Textured Concrete Pillar

I've been working for a bit on this sculpt and decided to texture it. There are still a few tweaks but I feel I'll keep it like this, been working the low poly/texturing for a few evenings.

Cheers,

Stefan Groenewoud

Environment artist 

[Click to enlarge]

[WIP] High poly concrete pillar

Textures & shaders

It's been quite a while since I wrote my last post and this time I'd like to show off my new experimentations with shaders for personal work and several textures I did for the awesome guys at Gametextures.com. This was a great opportunity to improve my workflow and experiment with several styles.

During my time of workflow improvement and texture skills improvement I have sculpted a few Insert Multi Mesh assets. For example this set of rocks.

 

Besides that I have worked on a new personal project but it's pretty much in the concept phase so that I'll have to keep for the next time. ;)

Please feel free to check out my breakdown/tutorial for creating this rain shader in UDK.

This shader is still Work in Progress, but the gif shows a clear idea of the shader in several states of wetness on the surface. But the main thing that got me stuck with this shader is the blending/animating of one wetness state into the other one, I want to create one state of wetness "flowing" into the next state of wetness. This is rather challenging for me mainly because of the fact that I'm not a programmer or shader artist by trade, so figuring this out is pretty crazy.

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;

 

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.

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.