Chest Master Study - Final Renders

Final renders for my 3D Art boot camp project. 

This project, by in large, is the most successful I've been in terms of executing on a vision of a project. I immediately knew I wanted to recreate the VFX and rigging present in the original image. I managed my time well and ended up with a piece I'm very pleased with.

 

Base color, Detail Lighting, wireframe, and full composite.

 

Reference image.

 

The Coin effect is a Niagara system base on this tutorial.

 

 

Geometry with VFX applied versus non. 

The main main VFX, the swirling energy and pulsing rings are all done in a single shader. Rings are SDF's and do not reference any textures. The cones are done with a scrolling noise with polarized texture coordinates.

Here's the material graph before and after cleanup. I used material functions for code that would be repeated a few times, which only ended up being the circle SDF's.

The baking process for this piece was the largest struggle point. Splitting up the mesh more like the professional did in the real game asset will solve the issue.

Chest Master Study - Game Res, Bakes, and UV's

Finalized low poly and bakes of this chest asset.

4k Texture for the body, 2k for the orb.

 

 

Standard UV techniques for the body. The sphere is 2 haves stacked on each other, this the purple color.

 

 

First pass of texturing and some VFX experiments are also complete. 

 

 

Reference

Chest Master Study - High Poly and Low Poly

 

High Poly of my chest. This took me about 10 hours I'd say? It's a bit hard to tell, the work was protracted over a few days and snuck in between assignments and meetings and etc. The vast majority of the work was accomplished through Live Boolean, Trim Dynamic, and the Layer brush.

 

 

ID Map.

 

 

 I'm still on track to get this asset its rig and VFX. The above is the low poly model, baked out in Marmosett. Took about 8 hours to retopologize. 

 

Bakes and Wires

 

Piece I'm recreating by Eleanore Falck
 

Chest Master Study - Blockout Thoughts

My Reference by Eleanore Falck

  Block out of a master study of a chest asset for class. Rendered in Zbrush. The challenge here is to be as accurate as possible from limited reference material. 

 

    I tend to do my blockouts in Zbrush. I like having access to all of my sculpting tools, even on less organic pieces like this. I use the crease edges/dynamic subdiv workflow to achieve these results. Zmodeler is obtuse, but highly effective once you get the hang of it. 

 

Remember to set your scale!

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    I'm going to attempt to rig this chest to open and close, as well as get the VFX present in game running as well. I have to work on an accelerated time table to achieve this. Currently midway through the high poly sculpt. Progress below. I should be able to wrap up this and the retopology this week, provided Covid doesn't knock me out.

 

Meet Mat - The Search for the Mailman

 

 

 

    Texturing assignment based in the Meet Mat competitions that are held online. This was my first time rendering using IRay. My meet mat is a dog stuck in a mailbox (he was looking for the mailman).  I knew I wanted to change the base mesh in some way while maintaining the main silhouette of the original model. I played around with tentacles and food, but once the dog idea hit I got attached.

    

    My Painter workflow is pretty standard, using fill layers and masks to drive material attributes. I like to really mess around in my base color whenever I can to achieve a stylized, varied look. I use lots of position gradients and the 3D distance generator a lot.

Albedo pass in substance viewport. 

 

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    I ended up using a lot of Substance Designer in this project. My first challenge was creating a rock texture that really captures the scattered garden rock aesthetic I was looking for. The base layer of pebbles is just a Voronoi noise warped with Perlin. Then I made a few bigger shapes with blurs and warps. 

 

 

Small Rocks

 

Big Rocks

 

    All combined with some extra noises layered on top.

 

 

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         I knew I wanted a more stylized look for the piece. I usually sculpt details when I'm doing wood, but with the time constrain I wanted to see if I could get a nice stylized height map out of Designer. The common workflow for wood is to use a warp on anisotropic noise for the main grains. Applying that logic to larger shapes gave me a nice result. I basically made a really thick anisotropic pattern using a tile sampler. I then spent a while messing with various warp textures, blurs, and levels nodes to get a some thicker lines, which took out all of the midtones. I blended the original texture together with the resized one to reintroduce some height information.

 

 

 

Main grain height map

 

Substance viewport.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My FIEA Entrance Portfolio

    Hello! I'm Trevor Farriss, a member of Cohort 23 at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy. I am an aspiring technical artist, which is a recent development. I spent my entire undergrad (and beyond) trying to be a character artist. Somewhere along the line, I fell in love with shader authoring, which lead to rigging and tools development, and now I'm here. Below is a collection of work that got me into the program. Each has their own post if you'd like to take a deeper look. I'm hoping to use this blog as a journal to catalog all the techniques I pick up in the coming year. 

   My entrance piece for FIEA. This project was an attempt to make a comprehensive real time rig, as well as learn how to integrate python into my workflow in Maya. Rendered in Unreal Engine 5. Everything was made by me.

    

     

    Punch Primate has a full face rig, IK and FK switches for his arms and legs, face topology that reacts to where he's looking, and support for the areas of fat on his body.

 

    Throughout this project, I started building out my own set of tools that would speed up my workflow. My methodology was whenever I ran into a thing that I didn't want to do, I'd try and make a script for it. This ended up ballooning my time spent on the project by a LOT. Thankfully I had plenty of spare time. This project was made during my final semesters working at IRSC.

Hi res images and more breakdowns are on my ArtStation.

Yi - Unreal Engine NPR Rendering

     Without a doubt this is the most satisfied I've been with a piece. This was fan art I did after finishing Nine Sols (which blows Silksong out of the water). My goal was to create a completely unlit render that sold light and shadow, as well as acquaint myself with the post process workflow in unreal engine.

 

 

    Main shader demo. A vector is received from the main light in the scene, then using dot product and some smooth step nodes and addition, I created fake light and shadow, as well as a transition color. Main color is texture driven, shadow and transition colors are  calculated at runtime.

    

 

    The hat and veil are a mix of post process and unlit shaders. I'm using the stencil buffer to select what meshes do and do not appear behind the veil, then doing a depth test to color things within the veil mesh black while leaving the background grey. In game effect on the left

    

 Hi res images and further breakdowns are on my ArtStation.

Vine Great Sword - CGMA Mentorship

    This is the result of a 10 week mentorship provided by Weston Reid through CGMA. This character art course kicked my ass. This was shortly after I graduated from my bachelor's program. I, having just graduated, thought I was ready to start and industry job. I was not. The sheer amount of technical issues that my first shipped model had were staggeringly bad. However, mamma didn't raise a quitter, so I took it on the chin and really pushed to get my topology in order. I learned a lot about edge flow and retopology during this course.

4K maps. The face and flowers are grouped together so they can bot have Sub Surface Scattering.

 

 

 

 I modeled everything in ZBrush with ZModeler before retopology. 

 

 

    The hair shader is fully unlit. I followed and modified this tutorial for the effect. You'll notice its in French. This was a bit of a problem, as I don't speak French, but I wanted the effect bad enough to fight through it.

The Original Concept by Tian Kou.

 

 

    Reflecting on this, this mentorship was mostly a failure. The materials are kinda whack, especially in the tree roots on the sword, and the topology still isn't production level. However, I gained a sense of direction from this project. We were supposed to render in Marmoset Toolbag, but had an option to use that sexy new Unreal Engine 5 if we wanted. I, knowing absolutely nothing about the engine, of course took the chance to render there. Learning the engine was a giant time sink that significantly impacted the time I spent actually doing the art side of this art mentorship. But I was also introduced Material Graph, which was a revelation. Suddenly all of the coding concepts my instructors tired to impart to me made sense now that I could see the math laid out in front of me. This led me experimenting in Material Graph to building my own blueprints, then to learning python, and all of a sudden I'm in a graduate game design program as a technical artist. Not sure if Weston was trying to make tech artists in his course, but he did!

Hi Res on ArtStation.