working on some commercial stuff

some stuff il be trying to sell at Emerald City ComicCon. lots to do and learn. will post finals when they are done.

Zbrush Tileable Scultping

I have tried many ways aroudn the issues of making a tileable alpha in zbruhs without a ton of post work to fix seams. this is a great little tutoria that I will add to my arsenal of tricks for less hard work :)

Huge thanks to BradHB3D for the awesome workflow.

Some simple model work

been making a lot of generic props for a game coming out on steam real soon. i just began the texturing pass here are some examples on what I've been making. nothing mind blowing but its fun to make some of these simple models as elegant as possible.

Zbrush plug ins

some sweet zbrush plug ins courtesy of Nick
https://gumroad.com/l/nickstools

In Mmemory of Destiny's Loot Cave

My friend Dan Rosas has made a quick weekend interactive art piece in loving memeory of the original loot cave found in Destiny. I made the models for him for this piece. it exploded and went viral. pretty awesome. Go check it out and below are a bunch of links.

• http://www.gamerheadlines.com/2014/09/destiny-loot-cave-simulator/
• https://www.reddit.com/r/DestinyTheGame/comments/2htku3/polygoncom_you_can_farm_loot_caves_without_buying/
• http://www.pcgamer.com/interactive-cave-shooting-simulator-brings-part-of-the-destiny-experience-to-pc/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__RLhIfXkBo&app=desktop
• http://kotaku.com/destinys-loot-cave-lives-on-forever-in-goofy-tribute-ga-1640483752?utm_campaign=Socialflow_Kotaku_Facebook&utm_source=Kotaku_Facebook&utm_medium=Socialflow

PBR Values for UE4 via Sébastien Lagarde

Original Post Via
Sébastien Lagarde

BaseColor

The color is provide in sRGB 0-255.

The diffuse part of the base color (the one use by the non-metallic) must be in the range of the first gradient 50-243. There is some sample values of real world material in sRGB below the gradient. Some of these values are base on real world measured material (from misc sources, not done by us) and other are have been generated by Laurent Harduin. He take calibrated raw picture of representative material, take the luminance histogram in Photoshop and use the value of the medium axis for the luminance. Then he blur the picture and take one pixel inside the blurred region and use that as the color value. This explain why in few case like the clean cement the color and the luminance doesn’t match perfectly. We also lower a bit the value to take into account the invevitable specular present during the capture.

The reflectance part (the one use by metallic) must be in the range 186-255 (not present in the chart). Some example are provided below the grey square. Most of the time the metallic color of material match what the eye see.

Metallic

Simple monochrome linear parameter. Range is 0-1 but the gradient is from 0-255. The yellow sphere below represent in-engine capture of a sphere and a cube.

Roughness

The specular part of Disney “principled” BRDF is a GGX BRDF. It use a roughness parameter. This roughness is the “Disney roughness”, not the real GGX roughness. Disney Roughness = sqrt(Roughness). When use at runtime this Disney Roughness is transform to the GGX roughness with roughness = Disney Roughness * Disney Roughness.

The gradient display roughness from 0 for smooth (left) material to 1 for rough material (right).
The grey gradient are from 0 to 255 and red segments are displayed every 1/10 with a sphere like object below to show the in-game result of the designated value.
The first row of real world image above represent no metallic object, the second row represent metallic object. Goal is to give artist a better feeling of what is roughness.
The first row of sphere like object represent metallic object, the second row represent non-metallic object.

Note: The roughness here is coupled with the BRDF used by the Unreal engine 4, it may not be compatible with other engine or offline renderer.

Porosity

The Dontnod chart include an unusual parameter named Porosity. This parameter is the “open porosity” of a material. It can be used for driving weathering and aging effect (Pollution, rain, aging…). More details on its usage can be found in previous blog post: Water drop 3a – Physically based wet surfaces and Water drop 3b – Physically based wet surfaces. In practice Dontnod use it mainly with the dynamic wet formula provided in the mentionned previous post.

The range is remapped from 0-1 to 0-70% of open porosity. There is real worl image to try to give a feeling of what the value mean. An extremely porous material is the clay (70%), but open porosity can vary a lot for same material, clay could also be only 50%.

Note: The porosity parameter is not used in the BRDF formulation. More research need to be done on this topic and currently there is only one porosity BRDF paper available which doesn’t fit with the current need.

Reflectance

There is no chart for the reflectance value of the Unreal engine 4, just let the value by default and apply a cavity map on it.
Difference with the old chart

The previous chart was based on modfied Unreal engine 3 where I introduced a new physically based renderer based on Blinn-Phong BRDF. This new chart is based on the Disney “principled” BRDF use in the Unreal engine 4 which is based on the GGX BRDF. The glossiness of the previous chart and the roughness of this one do not match. Moreover, the range is inversed. Previous specular value for metalic can be reuse for Unreal engine 4 reflectance parameter. UE4 use a mapped range of 0-1 to 0.08, so you need to do the conversion. But in practice there is so little difference that’s it is not necessary to use the precise values.

Reference

[1] Burley, “Physically based shading at Disney”, http://disney-animation.s3.amazonaws.com/library/s2012_pbs_disney_brdf_notes_v2.pdf[2] Hnat, thesis “Influence of surfaces micro-geometry on realistic rendering” in French,http://epublications.unilim.fr/theses/index.php?id=4820

Environment challenge!

I will be entering the art for games website's environment challenge. Ill try and make one of my favorite areas of a game. FFIX Cid's Castle. I will post here as i work on it as well as on the competitions forum. I hope to finished in about 2 weeks since the deadline is on Aug 8th. if anything i would like to be done with all assets in 2 weeks and just tweak values and settings on shaders until the deadline.

heres some ideas for the theme and then the second pic for a style.

***UPDATE***

I found the view I will be making. lets get this shit started!

Quixel Suite

I've always been a fan of the quixel guys. so tonight i finally took the new ddo out for a spin. definitely need getting used to the new flow but this is a way more intuitive way to work compared to the last version. fucking awesome work Teddy and everyone involved.

Something is cooking...

I swear updates to come. based on a  concept by Popov-Sergey-Michailovich

a different view.

low poly bakes

UPDATE!!
some texturing on its way.

UPDATE 2

more texturing

Gong Inspired by Artyom Vlaskin concept work.

Its been a long time. I have lots of stuff to update here in the next week or two but in the mean time heres what i am currently working on. I will update this post with more info soon.I love Artyom Vlaskin concept work and decided to try and make one of his pieces for fun. Just a little something i am working on for fun and to learn some new techniques and workflows. been using Maya, Zbrush, TopoGun, Photoshop, DDO and Marmoset. Work in progress images at bottom.
Final Render

WIPS

BRZAP! 5 tips for creating unique sci-fi sounds in video games

Hybrid the game I had been working on over the last 2 years came out summer 2012 for XBLA. I will be posting more on the art of the game in the coming weeks but Gamasutra has released an article from the Audio Director from the game. its a good read.

Here is the launch trailer for the game if you never even heard of it.

GO HERE FOR THE ARTICLE!!

GO HERE TO SEE MORE OF THE GAME!!

Zbrush Time Lapse and some Photography.

Among a couple things my friend went ahead and made a time lapse of a shield I made to learn hard surface in Zbrush.  I need to give proper credit to the original artist who concepted this piece but I am unable to find who it was. ass soon as I know I will post a URL to his site here. the video is about 5 minutes and not very good. Bu t id id learn a lot. I need to finish that Gong I started after this soon.

Also some updates to my Flickr collection from the winter of 2012.

More Portfolio digging.

Going through more old stuff. 

The Agency. SOE. MMOFPS PS3/PC

Alex Alvarez Foliage method.

Been looking into some foliage stuff lately. been feeling inspired to do a small render of my own. Alex's techniques on this matter are superb. I recommend checking him out. I posted a little snippet from his site below.

Alex Alvarez: "Forest Path


I’ve been obsessing over natural environments lately, developing my workflow for plants/trees and techniques for object placement. Maya, Mental Ray, Paint Effects, Onyx and a little Zbrush for the path. 110 million polys. Rendered with physical sun/sky and all miaMaterialX. Surprised by how many polys I can throw at Mental Ray!"

'via Blog this'

Going through the Old Pfolios

Going through the portfolios since I have hardly updated it since forever. Here are some of the images I found. also programming my new portfolio to use lightbox and making it awesome and streamlined.

Lighting before

Lighting after