MAV : Renders

I’ve recently worked on some ‘Beauty shots’ (promotional renders) for MAV ‘Modular Assault Vehicle’ by Bombdog studios, using the mech parts and environments i’ve modeled and textured in the past year (always starting from the concepts and specs i receive, most recent parts i modeled from scratch, others starting from concept hipoly models by the main dev. Chad Mauldin) .

These images are rendered in Unity 5, so technically realtime, but at 4k res, with very high general settings and a bit more postfx than would be ‘sane’ for actual in-game use. Models and textures though, are the same used in the game.

One of the coolest (and heaviest) effects in this kind of render is volumetrics, here i used ‘Fog Volume 3’ . An alternative to the whole setup would have been the new ‘Eevee’ viewport/realtime/render engine in dev. for Blender 2.8, which i’m sure would have been more fun for volumetrics, since you can make actual sims of fire/smoke systems in Blender and then render them with Eevee in near-realtime, with accurate volume shadows too. I’m really looking forward to Eevee, but since 2.8 is still alpha and this was production work, i didn’t risk messing up the schedule.

Unity’s fog volume is more limited to primitive volumes and a general cloudy-noise ( understandably, it’s already heavy as it is for use in ‘proper’ realtime ) In any case, having a fog/smoke you can shape is a great tool to hide or reveal more parts of the shot and balance clutter and contrast.

One thing i’m still working on, is the fact that rendering stills in unity means having many lighting types going on at once : pure realtime direct light and shadows, baked GI and the realtime GI. It’s great to be able to bake something and have still 2 out of 3 of those ‘tweakable’ after, but you have to balance them, for stills is often good to use the static baked light heavily since it allows softer shadows and ao,  but it’s the less ‘interactive’ part.

There are more of these renders, but as usual, i only post here assets already published in the game updates 🙂

October 24, 2017 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off on MAV : Renders

MAV: Buildings and environments

So much to post from the past months!  Starting with buildings and environments for the game ‘MAV’.  Above : the garage / game lobby,  below : 2 sets of buildings for the levels:

I always enjoy the architecture part, the style ref.  was 20th century ‘Brutalist’ buildings,  and it fits well with the concept that these buildings are on another planet and in the future, but not necessarily all shiny, high tech and unfamiliar , they are  ‘normal’ everyday industrial or military architecture, even if from a different time and place.

Workflow is the same as previous sets (Blender+Substance).  The screenshots above are beauty shots in Unity 5 ( and some older ones below are Marmoset),  also below,  some w.ip. images of models and previews in Blender and screenshots from Substance Painter with texture sheets, which show what parts are uniquely textured vs. all the repeats and reuse in the assembled models above .

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Also below, landscape shots of the mountain pass and city levels (Unity 4, using the actual in-game shaders) These are large, open levels to fit the size of player models (M.A.V.s are mechs, 2-4 storeys tall)  For the levels, i worked on terrains in Blender and exported to Unity terrain system, textured using S. Designer and used Unity tools for grass and trees.

More posts soon : New mech parts and promotional renders.

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October 8, 2017 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off on MAV: Buildings and environments

MAV: New parts and env assets

Some new assets, done in the past months, for Modular Assault Vehicle by Bombdog Studios.

Lots more to post as soon as they’re released 😀

Modeled in Blender, textures in Substance, rendered in Unity 5,   At this point i prefer results in Unity vs. Marmoset (2, at least) maybe a little less metallic and shiny as i have it set up, but overall pbr reliability and just the easy of shading and lighting in unity 5 (since 5.3-5.6)  is great.   The actual game is unity 4 and not pbr shaded,  but i have started doing some env. / maps work, and that allows to setup reflection maps and lamps  to work better for the mechs’ shading too (and luckily the big open spaces in the game mean that light conditions are much more consistent than in i.e. a human scale city level with interiors, so it’s not too time consuming to expose correctly without pbr,  hdr,  tonemappers and all the fancy stuff) .

Heavy2 cockpit :

Thermal systems (mech parts) :

Ice environment assets :

May 27, 2017 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off on MAV: New parts and env assets

Personal Project

I’m working on a personal project! a small realtime env. (Blender, Substance, Unity)

This was long overdue: some things you only learn on actual projects,  working for and with other people, and with budget and time constraints, but after a while i had also a pile of  things you don’t get to solve properly in that context.

The updates and info on the scene are on polycount :

http://polycount.com/discussion/186290/

And in particular ,  in the last year, i’ve been working on some export and workflow tools of my own (i call them ‘python on post-its’ ) :  It’s some batch tools for quicker common tasks of organization and cleanup when creating game assets and environments.

These tools started as a few macros to rename object pairs for hipoly-lowpoly  and quickly going from Blender to Substance, then expanded with some macros for export to Unity (joining objects preserving custom normals, repacking uvs for use as lightmaps .. and few more boring but useful speed ups)

After a while, i had all these snippets lying around , customized with ‘hardcoded’ changes for each project,  and at least i want to polish them as ‘internal tool’, organize them so they don’t get lost, but i also want to make them as usable/useful as possible for the community.

I think it’s great how Blender allows artists to make their own tools easily (i’m not a dev or a proper technical artist either) and it has surely saved me time on daily env-art work! But this also means, my addons will never be good code or polished,  still this thing will serve its purpose even if it only creates a bit of online discussion about game art tools in Blender,  or later a talk at BConf and eventually the best ideas being picked up by proper devs.

Click on ‘read more’ to continue on this topic :

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April 25, 2017 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off on Personal Project

Almighty window, realtime Architectural elements

This is a set of assets for realtime/VR for the project Almighty window by Rob Tuytel / Model Earth.

These were modelled, and sculpted, in Blender, textured in Substance (painter for most, Designer for the tileable sandstone blocks detail)  Rendered in Unity 5.

This was an interesting project for the level of detail of models, higher than usual because it’s for 1st person / VR, and in particular a game that will be mostly in confined interior spaces.

I’m a big fan of sculpting for architectural details, even when it’s just chipped edges and scratches, but it is time consuming and so procedural workflows is also something i will try to use more and more (i.e. the inner pillars at the sides of the door are sculpted, the outer ones have a tileable procedural texture, where even normal map is fully in substance)

I used spec-gloss pbr model becaus, while still trying to be pbr accurate, i like to have a bit of freedom vs. the metalness model forcing anything non-metallic to have same spec. level.I also made some simple custom shaders in shaderforge to be able to mix detail maps using : 1- a blend mode that doe not add saturation (mix or color dodge depending on cases) 2-adding spec-gloss texture for the detail too (to get nice and detailed spec on wood veneer)

In the images below : the 4 tall pillars are actually the same 2 : left has detail map of sandstone bricks, right has a simpler grainy concrete. The curtains were made by cloth sim in Blender, realtime model made simply by un-subdividing the detailed mesh 3-4 times (to under 1k tris each) + normal map.

In the last row : sculpt detail, hipoly full view (23 million polys between all sculpted pieces and still a workable scene) with material colors corresponding to Substance mat-id key map, and right picture shows lowpoly (material color correspond to texture sheets in unity) with uv view of one of the 4 sheets.

October 25, 2016 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off on Almighty window, realtime Architectural elements

Metris Street Football : Venice Rialto and Thai village environments

These are the 3rd and 4th environments i made recently for the indie pc game Metris Street Football, by Metris code :  Venice Rialto bridge and Thai village.

Specs are same as previously: Unity 5, PC game, current gen level of detail, 1 month of work time each env, modeled  in Blender, textured in Substance. With the addition of using Shader Forge for the water and colored buildings in Thai village.

These levels are a bit bigger than previous ones, and the main challenge was to be selective on what assets to make  to fill them and have variation, without loosing too much detail on the single item, but of course, luckily, the fixed point of view of a sport arena game does allow to keep props simple, quick and dirty (compared to an fps asset that is !)  and still get a good ‘ensemble’ view.

Strictly speaking there’s no LODs in these,  but Venice and size of the view of Canal Grande required  that the further buildings be less detailed than those just behind the goals, it turned out very quick and effective to put  the models of the detailed/hero lowpoly ones in a Blender scene (diffuse textures only in a Cycles material),  render front views of 2 canal sides and then retrace low(er) poly shapes over the rendered 2d card. (in gallery you can see also an attempt to use a curved skybox type plane with a rendered background, but the camera has be able to go 1-2 floors high in a sport game replays, so that wouldn’t work at all)

The other thing about the buidlings is visible in left image of gallery: showing the final diffuse, using a brick tiled detail and base diffuse color (unique unwrap) . That’s something i like to work with : seems a straightforward technical thing to overlay a detail on a base, but  actually involves a fair bit of painter/photograph eye to pick each time the right blend mode, color and saturation of both maps to combine and whether to use a mask to refine the mix (all of course bound by limits of realtime, even when something like ShaderForge makes it very intuitive to do with its nodes)

The last image in gallery above shows the baked light : static on the left , realtime on the right.  There wasn’t a strict need to use dynamic GI for this kind of game, but i think unity’s approach makes a lot of sense in general, blending an advanced and dynamic solution that has low resolution and a simpler, static one that has detail, like soft shadows and contact bounces. This was done just before Unity  added an option to add direct light AO to static bake ..which just goes in that direction , but the result is similar (contact shadows here are from a soft baked sun and sky)

Above some of the models : classic Venice boats, a load of windows doors and other facade details used on the buildings, and the Rialto model : the substance painter view is ..full of holes  🙂  because i didn’t export  parts/modules that could reuse textures from other parts But it includes mirrored objects.. never got baking errors from those, and i guess i could setup Painter to show everything but only bake some, but this works fine, only requiring sometimes to do an exploded placement to get better ao (as usual i bake normal in small separate chunks by matching hi/lo poly objects names, but bake ao from everything to give more ‘food’ to procedural materials to make their effects)

Below  more screenshots of finished level :

And the other level is Thai village : Venice was done just after and reused the water shader (though changed ..much muddier)   This level has a bit less architecture, but also a lot of natural landscape, requiring some special attention to light and shading .

The water shader is technically simple , just some more nodes than a standard material: a base, a single detail reused in 2 scales to get resolution without repetition, a  static mask for foam  around objects (all animated with texture panning) and a planar reflection from stock unity effects.

It’s always risky to start adding nodes to a realtime material, before you know there’s a ton of them !  but afaik this should be still a simpler solution than SSR or transparency effects.

The atmospheric scattering plugin (from Blacksmith demo, at low settings) does add a lot in these types of landscapes : yes.. it’s a fog, but one that takes light direction into account, and a lot more natural looking than a simple fade to flat color.

Something that proved important here : limiting the work to the camera angles actually used in game. This level is based on a real world location, something amazing about the photos of this floating Thai village is the variety of roofs .. but those are hardly visible in game and anyway not so important to need many variations.

he houses on the waterfront, in reality, also are each very different, so i made a few models, then added a shader with a color mask for wall paint areas and a vertex color channel to get unique colors on the foreground buildings.

Below images of the individual assets in substance and more screenshots :

October 21, 2016 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off on Metris Street Football : Venice Rialto and Thai village environments

M.A.V. – modular mech parts

M.A.V. : Modular Assault Vechicle is a indie PC game where you can build your mech and fight other pilots, developed by Bombdog Studios.

I worked on  unwrapping, making hipoly detail models and texturing all the mech parts in the library, and modelled lowpolys for some.

Credits for the base design and lowpoly modelling goes to the main dev of the game Chad Mauldin (http://bombdogstudios.com/)   and  Valerio Fissolo  collaborated on modelling hi and low poly for the heavy weapon set.

Image below is the full set of pieces done in the 1st round, but more mech parts and env. assets are coming.

That’s quite a library of pieces, but also quite consistent set of materials,  and hipoly detail types, so a big part of the job was  a good workflow, for the texturing the key was the standard Substance workflow of setting material ids on hipoly pieces, then applying to all sets a single smart material with color keys for the mat ids (approx. 30 materials in total), combinations of plastic, metal, rubber in 3 shades (light, mid , dark) and dull or shiny versions .  The camo you see is dynamic, applied in game.

The overview screenshot is in the game engine, Unity 4,   with a custom hardsurface shader. The assembled mech pictures on top and below are Marmoset viewer renders (using same spec/gloss maps as in game but with full pbr shading)

Below screenshots of various parts in Substance painter , with test camo patterns. Turns out, pink camo is the best way to judge if the mask is good 🙂 and how much camo paint the mech will acutally get.

The  exploded placement is there to get correct occlusion  while baking hipolys, and models were split in even smaller parts and named to get clean normal map bakes  .. all then put back toghether and in place with some python script/macros  to handle the repetitive bits.

The medals are game achievements i modelled and rendered as images.

The last screenshot is inside Blender  showing a bit of the workflow.. mat id list, some low and hi poly pieces,  the  list of named (-hipo or -lopo) pieces and script with buttons to quickly export to substance or to final fbxs for unity .

October 11, 2016 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off on M.A.V. – modular mech parts

Beach Arena

This is  the 2nd arena from the Metris Street Football project. Like the next ones , this is based on real world locations, not precise ones, but generally popular and cool places where street soccer is played, like a city beach in Brazil.

This also proves i don’t only do postapocalyptic stuff! (and robots and sci-fi and ships…) Incredibly, the next 2 (Thai village and Venice ) even have bright sunny daylight ! 😀

The view of a city beach has lots of elements, from the natural (sand , rocks and water, for which i used Substance designer for the most important tileables like sand, and for the 1st time Shader Forge for some additional blending and detail masks)  to the architecture.

And the list there could have been nearly infinite, so the challenge was to narrow it down to the minimum (1 umbrella, 1 chair, 1 background tower and ‘sets’ of parts for wood huts and gazebos that allowed some different combinations.

September 25, 2016 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off on Beach Arena

Ship Arena – Metris street football

Lots to post from recent months ! Starting with this: environment art for PC game Metris street football for Metris Code.

“Ship Arena” (inspired by Terry Gilliam’s commercial from some years ago 😀 )

Modelled in Blender, textures in Substance, game engine and lighting in Unity.

I’ve done 3 more of these arenas (1 per month) recently, and i’ll be posting also another project i’ve done before that and that’s continuing now .

As for tech specs, it’s a indie pc game,  uses Unity 5, so pbr materials and Enlighten (using a combo of low res realtime and more detailed baked GI ). Polycount was a bit more limited, aiming for 150-200k tris per level.

Textures budget is always a little less clear-cut : generally it’s all done with a 8-12 2k textures (knowing some might need ‘sacrificing’ to 1k) , 1-2 4k textures and 3-4 1k tileables and misc. textures,  which runs fine on a modern pc even at 1440p  but it’s anyway easily scalable for other hardware.

(Edit : 8-12 2k textures .. i mean sets of course ! so actually 3-4 images each , diff+opacity,  pbr spec/gloss, normal and rarely emission or a detail mask )

Workflow has been pretty consistently Blender/Substance/Unity.  The biggest new thing has been the export script i mentioned earlier to batch export quickly from blender to substance for hi-to-low bake and then to Unity for assembling the environment and lighting it.

This script i started  is working ok as an internal tool for my work, but i’d honestly need a meditation week away from everything before it’s worth posting about as a general use tool.  It doesn’t do anything fancy besides joining, renaming, repacking uvs without overlaps, fixing things like flipped normals on joining objects and rearranging ‘named’ uv layers in blender for the ‘numbered’ approach in unity …

But of course behind all the operations there’s a workflow and a logic structure : i.e. how i use object name suffix or parenting or scenes to organize all the copies of assets (for texturing and for in game use)  and that’s very ‘personal’ (to my workflow and projects)

Right now, i have a bit of free time , so i could do that rethink and make sure any more python code i will write is time well spent, and hopefully that will make it more usable for others … Except 😀 , the priority is going to learning the Hard Ops modelling tool for Blender, which is going to be very useful for the other project i’ll post soon.

September 20, 2016 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off on Ship Arena – Metris street football

Branched path tracing and complex node trees tests (BConf13 slides)

Just back from Blender Conf 2013 .. so nice , as usual 😀

Below the slides i had prepared for the Tube project talk . Presentation was very short, so i only mentioned the tests i did on render performance of complex node trees in progressive path tracing vs. branched path tracing.

The 1st 10 slides are misc. w.i.p. images from Tube , the last ones show some comparisons between integrators , basically : branched being faster for easier cases (like absence of transmission and sss components and no dof or motion blur which require high AA ) and if setup correctly (trying to keep AA samples as low as possible)

Also the comparison is between complex node trees (= blending dirtmaps and tileables ‘live’ in the cycles material nodes) and ‘baked’ materials (= not lightbake, just ‘flattening’ the node tree to a single image per channel)

And the result is, baked shaders are much faster (circa. 150%) than complex nodetrees in progressive mode , while in branched the difference is only around 10%.

The test should be more extensive , with more data points ..but this seems to be the pattern. That’s relatively good news for shading artists wanting the flexibility and speed of setup of complex nodetrees but worried about their technical rendertime performance.

More to come on the subject, please post if you have any question.

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EDIT : seems the slideshow gallery type doesn’t allow fullscreen , to see images fullsize (to read rendertimes!)  click below (“more..”) to see expanded gallery with links to fullsize slides.

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October 31, 2013 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off on Branched path tracing and complex node trees tests (BConf13 slides)

Final! (..final1, at least)

This is the final image of my personal still project. after some feedback i got on forums :

it was mentioned adding a character, .. but characters are an issue : being an env artist, that’s what i focus on . When i tried to have chars in my last personal still .. they weren’t at the same level as the hard-surface parts, and i don’t want people to be distracted by a bad skin shader or similar..

So i thought , if not chars .. at least some storytelling element would help , i came up with the idea of the cordon.. (like a crime scene, or a contagion zone .. ) it’s just a minor element but adds some plot , as well as just phyisically filling some space in the road area , and ,as for composition , it mirrors the curve of the arch above.

The other update is i’ve added displacement to the foreground bricks … being those so close up, makes a nice difference to have the detailed silhouette and better shading… (and it wasn’t much work , i just added some subd, a displace modifier an used weight paint to tweak intensity in different areas)

Latest feedback i got -just after publishing as final on BA, argh! 🙂 – was a mock-up for better composition and perspective. A great suggestion .. especially considering i’m still bothered that my last big personal project was precisely too simmetrical in composition .  I think i’ll keep it this way and wrap up, but , i’ll remember that , check the mockup at CGS forums, quite interesting :

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=7661133

Diffcol pass and wireframe :

Video ‘post mortem’ project analysis :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doJq8m6emsI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nwmHoS_0xk

September 16, 2013 | Categories: Uncategorized | 3 Comments

new still : time to wrap

Here’s the latest render of this env still .  It’s time to wrap this up ! but i still want some feedback so i’m posting some material to share on forums :

Slideshow of all test renders from blockout to final tweaks :

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Below, a screengrab showing which materials are based on dirtmaps (the ones in greyscale ) dirtmaps were 1st baked with the batchbake script , then painted over. The coloured parts are materials based on photos (of a ‘complete’ architectural piece like a wall panel or door) , except the sidewalk tiles based on sculpts  done in Blender (and photos)

And Some passes from the latest render (AO and diff) :

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September 8, 2013 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off on new still : time to wrap

New Still : few more bits and pieces

Can you spot the difference with previous update ? just kidding .. the tweaks are getting smaller , but still, at this point you want to patch up all the small imperfections or unfinished bits.

Some visible changes are to composition, mostly on color grading and exposure,  including changing  brightness of some material to get better overall colors (i.e. the background building bricks are brighter and of a cooler hue  now )

I’ve refined the fog , using the “shaded” mode instead of “shadowed” , it’s slower but more realistic , the godrays are barely visible  but more ‘physically’ plausible.

An interesting bit -even if not very visible- is that i’ve finally painted (photo-based) spec and bumpmaps for the green doors on the right and ‘diamond’ wall (on the left) :  those parts are heavily based on photos (meaning the model is traced over an actual photo of the full wall or door )

Basing the model heavily on a photo of a complete architectural element definitely helps realism .. However i was bothered by the shading which looked a bit more “plain” and flat : it had bump and spec , but derived from the photo in cycles nodes, i spent about 30mins each in gimp with brushes and filters and i think they now integrate better with the rest.

In general , using good , complex photo textures was one of the aims of this still … i always relied more on tileables and complex shaders than good photos,(in the end, here too they’re just a few pieces).

But they have their pros .. like the door in the background : i think i wouldn’t have came up myself with such an interesting pattern in weathering (instead i just found a gorgeous looking hallway door in the city center.. and snapped a photo)

September 3, 2013 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off on New Still : few more bits and pieces

New still: road and other facades

About everything is textured ! and most is working ok, with some tweaks to do (the dirt color in the green building, the puddles water shader) i’m also planning to add some more mesh details and props (especially to the background building) , and rework some models (like the garden entrance).

I’ve also worked a bit on the lighting ,  trying to get a balance between dusk sunlight and artificial light.

Also, i’d really like to  have some  volumetric light and fog ,  so i guess i can’t refine the comp much (in contrast .. staturation and key/fill light ratio ..) before setting that up.

But, In general, .. this render gives a good idea of where this is going .. And, as usual, with my renders it has a peculiar “matte” look to it … and , more than that, the lighting isn’t very contrasted .. if you blur the image you quickly get to a flat grey  .. But i also like that matte look !  you can read and see detail in shadow areas and it’s not too “cheap-cg-glossy”  (when i say matte or glossy here , i don’t mean ‘materials’  but the ‘film’ ..the general look/lighting style )

This question is also related to something that i started figuring out during Mango.. that’s the “conflict” between lighting and textures : strong, rich, contrasted textures can get in the way of lighting , almost “overriding” the lighting itself  …this image is a good test ground for this , at some point i’ll have to do the comp not starting from the final render but rebuilding it from passes , so i can try to balance influence of color passes and dir/indir light passes … let’s see..

Btw , thanks for the comments !  i’ve posted this only on the blog and social networks because so far i stuck to ‘my own plan’ and  had lots to test anyway, but at some point i should try to get more crits and additional ideas ..

August 22, 2013 | Categories: Uncategorized | Comments Off on New still: road and other facades

New still : modelling and texturing sidewalks

More texturing and detailing.. And, who knew ? making good looking sidewalks is hard !

In general, at this point,  judging the results  always gets confusing .. you have ‘finished’ pieces next to clay or basic materials ; there is light and comp , but it’s far from final ,etc.. So you just have to keep working ..and know where to suspend judgement ..

In the pic below the progression of sidewalks .. took quite a few iterations !  first i ‘slapped on’ some tileables ..and the result was so bad i realized this element would take some serious work .

So i dug into my library of tiles textures for the better ones -those with hand sculpted bumpmaps .

That wasn’t enough :  just using bump looked horrible on the left sidewalks , so i added displacement .. But in the end i modelled and placed individual lowpoly tiles (with bump tex)  : it takes time but it’s better looking and lighter on rendertime than displacement.

Next some  tweaks to the sidewalk shape (for composition reasons.. ) and added some pebbles using  particle scattering .

And finally tweaking the color so the sidewalks don’t stick out that much (they were definitely too bright)

Pfff.. that took a while 🙂  Next the road ..

August 19, 2013 | Categories: Uncategorized | 4 Comments