A good while ago I started working on a new project based off a concept by Andy Walsh called House on the Rocks. I really enjoyed Andy's Cthulhu works and decided to take a stab at one of them!

Since I started on the project I've gotten my initial blockout in with some placeholder colors, as well as having started on the brick material for the quay. I'll likely take a step back on that material and go back to basics after finding some better references and workflows I've picked up while working on it.

Apart from the in-engine work, over the last week I also did a proper breakdown of the concept! This to make sure that I've decided on all the elements that from the concept seemed uncertain to me, and thus now provides more of a foundation for the project as a whole to stand on.

From here on out it'll be all material work, at least for a while. I've been playing a lot of Alan Wake 2 lately and use that as a source of inspiration for both mood and as a quality bar for myself. This as I really want to do more with tileables and trims compared to the standard high -> low workflow that I've been doing for most of my previous projects' assets. It's gonna be a lot of fun to see this project progress, as well as how I can improve creating assets from tileables compared to my last scene.

That's all for now, see you in the next update!

DA Systems SEC_C4M3R4

I started working on a lil security camera a while back as a reintroduction to Blender while also working on some texturing and presentation skills. I've gotten feedback in the past about being more playful and exploratory in the presentation of my pieces. So here's a lil one to play around with!

Originally I was planning on texturing it with some retro-scifi (Simon Stålenhag) direction in mind, we'll see how the final render ideas come out!

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I've been working on this a bit off and on when I've had the time to, and started out with that in mind. So when I first began modeling for this project, I went pretty basic in order to get through the modelling stages quickly, making the model as plain as possible to get to texturing as fast as possible.

As it turned out, the thing I ended up with was a bit too basic for my liking, so back to the drawing board I went. Thanks to some feedback in the Beyond Extent Discord I got a Miro board with some more interesting references up and running. Not only for modelling, but also for presentation! I didn't want to make any exact model of camera. Instead, I ended up merging a few together to create my own. Apart from this, I quickly sketched out an additional battery pack in case I wanted to have an addon for the camera in the future.

After some final adjustments to the silhouette, as well as some panel lines in the base mesh itself, I took it into ZBrush to create the highpoly. Here I followed my standard workflow of creasing based on angle, subdividing, dynameshing and polishing edges. For this I also took the opportunity to add some screws and sketched out some additional panel lines to make it feel like the camera was built from several pieces, instead of being molded into one solid piece.

After this I decimated the highpoly at quite a harsh number to get it super low, and then brought it back into Blender. Here, I used the decimated highpoly as a blueprint for my lowpoly which used my basemesh which I subdivided with some edge creases to get it to a nice smoothness. I then started deleting unneccessary loops to get it to a more game ready polycount, still very much keeping in mind that I want to preserve as smooth shapes as possible and not be too crunchy with the numbers. This as I'm focusing more on making the asset look good, rather than as optimized as it can possibly be.

And this brings us to the present day! I still have to optimize the glass and adjust the overlap of verts between the high- and lowpoly. But other than that we're ready to move onto UVs! Thanks for reading this catch up and I'll see you in the next one!

The RGB masks are in! Over the past week since New Year's (Happy New Year by the way!) I added in RGB masks for all my objects in the scene and adjusted the cloud shadows in my light function material slightly. It still needs some adjustments but is definately better than before! I also added in a few smaller piles of sand which blends in nicely with the other assets thanks to Runtime Virtual Textures.

The remaining work now is to get in some blowing sand VFX as well as some POM cracks on the cliffs and the quarried blocks to show the way they crack apart. After that it's time for final cinematics and renders! This is probably the last blogpost before uploading the final artwork as there's not too much left. Thanks again for all the support and have a great day!

Wrapping up 2022 as I'm getting ever closer to the finish line with this project. It's taken a while to get here but I'm so happy I took the time needed. A few iterations here and there to the composition, removing some assets that added too much noise, as well as some shader work!

The ropes are in place to make the scaffoldings look more realistic and secure, as well as metal rings securing the larger ropes and flags to the cliffs. I'm really happy I'm a place where I can polish things, like the cloth shader which now is way less intense and looks a lot nicer. Furthermore I took some inspiration from Cairo Goodbrand's RGB mask shader to add more details into my assets. For this I used a secondary UV set, with simple colors assigned via constant 3 vecors in the shader itself. Red channel gives a slight color variation, green adds dust/dirt, blue adds some wetness (also changes roughness) and the alpha channel adds some very slight edge highlights.

All this is now setup neatly for me in Substance Painter using a smart material for the masks, and a template scene so that I don't have to set up my custom channels in Painter every time I need to make another mask.

To help break up the rocky shapes in the scene I decided to reuse the pebble assets I created previously for my ground. Thanks to RVT blending and matching the textures quite well to my scanned ground they looked quite decent even when scaling them up, and didn't really feel out of place. I'm letting these serve as my medium shapes to help the transition from cliff to ground.

Finally it was time to get even more movement into the scene using the cranes. I simply split the crane up into two separate meshes (crane + platform) and brought them separately into the engine. In the engine I combined them into a Blueprint which I then animated using a timeline curve along with exposing the default turn angle I wanted for the crane, enabling me to make each crane's starting position offset from each others.

All of these changes are putting me into an excellent position for finishing this project in January. The final stuff is to get the rest of the RGB masks done, as well as some decal work to really tie it all together.

That's all for this year! Thank you so much for all the help, feedback and support everyone. Now let us look forward to 2023, happy new year!

During the past month there's been quite a few adjustments! Minor fixes which have made quite a difference. The biggest change is in the composition, where I've added in a cave opening in the foreground to help frame the picture and add depth to the scene. Apart from this I've also made the move to Unreal Engine 5.1 and while it hasn't been problem free, the fixes to Lumen and extra control for interiors did make quite a difference between a black void and a nice framing transition once the cave was introduced.

Furthermore I also introduced parallax occlusion to my landscape material, as well as adding some pebble rocks to further sell the depth. For an extra layer of transition assistance I've also introduced RVT blending. And while it still needs some tweaking it's off to a decent start! For the pebbles I started off with one rock and spun it around in ZBrush to check how much use I could get from a single rock. Then I made another 2 to get my final 3 rocks.

Finally I decided to take a look back in time! I think it's always good to once in a while take a look at how my projects evolve over time. It really helps taking a step back and see how long I've come, rather than how long I have left.

To sum the month up I decided to make a quick and dirty first draft of how a shot for the cinematic could look! Seeing things in motion really helps picking up things that needs fixing and also helps with the immersion. And while I do have a fair amount of things left on my list, it's really coming together! Thanks for reading and I'll see you in the next update!

After a lot of rework based on some amazing feedback (mentioned in the last post) I've gotten to a pretty good post! I also decided to dive back into composition a bit, reworking some placement, and also played around with skies a bit. Both with volumetric cloud painting, but also trying out some skybox packs from the marketplace as well. As I'm not that good of a painter by any terms I decided to just go with a pack :) Worked out pretty good, including some fog planes from the old UE Blueprint sample project and I got something real nice in the end!

There's still a fair bit to go though, including getting the RGB masks going for the props, adding the micro shapes like rubble piles and the like. I did get a lot of great feedback last week from the Beyond Extent community that I'm currently in the process of adressing as well. Furthermore, there are some technical bugs with the cloth sim, as well as lumen in combination with the light function materials I'm using to fake cloud shadows. If anyone has experience with that and how to fix it please reach out! :) (Below you can see the latest feedback I got from Beyond Extent)

It's gonna be realm fun to implement all the feedback and see what the scene will look like after these next couple of steps! See you then!

One month and one vacation later! August is coming to an end and so is the current pace of progress! More on that later in the post, but for now: Updates!

We got some more colors in first of all! I decided to dive into some Blueprints to make my own rope-tool similar to the one I previously made in Houdini, although this time directly in engine. It's a bit more primitive spawning in a set mesh piece on points along a spline, but it gets the job done nonetheless! After that I added on the flags, getting the color variation was a bit of a challenge first as I wanted some control over it rather than just going 100% random. The solution was sampling the colors from a pre-chosen array set up in the blueprint. It works really well as it tints the default flag material and gives me a ton of control over the art direction for them! You can find the full blueprint here!

For the tent fabric covering the work area where the workers would be cutting the stones into smaller pieces for transportation, I brought the ropes and a placeholder mesh into Marvelous Designer where I simulated different pieces of tent cloth. Later down the line I might add in holes by using alpha in the tilable texture to add to the ragged look. The cloth pieces were too big with too much collision to be able to easily handle the UE cloth sim however, so I had to look for a different solution there. I ended up with a vertex shader for that, quite a simple one but it gets the work done. I went with the same shader as showcased here. The tent fabric itself was create in Substance Designer as a jute weave.

As you can see below, I also went back and reworked the trimsheet one final time to add on a tiling rope texture that I made using ZBrush for a highpoly which was then unwrapped on a cylinder. I then placed those UVs in the free part of the trimsheet. The rope ends were sculpted from scratch in ZBrush. This was the final part of the trimsheet and I'm really happy with how it turned out!

Thanks to Cairo Goodbrand I also got a new master shader set up for the trimsheet which is being used by every asset except for the rocks :D Cairo's got a great video breaking this shader down over on his Artstation!

The next item on the list was...rocks! A bit of size variation was required to break things up so that's what I jumped on next. And while I still need to add in a small rock piece, a debris cluster and a transition piece between the refined blocks and the unquarried pieces, I started big! Well, medium in this case. I ended up with a medium piece to have something to break up the terrain with. Thanks a lot to Katelyn Johnson for providing a bunch of awesome rock feedback, references and ideas for this piece. It really helped widen my idea spectrum of mixing the cool-factor with realism (it also added Max Mad Fury Road to my "must rewatch" movie list)

So what's next? Well there's a fair bit of work remaining, mainly in terms of breaking up the terrain, as well as relighting. After that there's polishing, getting the RGB shader implemented on all the assets with secondary UVs. For the lighting I got some ideas from Peyton Varney by taking inspiration from this gorgeous illustration by Aaron Limonick in regards of balancing the colors and tones.

I also once again also recieved really useful feedback from Katelyn on layering of the ground elements to help blend the scene together (image 1)! I also recieved a ton of great feedback from the awesome community over at Beyond Extent in terms of more ground elements, separating the destroyed nature of the quarry from the untouched nature around and general tips to improve the scene (image 2)!

Even though there's still a fair amount of work left on this, I'm gonna take it slow. In fact, progress is gonna slow down further as I'm starting my first gig in AAA tomorrow! While I don't plan to call it quits on this project, it's just gonna take a bit longer until it gets finished :) Now then, I can't wait to get started in the industry and keep on learning and growing as an artist! See you all in the next update, whenever that may be!

With the Rookie Awards 2022 at an end I am happy to announce that I recieved an A-ranking for my entry in the Game Development category! This caps off an amazing year for me in the competition having already recieved a Finalist position along with an Excellence Award. And while I didn't make it quite all the way I am nevertheless extremely honored and grateful to stand alongside the other incredible finalists in my category.

Congratulations to all the winners, other finalists and everyone else who sent in an entry this year! Everyone have been producing amazing works of art and I couldn't be happier to be a part of the #gameart and #gamedev community. A special thank you to The Rookies for organising this as well as all the sponsors for giving students and hobbyists around the world the amazing opportunities that the competition offers.

Finally I'd like to thank The Game Assembly for being a great school throughout the last two years and I can't wait to talk more about what the future holds for me in about a month.

Also make sure to check out all the winners here!

Hello there! July is nearing it's end, so before I leave for some vacation I wanted to share the latest! If you've been following me on Twitter, you'll have seen the progress made. But here's a summary if you don't :) This time I'm also adding in a larger breakdown of my new cliff creation process for the larger cliff assets in my scene.

There's been further improvements on the composition, a lot of it thanks to feedback from the awesome people over at Beyond Extent. Yet the majority of the work has gone into reworking my assets, making a new trim sheet, as well as making the crane more functional! (shoutout to Simon Grefback and Gavin Harvey for being killer thinkers for helping me figure out the functionality and how to make it work!)

Furthermore I've also been working on a pretty big part of the scene, cliffs! I've really been struggling figuring out how to create giant environment assets like cliff walls and the like, thankfully I've been getting a lot of help from a real rock expert, Derk Elshof! 

Thanks to him I managed to get down a really solid workflow consisting of creating really extreme heightmaps in Substance Designer, which I could then use to displace simple basemeshes in ZBrush. After that I was doing some minor cleanup using the Planar and TrimSmoothBorder brushes to clean up the worst offenders in terms of noise and weird geo, and then it was ready to make a gameres version! Some lowpoly and UV work later I could bring it into engine! I also decided to play around with the cliff in ZBrush to make a little diorama presentation in order to get a feeling of how it could look like later on. It was also generally just fun doing it!

Since I've been getting quite a few questions about what this workflow would look like in action, I decided to record a short clip in order to demonstrate just how quick it can actually be doing the ZBrush stage! The main thing to keep in mind here is scale in terms of your heightmap vs the scale of your asset, just to make sure things don't look too weird. On a larger cliff for example you'd have to stamp on a lot more of these alphas to keep things consistent.

Once the lowpoly is complete I bring it into the engine and slap on a couple of different detail textures I made in Designer combined with a baked unique normal for every cliff. The detail textures help keep up the fidelity, especially when you have a shader scaling the textures with the asset based on world position and object scale.

The final shader itself is largely based on an article from Vishal Ranga, along with some tweaks of my own like making the shader triplanar for a couple of things. This is mainly because of production efficiency, while I in the future would look at more optimized solutions instead. The final shader has also control for color tinting through an RGB mask, as well as a slight color offset based on world position. These options allow me to create biome variations just through tinting colors, rather than creating brand new textures. Pretty handy! Below is an image of two different groupings of my cliff, with the left and right groupings having different instances on them with different color tints.

Now I'll be going on a short vacation for the next week! After that I'll write down the final remaining pieces as documentation on Notion to keep track of things. (See the picture below for a sneak peek of what awaits) Again a big thank you to everyone in the Beyond Extent community for their great feedback.

Even though some of the feedback has already been implemented (as you can see below) there are still a couple of things left in there for post-vacation ;)  That's it for this update, see you in the next one!

Hello everyone! I can happily announce that I'm a finalist in the Rookie Awards 2022 - Game Development category! I couldn't be more honored for this opportunity and would like to thank The Rookies and everyone else in the gameart and gamedev community for making this happen. A special thanks to everyone at The Game Assembly as well as my mentors Fumio Katto and Derk Elshof for all the help and support.

If you wanna help me win The People's Choice then there's a share button for Facebook in the entry page itself, with each share counting as a vote. Thanks again everyone, and I'm looking forward to seeing the results later this month! And good luck to everyone else who made it through, so much epic art this year overall in the contest!

My entry can be found here!