Horizon: Zero Dawn - Artstation Artblast

Fabric sculpting

After a few months I finally got around to sculpt some fabric in Zbrush in my spare time to improve my workflow and simply get everything done in one program. Unfortunately I did have to do a bit of blocking out and fixing model issues outside of Z.

I also got some other projects going but they're not at a stage that it's ready to show yet ;).

Cheers!

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.

Post Apoca Update

Work in Progress - Another update on the Post Apocalyptic environment I'm working on. I've re-adjusted the roof and the broken concrete pieces on the floor. Besides that, I also tried to adjust the composition a bit so the viewers eye would be led through the composition. Also the shaders/textures have been modified/optimized, the lightmaps have been optimized and I enhanced the light setup.

After making the level run smoothly, I started adding collision and LOD's. Personally it felt really interesting to make a big level from start to finish and optimizing it. With that in mind, I do have a few extra props I need to finish. E.g. a car, extra vegetation, 2 extra buildings, water puddles with realtime reflections and perhaps a bus. It doesn't look like a lot of work but when you break down these things into seperate workloads it's going to take a lot of time.

Recently I had the question if I was going to make this a flythrough or a set of screengrabs. To be honest, I don't feel like doing a flythrough since I have been spending a lot of time on this project already. I do like the idea but I might have to do a shit load of extra buildings to make it look like a dense city.

Don't forget to drop a comment!


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.

Art dump pt.2 - What I Did This Winter

Quick post

 

Wall Ornament with test shaders.

Wall Ornament with Final shaders.

 

 Mirror also with final shaders.

Torso Re-do

 

 Beach Scene W.I.P. - I was working on this scene when my PC broke, so I'll be revisiting this one later on.

 

Z-brush hardsurface study

Cheers,

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.

My Look On The Crysis Franchise

Hello my trusty readers!

Last time I talked about Lighting-artists and some composition rules, I'm very glad this article got very well received by other artists! It's nice to see some support and it also keeps me motivated to keep writing these articles. I really do enjoy writing these small articles and keeping them diverse every time.
By the way, I recently got my hands on Halo 4 and I'm a huge fan of this game, I enjoyed it way more then some of the previous Halo games. I must say 343 Industries really raised the bar for graphics on the 360. Also, don't forget to checkout the Steam Holiday Sale, but be warned! They already got their hands on my wallet again like last year, they might get their hands on yours too.

Since last time I had in mind to compare the changes within a certain game franchise in this console generation, not only by "just" comparing the texture resolutions. My personal curiosity really went towards the positioning of the weaponry and the epic scaliness of the environments. The first game that came to mind was Crysis 3 compared to Crysis 2, these are very intense games on graphics.
It's not completely fair to compare Crysis 3 (which has not been released yet) to Crysis 2, since it's not a final product.
Side note: I recently tried out the (multiplayer) Alpha version of the game. Crytek really did a great job on creating even more believable environments. Although some might complain on the heavy chromatic aberration effect as a lens effect  I really love it but I understand few people out there might dislike it.

Weapons

Personally I don't see a huge difference concerning the texture resolution with the weapons nor the polycount. The example below shows exactly what I mean.

Also the weapons positioning has been changed in Crysis 3, the hands/armor are way more visible. The guns are more believable positioned with the barrel slightly pointed towards the centrepoint of the screen. One thing I noticed is how much space a weapon is actually using on the screen, I'm estimating it around 20% (with an exception on the bow).

Lighting

 

Environments

I really dig the enhanced epic scaling that has been done in Crysis 3. I'm guessing Crytek really knew how too push the hardware on the consoles with these huge environments that can be a big load for console and PC. Crysis 2 was their first Crysis game on the consoles and probably that's why the environments aren't that hugely scaled, for Crysis 3 they seemed to have taken more time to develop really interesting environments which payed off.

 

I just managed to complete this article before New Years in Holland haha. It seemed like a small objective I wanted to finish before New Years! One of my resolutions for next year is, creating a better portfolio and planning out my work more evenly.

Sorry if it wasn't much in-depth information on art creation but I'd like to hear if you guys thought it was kind of an interesting look on game development.

By the way, I did my first piece of (finished) 2D concept art. I really like to do some weapon concept art stuff but it takes a lot of time ;).

Best wishes and a happy new Year!

Cheers,

Stefan Groenewoud
Freelance 3D-artist

I do not own the rights concerning the work of Crytek, 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.

In the desert

Hey there,

Soooo, I'm back again with another blogpost that I'm writing during lunch time. It's not so much of an impressive post like last time though, concerning my personal work. I did try to make a matte painting, it's still very work in progress.
And I took the liberty of starting on a new small environment that is taking place in the desert. The shader is pretty basic but it was fun to try out several setups and creating a basic atmosphere. I do need to make a paintover so I can figure out a good focal point that will pull the interest in the scene. Ah well, as an artist you always have a shortage of time, unfortunately. Please leave some crits if you have the time to do so!

For this post I was looking for a different type of artist, not an environment artist nor weapon artist, no this time I looked for a function in gaming that isn't very popular. Lighting artist! As far as I know, there aren't that many of these guys in the games industry.

Lighting artist job

The main task for an lighting artist is, of course, lighting up the environment, duh! Kidding aside, besides that post processing is also one of their tasks,this means keeping the color key of the environment in mind, LOD'ing, optimizing assets, (re-)UVing secondary UV-sets and creating paintovers to try out different atmospheric ideas. For some it might sound pretty easy but I do think it's a pretty challenging job, it's not just dumping in a few dynamic lights and calling it a day. A good lighting artist knows how to flesh out his environment with lighting and keeping the environment readable for the eyes.

Like I said, this time I'll show some work of lighting artist Tomas Lidström. He has quite the list of gametitles on his name already! Especially Gears of War Judgement and Bulletstorm are the titles that I admire. Although Bulletstorm wasn't a bestselling game, I do love the environments and unique atmosphere in the game.

Tomas's portfolio: http://portfolio.tomaslidstrom.com/

By the way, I'd like to thank all the artists out there who gave me the permission to use their work for this purpose!

I'd recommend to open the images in a new window to see the full resolution.  

Small color study, I extracted some colors to have a better understanding how lighting artists use their colors wisely to create a certain atmosphere in their environment. Lighting is very important to steer the viewers eye around in an environment/screenshot/painting. In the high contrast images the viewers eye is constantly drawn towards the lightest/most intense light source. Proper lighting setup isn't the only thing that makes an environment complete, the silhouettes are making the shapes of the environment way more interesting.

Matte painting tryout

Tile test

Desert starting point

Tomas Lidström his work:

Some color testing for one of Tomas's personal projects.

 

Thanks for reading the post and please share this if you can. =]

Have a good day!

Cheers,

Stefan Groenewoud
Freelance 3D-artist

I do not own the rights concerning the work of Tomas Lidström, I am just sharing my thoughts and interesting artwork to other artists out there.

High poly artdump

Hey there,

Well it was pretty busy for the last few weeks, been doing a course and some freelance work! This weekend I took some time off to relax a bit, playing some games again and it was time for another blog post. Another highlight of the week is, I'm considering to go back to school for a Bachelor diploma in Game-Architecture. I already got in the selection for this course last school year but my last school didn't send the paperwork in time so I got removed of the candidate list!

I'd recommend to open the images in a new window to see the full resolution.

Off-topic: Windows 8 was released recently, what are your thoughts about this? Are most 3D/2D programs compatible with this new OS?

Here's some work I've done the last 2-3 weeks:

The artist that is being highlighted this time is Brian Burrell. He has done some amazing work on Homefront (as art supervisor and senior artist) but also has very interesting personal work. Don't forget to checkout his website, this contains all the in depth information concerning his art supervising work. Personally, I loved the game Homefront, the weapons really caught my attention, unfortunately it wasn't a big commercial success, which led to the shutdown of Kaos Studio.

Bryan's personal work:

 

Work on Homefront in collaboration with other artists:

Thanks for reading the post and please share this if you can. =]

Have a good Sunday!

Cheers,

Stefan Groenewoud
Freelance 3D-artist

I do not own the rights concerning the work of Bryan Burrell, I am just sharing my thoughts and interesting artwork to other artists out there.

Playing with compositions

Hey readers,

It has been a while since I've done my last blog post. As you might have noticed I was very disappointed in the way (some) game companies have treated me over the last few months. I took some time off to evaluate myself as an artist and look at ways to improve myself. Also, I have received an email from another (entry level) artist which was very helpful for me to continue making game-art. This email also made it clear to me that I'm not the only entry level artist that is looking for a job and is having a hard time finding one.

In the last few weeks a lot of things have happened and (strangely) enough I got contacted by several studios. Not sure if it had something to do with my outburst blog post?

Besides that, I wanted to share my update with you guys (and girls?) for the post apoca environment I'm still working on. I'm still figuring out the composition a bit and just tweaking here there some assets to make the scene feel more alive. I also did a quick paint over and I'd love to hear some feedback on this.

Paint over of one of the main screenshot. I'm not much of a concept artist but it's very helpful to establish my ideas rather quickly.

High Poly Wall Render

Also, this section of the blog hasn't been done for a long time. But I've decided to take some time for this and do my research again! It's time for the artist of the week (or of the blog post?) not sure how I should call it.

Polygoo a.k.a. Alan van Ryzin is a freelancer 3D-artist and he makes weapons, vehicles and assets. Alan has worked on a lot of game titles like Hawken, Rage, Homefront and the list goes on. As you can see his work has an incredible level of detail and believability. His textures show off, in my opinion, one of the most inspiring and best texturing skills I've seen.

Don't forget to checkout his portfolio.

I love those terrain textures, they show off so much detail just awesome.

Thanks for your time and please share the blog with other artist and friends!

Have a good weekend!

Cheers,

Stefan Groenewoud
Junior 3D-artist

I do not own the rights concerning the work of Alan "Polygoo" van Ryzin, I am just sharing my thoughts and interesting artwork to other artist out there.