So over the past week I've been starting to work on something new! I had the opportunity to try out New World for a weekend and found a nice little quarry. So I got inspired to make my own! It's gonna be really fun working on a more natural environment with a big focus on sculpting, something that I've been missing a lot making the past couple of projects. This is also a chance for me to try out the full release of UE5!

I spent the easter weekend getting a quick blockout in, and got to work on some sculpts! Not only a trimsheet for the wood pieces, but also for the rocks! So far I've gotten first iteration sculpts for the smaller scatter rocks/boulders, as well as the main quarry blocks! Those are also UVed and got placeholder textures on them in engine. Later on I'll be making tilables and using a world-aligned shader to mix between the baked normal+AO maps and tilables with detail textures on top! Hopefully I'll also get some dust on top based on z-alignment :)

This project will be moving a bit slower than the previous three, as I'm working on this on my free time alone compared to when I had the ability to spend school hours. Nevertheless it's gonna give me more time to polish everything and really push myself further without stress. In the end I'll hopefully have a lil outdoor environment where you can explore a bit freely. Both in the quarry, but also in the forest that will eventually be surrounding it!

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

Not too many changes this week as I mentioned in my last post. Nevertheless I've tweaked a bit of lighting and starting planning out how to get some more depth into the scene. Looking forward to having a lot more to show next week, see you then!

Week 7 is complete! I got the final pieces in the scene and mainly focused on lighting this past week. Now it's all about those final 20%. Thanks to a lot of great feedback I've gotten during the past week I'm ready to get to tweaking! Roughness tweaks to make the surfaces feel more wet, adding a bunch of pieces to add depth to the scene, adding chaos to the shapes, and making a couple of more variations for the ground materials. Furthermore I'll try to make some puddles!

The main idea for next week is to work on another smaller project to rest my eyes from this project and come back with fresh eyes, but like always I'll probably end up doing some tweaking here and there. Anyhow. No matter if the next update on this piece is next week or the week after that, I'll see you then!

The majority of this past week has been down to improving the mood in the scene, slightly tweaking the lighting and adding decals and Megascans scatter assets to break up the ground! I've also like mentioned in my last post been working on some more materials! This time new metal, rust and rubber!

Furthermore I also managed to dive a bit more into Houdini to improve my pipe tool! That now has had its normals fixed and UVs added. Next up on that list is finalizing the cable tool. The main subject for next week however will be lighting. My goal is to after next week have the scene in a polish-ready state, after which I can just work on polishing everything to get it done! Bye for now!

For the past week I've mainly been working on additional meshes. Finalizing the ones I already had as well as getting to work on some additional ones! I've also spent some time refining and expanding on the ground material, adding 2 variations which I can vertex blend in engine. Thanks to Scot Daniel Burns I learned some more about parallax occlusion and how to make it look good in engine. Huge thanks to him for helping out! Down below you'll also find some ballsy renders in Toolbag :P

I've also looked into another camera angle! Pretty happy with it but those things can always be improved! The coming week will be spent on improving the lighting, getting some decals in and overall improving the mood! I'll also spend some time looking into more material variation for the man-made objects in the scene and finalizing shaders. See you next time!

Materials, materials, materials! There's been quite a lot of time spent in Substance Designer this week as I've been focusing on textures. Namely, tilable surfaces. A lot of different concrete surfaces, as well as broken asphalt!

The Houdini experiments continued a bit more as I was able to get my own (very basic at this point) sculpted coal piece meshes in to simulate them into a nice little rubble pile. That all baked down really nicely in Designer which I then could add color to. Definately a workflow I'll have use of in the future!

Next week is gonna have a focus on getting a lot of the final meshes in and getting that set up with masks to work with my master material :) Looking forward to it. See you then!

For week 3 I started getting a first lighting pass in, as well as some materials! So right now I have steel and rust in. Those are then blended through masks using a secondary UV workflow to make sure that I can keep the texel density and detail while still using tilable textures. It's all still an early pipeline test, but so far everything checks out!

I've also gotten the opportunity to play around a bit more with Houdini, this time for rubble! There's still a few quirks to fix in the graph, but at least I've gotten it to bake down to a tilable height map which I can use in Designer!

Next week I'm gonna keep working on materials! The priority is gonna get my concrete in, so looking forward to that! If all goes well I'll also get to work on the proper modules! See you then!

So! Weekend has come and thus it's time for a new project update! Since last week I've been busy making tools and wrapping up my blockout! Thanks to a workshop with Simon Verstraete and some SideFX tutorials I've gotten started in Houdini, resulting in a pipe tool and a cable tool. During this process I've learned a ton about how Houdini can speed up my workflow. It's also been quite a playful week as I've been spending a lot of time resimming my cables in the environment. In short: quick yet playful iterations! Next week I plan on getting a base lighting pass in, along with working on some tilable materials and trim sheets!

In other news I decided to move the project to Unreal Engine 4 instead of 5. This due to Houdini not yet being supported by Unreal 5, as well as loosing compability with other plugins and packs I can use to speed up the workflow. I simply didn't think the tradeoff to loose those factors and gain Lumen was worth it at this point :) A good reflection and choice that I believe I will gain from moving forward.

To summarize: Moved the project to UE4, finished the blockout, making materials next week! See you then!

Hello Artstation! It's been a while :) I'm currently wrapping up final renders of the last project and have begun working on my next one. This time it's an outdoor environment based on a concept by Sergey Vasnev. The past week has been all planning, setting everything up in Notion. This includes an asset list, scrumboard, and documentation for workflows I'll need :)

Right now I'm in the process of blocking out things, this time trying out UE5! I'm looking forward to exploring its quirks, along with its pros and cons over the next 6 weeks. Something else I want to try out this project is Houdini! Making some tools for pipes, cables and the like. I'm leaving you all with a first shot of my blockout, as well as the original concept. That's it for now, see you all in a week!

So this update has taken a while to get here. But a lot of work has been done since! I've completed another prop, the desk. There was quite a bit of back and forth with baking and UVs but at long last, it is complete!

Furthermore the scene has also progressed with adding placeholder materials and colors. A great tip I got from Jeremy Estrellado to get a better feeling early on for the colors and making me able to work with the lighting even more. Should've done this earlier but you live as you learn! Next up I hope to finish the remaining furniture so that I can start working on the smaller stuff. Can't wait for that! See you in the next update!

(As a special treat, here's also a collection of details from the desk's highpoly and a final closeup)