HIVE

Quick design this evening. Unity stuff.

Photo ref: Haze and Atmosphere

Over my camping trip this past weekend, I was able to get a few shots of Mt. Rainier under several different lighting conditions.  These are the two best.   Really great reference for haze through a valley of mountains.

Blue is about 5:30 and more sunset colored is about 8:00 I believe.   Compression here sort of kills some color.

This was up in the Lost Lake area.

Minimalism

Been exploring more of this minimalism based modeling and lighting scenes.

few more over at http://society6.com/artenvelope

Color/Light

Color Studies / Lighting

Uploading them to here compressed them like crazy, but the colors came out ok. Fun 30 min little exercises in maya. 

Mountains

More world machine. I tried using a quad of 4 and tiled the mountains. Creates a much more continuous range. I used the blur too much (motion blur in WM)...it rounded out the mountains at the top.  I created these using a layout generator spline.

I feel good about the texturing process. This uses  1 texture set at 4096 that I brought down to 2048. 6k tris.

UDK

Maya/Paintover

WM test that I'm going to try and make next. *16 million here*

Paint Update

It's been a while since I've updated. Been busy at work... good to get back and bust out some stuff.  An awesome Seattle sky sunset inspired this. For a side project. 

An alternate one I didnt really like as much so I stopped...

I then did some 20 min quick study of one of my favorites by: http://davidsketch.blogspot.com/

More terrain. Resolution fights.

I've spent a lot of time in world machine lately. Tonight I did some sanity checks to see how much detail actually comes through in the end real time model between 2048x2048 and 4096x4096 in WM. In world machine, you can set the resolution of your mesh in the settings box (see image). There is a pretty big time difference so it was worth exploring.

I found that, generally speaking, I preferred the higher res one and it was worth my time investment. Keep in mind, a 4096x4096 res out of world machine will output a 16.7 million poly model. So have a plan for shrinking that down, or use the heightmaps and rebuild in mudbox.

 (NOTE: I actually just import the model straight into Mudbox and rebuild from 16 million down to a target resolution...)

(NOTE2: If you use Chocos method of using the height map, then you could probably just render at 8k in WM, since the polycount wont matter at all. Just render it over night, because it will take a while)

Here is a small sample of the extra detail added. 

Now there are a ton of ways to get more detail, I'm sure of it. This is just a test I figured I'd share with people. Along with some screenshots. Default night sky in UDK.

More later I'm sure.  I've been having too much fun with this stuff.

Side project: mountains

Some work for a small side project I've been working on at home.

Worldmachine, UDK and Photoshop.

FuturePoly course 2

While teaching the last FuturePoly class on sky textures, I made the above sky swatch. 

Terrain, World Machine, Sky

Experiments in creating landscapes.

So, for a while now I've been wanting to create interesting landscapes to go along with my skybox/dome textures. I have experience in Terragen 2 but I dont particularly like it much. I checked out World Machine a while back but didnt really have the PC nor the time to really devote to it.  Now with this 12 thread 32gig system...I feel more adequately equipped :)

I checked out Choco's tutorials over at Polycount and liked what I saw.  I decided I would give the whole process a go. I ended up changing some things up to get a little more detail in my mesh... I think there is something wrong with my copy of mudbox... I need more investigation.

My intention is to eventually use these terrain in my paintings/concepts/mattes.   Here is some rough work from the evening. Sky is a default unreal sky texture. You just have to hunt for it. (It is actually pretty good!...kudos!)

I am a little backlogged on blog posts. I have 2 or 3 I need to get out... including some more HDR sky painting experiments and one on physical based lighting.

HDR sky painting

HDR Sky Painting

Video link below

When creating a skybox I always strive for interesting painted realism look rather than simply photoreal.  If you simply want photoreal, there are many different ways to capture or buy skybox textures.  I'm focused on creating UNIQUE sun breaks and storms in the sky.

When working in an HDR engine it really complicates things. The normal process of painting in ldr / 8bit simply isnt good enough. If your engine has eye adaptation... it will be really hard for you to get your ldr/8bit texture looking right in the hdr engine. Now, I'm sure you could probably make it work... but why not try and make it better than that? Thats my goal here.  To get a normal brushed/matte painted sky and paint exposure levels into it.

Now, there are many options to make hdr skies. Maya, Ozone/Vue, Terragen to name a few. I'm specifically talking about using photoshop as your main tool.

I'm going to be continuing exploration of how I'd get the exact look I want, but for now here is a quick sample texture I painted originally in 8bit and then converted to 32bit in photoshop and started painting exposure adjustment layers on top of it.  The video below shows exposure steps pretty well...but I think it can get a lot better. More testing!

Link to video:  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2171307/hdr_sky.wmv

The next step will be to create the entire sky from scratch in 32 bit and paint these layers at the correct exposure levels to begin with.

Gir!

Gir!

A gift from my friend Eva!

The Last Friendship - MolyJam 2012 Screenshot

Hi-res screenshot requested by a few folks.

The Last Friendship - MolyJam 2012

In game. No painting.  Getting close to done.

The Last Friendship (MolyJam 2012) update

MolyJam 2012 update. Got a lot of visual setup working in UDK. Eva got a rough model together and Indy is crankin away on math. 

This is a paintover from a screenshot in udk.  

The Last Friendship (MolyJam 2012)

Our game for MolyJam 2012. 

 You are a scarecrow in a world with only 1 bird.

Acute Sky

Acute Sky

I spent some time tonight cleaning up this sky.  I think I'm going to finish this one instead of just stopping here. I like its composition. I just need to figure out what to do in the white area and refine some blobby areas at this point. 

Acute

Acute

2 hour practice before teaching a class at Future Poly on Monday evening.

Mush!

 Mush!

Is how my brain is feeling lately.

I was messing around in maya modeling trees and rendering a light direction. I liked that process a lot..

Background is painted and foreground all painted over.





A version without Mushy.





Quick sketches before starting

 

fishy

Quick sketch before jumping back on a bigger project.