Holiday & Artwork update

Hey readers,

I'm a few days back from my break on Curacao (an old colony of the Netherlands in the Caribbean for you who don't know where it is ;) ). During my stay I had the urge to write down a new blog post. So here I am back again, ready to work and write my new post where I share the ideas I have for the upcoming few weeks or so.
During my stay it was pretty strange to notice the cultural differences and the amazing landscapes I had the chance to see. I loved the atmosphere and the lovely foods! Oh another thing I noticed was the huge increase of the prices since I was there 'bout 7 years ago.

Art

For a while I was looking into what kind of environment I was going to pick up next. The Mirror's Edge shader work was mainly a test for me but now I really want to try and push it towards an environment that would fit in the style and game seamlessly. This is a great chance for me to improve my 2D art skills. Also I guessed this is also a possibility to try out the CryEngine once again after many months/almost a year. I wanted to check out what the main differences are between the latest available UDK installment or CryEngine.

Here is the second pass on my shader in Cryengine, I re-used the same textures from UDK with a few tweaks to replicate the style.

Thanks for your time!

Stefan Groenewoud
Freelance 3D-artist

I am just sharing my thoughts and interesting artwork to other artists out there. This blog is used for educational purposes and/or tracking of Stefan Groenewoud his personal work.

The large screeny is my first pass of the my shader interpretation of the ref screenshot, it still needs a bit of polish on the contrast side but I'll keep that for Post Processing.

Small summer update

Hey readers,

This is going to be a rather small post, I am a pretty booked up with work and tired, so forgive me! Anyways, reason why I was writing this post is someone shared a gameplay video of Killzone 4 at E3. To be honest, I totally missed it but as I was watching the video, it turns out there were a few assets used that I had created during my internship. I can't show them off individually (as far as I know) but go have a look at the video to see what I'm talking about.

Somewhere around 4:50 you'll see a large server and a portable server, and those were two of the assets I had created from scratch to finish (high/low poly + texturing and shader. @5:30 A better look at the large server.

Cheers,

Stefan Groenewoud

First Character (first) texture pass

Quick post to keep you guys updated on my first character! It's a quick texture setup in marmoset, adjustments have to wait a lil' bit until I have more time on hands :(

You have to enlarge the image in a new window to see it at full resolution.

Please, do drop a comment with feedback though!

Stefan Groenewoud
Freelance 3D-artist

I am just sharing my thoughts and interesting artwork to other artists out there. This blog is used for educational purposes and/or tracking of Stefan Groenewoud his personal work.
 

 

When Nature Reclaims The City pt. 2

Damn, I've been so amazed by a lot of new games that have been announced at E3 2013! My favorite at this moment probably is The Division, the amount of detail is insane and very inspiring. If only I could work on their team *hint hint to the guys at Massive, if they even read my blog*. Also got my hands on The Last of Us, amazing game I must say, great story writing, awesome graphics.

Last year I already worked on this environment but I didn't really had the time to work on it that much and also lost the motivation. Few weeks ago I had decided to finish this piece up and I am really curious what y'all think of the result. After seeing The Last of Us art dump I was a bit intimidated xD but heck I can really use the feedback to improve the scene.

Since the last update I had adjusted the light rig & color correction, car(s) have been modelled (not sure if I'll add the Bus as I had planned), added a few extra props to fill the scene, extra/better textures & shaders.

Note: I am using a few placeholders (the trees) from UDK

Thanks for your time!

Stefan Groenewoud
Freelance 3D-artist

I am just sharing my thoughts and interesting artwork to other artists out there. This blog is used for educational purposes and/or tracking of Stefan Groenewoud his personal work.

 

Two high poly screenies, couldn't find the others;

 

My first character [WIP]

Here's a quick update on my first character design. It was a ton of fun and I'm also working on my second character but that one isn't really near final so, you just have to wait a little longer. ;)

Stefan Groenewoud
Freelance 3D-artist

I am just sharing my thoughts and interesting artwork to other artists out there. This blog is used for educational purposes and/or tracking of Stefan Groenewoud his personal work.

click on the image to enlarge

Post-Apocalyptic breakdown

Content

• Crafting the idea
• Reference
• Lighting/Color correction
• Detail shots

Crafting the idea

I had wanted to do a post-apocalyptic environment for a very long time, somehow I felt very overwhelmed and couldn't really choose which direction I should take it. I got very inspired to do this thematic environment because of Unreal Tournament 3, Gears of War series and lately a game I'm hyped about is The Last of Us. I always had a warm heart for “the beauty of destruction” but this time I really wanted to step up to the plate and just do it.

As I am writing this I must admit that I started to notice how much I have learned throughout the last couple of months, not just with texturing but also modeling, organization, shader creation and optimization.

During this breakdown it’s obvious to me that I could have used a more efficient workflow and I figured how I could improve this when I start a new project. Also I’ve become more daring to show off my work in progress, when I started the environment I wasn’t sure at all if it was a good idea or if fellow artists would like it at all.

I must say that all this knowledge doesn’t come out of nowhere, I’ve read whitepapers from other developers, I read books about lighting and composition.

Goals: Large post-apocalyptic environment, create detailed textures, lots of high poly asset sculpting, shader experimentation (environmental shader and screen shaders e.g. vignette effect, lens dirt), use DX11 features like Tessellation and IBR.

Timespan: I have been working on this project on and off for the last 6 months, in total I estimate I would have worked on it for 2-3 months. And it’s still on going with additional asset creation.

To do: Vehicles (Modeling/texturing a Taxi and Bus), re-adjust/improve additional buildings, perhaps a fly through video?

Reference

During the process I looked up a lot of reference just to establish the main idea or props that I felt would fit the scene. I’ve heard it isn’t always a good idea too just focus on videogame concept art but when I got inspired by The Last of Us it was hard stay away from this style.

When I started to work on the project I didn’t had in mind in which direction I wanted the environment to push. Later on you’ll see my starting point, where I just had been messing around with temporary meshes and started crafting a broken wall in UDK. From there I started looking for possible ideas and came with this post-apocalyptic city.

The weekend of Texturing and Shader Experimentation

Hey everybody!

It has been a month already since the last blog post where I did shader testing as a tribute to Mirror's Edge. Again it was a very busy period for me and my PC had to be repaired (again). This weekend I had some time left and after playing Gears of War Judgment, which I like very much due to the artistic style. Because of that I had decided to mess around with some texture creation that is dedicated to this art style and thought it was time to step up the shader work a bit more.

I had a lot of fun just experimenting with shaders in combination with the textures I've sculpted over the weekend. Not just the sculpting was amazing, creating these detailed assets, also doing the texture baking in Zbrush was fairly new. After baking these textures and finalizing them in Photoshop, I started working on the shader in UDK.