UDK just to make sure that everything is water-tight.

Zbrush Head Practice WIP

I took a sphere and started making a head out of it. No reference pictures for the model, but I did look at various images online for the texturing. I just started coming up with a native tribesman, and then it started looking like Michael Jordan so I ran with it a bit. I'm still working on the texturing and planning on baking the high res mesh on a lower res, optimized mesh, just for some Zbrush practice. Right now I'm about 50% done with the texturing.

Burger Shop WIP

Here's the progress I've been doing on a new burger shop. This is a render with the diffuse texture only. I will be finishing the specular and normal maps soon. Will update when it's done!

Zbrush Practice

I have been wanting to do more zbrush lately, instead of just using it for tileable texture normal creation (like I have been). Here is a jukebox that I've been working on for a few days. Somehow my mesh doesn't like when I import and export back and forth between zbrush and 3dsmax, and my model would explode when subdividing. I found a pretty good cure by exporting and reimporting level 1 and level 2 of the object, but the uvs get screwed up and I was counting on texturing in zbrush. It seems that I have reached a road block and have moved on to my next personal project. If I ever find the solution I will revisit this model and finish the texturing.

Community Updates

Here are some links to forums where I've been posting my work:

http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=722180

http://jonathanarmstrong.cgsociety.org/gallery/

More work to come soon!

Newest Read Books :)

I always like learning and I'm really taking some time out to improve myself, my art, and the way I live. Here are the books that I've been reading:



The Image of the City by Kevin Lynch




Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials) by Robert B. Cialdini





Letters of the Dragon by Bruce Lee and John Little




Game Art: Creation, Direction, and Careers (Game Development) by Riccard Lind




100 Ways to Motivate Others: How Great Leaders Can Produce Insane Results Without Driving People Crazy by Steve Chandler




Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler

It's Monk Mode time!

Monk Mode was a term used by Jim Collins to describe a period where he would shut himself off from the world to get a major project finished. I've started an outdoor city environment, and I'm treating it as my job at the moment. I would like to get this piece in my portfolio to make it better and to test my current abilities. Here's the link on Polycount: http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=69122. I'll be updating frequently.

WOOT

Overrun - WIP Update

It's been a while since my last overrun update and after GDC, getting an internship at Vigil Games, and moving, I haven't had the most time to work on the mod. I've had time to sit down again and am dedicated to keep production going on this project despite the fact that I won't have as much time anymore to work on it. Anyway, here's what I've been looking into and am trying to make happen (I'm getting more familiar with Uscript, and so it's easier to ACTUALLY do the things I've had in mind and implement them):

Completed tasks:
-Fixed 3rd person cam: generated through Uscript now, and doesn't clip through walls or have to be set up in Kismet for each individual level
-Changed player's and NPC's lighting environments: they now are reactive to light and become dark in shadow (very cool affect :))
-Also, did the same treatment to all of the pickups -- since they aren't full bright, the player will have to do a little searching for them, and they won't break the immersion (as evident in the earlier Resident Evil games).
-Made the interface simpler, took out the scoreboard, changed the interface color
-Changed the weapon range and strength of both guns in the mod -- one is now more of a shotgun, the other: more of a rapid-fire low-damage weapon
-Disabled respawning on pickups -- so player couldn't cheat and keep going over ammo pickups (also, would break immersion in the more realistic setting)

What's in the works:
-Have level auto-load at beginning (it still requires player input each time, and lets them fly around in "spectator" mode...unnecessary for our game)
-Replace streaming triggers with dynamic streaming volumes -- so the content can be loaded while the player is playing, rather than having to wait it all out at once
-Adding on the previous: could create a simple loading UI scene so that player knows at least that the game hasn't crashed ;)
-Splash screen/UI background for level select screen (different from the main game selection logo)...will have to wait until the game is polished to get some good screens for a collage

Pipe dreams?:
-Have guns keep same amount of ammo that player died with at respawn
-Get custom animations for character and enemies so that they don't look awkard when running and can have a melee attack; also, body language adds so much extra information to the atmosphere that dialogue alone can't cover
-More dialogue??-- would have to get same voice actors again
-Create a custom front-end and loading screen?

As anyone could decipher from this information -- the mod is still in need of a serious amount of work. I am almost done with the major design edits, and would like to now focus on finishing up my level.

Mines WIP 2

I have been doing intensive work on my portion of the mod (getting a custom character, weapon and pickups into the game -- through UScript -- scripting events, writing materials, and texturing my objects. I have also been placing other team member's assets and been giving general advice to the other level designers. Credit goes to James Caskey, for the nice character model, and Julia Smith, for creating assets for me to place in the mines area. Here is are some screens of my area's progress (the mines area):

Rebuilding a Motorcycle

I had done a model of a Yamaha R6 a while back and was pretty satisfied with it. I have gotten positive comments from people on forums who like it, but where saying that the geometry was weird. I went back to the model, which has a horrendous amount of unnecessary detail (this was back when I was first learning 3D modeling). I took the bike apart, piece by piece, and optimized the edge flow and poly count. The original tri count was around 61K, now it's down to 14.3K...and also looks better :). I wasn't happy enough, yet, so I imported it into Unreal and created a custom carpaint shader, because most car paints seen in FPS games aren't the best. Here's the shading network I developed:



I would like to maybe use this model in a level or have it as a custom vehicle, but I don't think I want to get into that yet.