Apex Telescope

The Apex Observatory environment turned out to be too ambitious, and I made some bad decisions in the beginning which greatly slowed me down. So in order to complete something by the time of graduation I decided to scale things down and focus on a hero prop for the environment while I sort out the rest.

Unlike my usual workflow of modeling a highpoly and baking down maps I decided to try something different. All the detailing on the telescope was done 100% in Photoshop using the plugin nDo2. The plugin is also nice enough to generate AO and cavity, which I used as a nice base for the texture. Quixel's new plugin dDo was released just as I was done texturing my telescope, which is a shame because it would have made the process a lot faster.

In retrospect I should have been better at reusing details and features on it, particularly on the cylindrical parts as they are all rather similar. It would have saved me a ton of time. Also I should have made the mechanism at the base more nonsensical and interesting looking since the whole design is very whimsical.

Now I am doing a quick and very simple environment for it to live in. I'm going with the same basic idea as the Apex Observatory where a rickety and precarious observatory has been built on a very high and narrow peak above the clouds. Except now it's scaled down to a single eccentric astronomer living as a hermit on a tiny patch of land. Here is an early iteration:

dDo is pretty neat.

So dDo by Quixel is in open beta now and I gave it a spin. Just a simple test on a super generic nonsense sci fi wall, but it's a very handy tool. Won't be able to replace doing texturing b hand, but it automates a lot of the drudgery of painting in scratches along edges and blending dirt into cavities. Me likey.

Fatty The Pirate

I think this guy has shown up in a previous post or two, but I decided to sit down one day and texture him. I tried out a new approach to handpainted textures where I make a base diffuse lighting pass out of the green channels (up vector) of a Bent Normal map and a PrtP map, and make a cavity map out of a normal map to bring out some details. Then I just painted skintones and such and blended them with the light pass. It turned out pretty nice, I'll definitely keep using this technique.

Trying out a neat technique.

I saw a really clever technique in a video by Ryan Kingslien and had to try it out. Instead of sculpting on top of a flat featureless basemesh I made a quick wire armature with zSpheres and then used the InsertSphere brush to add "lumps of clay" that I then stretched and deformed into the different muscles and big forms. Essentially emulating how one would work with clay in real life. It's a really obvious way to work when I think about it, and the tools have been around since zBrush 3 so I have no idea why I never throught of it before.

Here is the video I mentioned by the way:

Just a window.

Updates have been slow. Moving out and getting ready for the Massive Black Workshop here in SF.

Today I made a Window. Huzzah. Trying to compile a set of MultiMesh brushes in zBrush through this project, that should save me some time in the future.

Just playing with Maya Vector.

Just for fun.

UDK Fake Thickness Material

Today I made a material that fakes thickness on surfaces that use transparency masking. 

The concept is basically to offset the texture with a Bump Offset node (also known as Parallax), then darkening it with a multiply node, and then adding it underneath the original texture with a Lerp node. It doesn't handle corners that well, so I'm wondering if multiple stacks of Lerp might help with the illusion but I'm worried about the drawcalls. Also, I'm not sure if this is more efficient than just stacking two planes, I'll have to do some testing.

Here is the Material Graph: