Horizon: Zero Dawn - Artstation Artblast

High Poly Brick Sculpting

Since my last post I've been working on these bricks while I was working on a different personal project. Kinda helped me to keep fresh eyes on the project by doing something else once every few days.

I was building a small library of different types of wall bricks.

Two bricks from the previously shown set of bricks but with polypaint to test a bit of lookdev. 

February update

Small update on the new environment I'm working on, it's still in a pretty early phase but hopefully next time I'll be able to show it in game with some cool textures. ;)

Also you can find here other stuff I have been working on in my spare time; the low poly creature model baked to a 2k texture (not textured though). And I messed around with some 2D art as well!

Hope you like it,

Cheers,


Stefan Groenewoud
Environment artist

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.
 

 

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

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.

Mirror's Edge Shader Overview in UDK

Hey there!

It has been a while since my last blog post and I promised a few people I'd show off the breakdown of the materials being used in the Mirror's Edge stylized test renders in UDK. First off all, I'd like to point out that the shader is NOT final. Second, I'm just going to show it off this time so I probably won't revisit this when I have a scene modeled out whatsoever. Writing these articles takes a lot of time and hopefully it'll be appreciated ;)

AND I got great feedback from one of the Lighting Artists who had worked on Mirror's Edge! I totally didn't expect that and I really appreciate the feedback I've received. When I was going to post the Shader blog post I didn't expect anything to happen. But the opposite happened, my blogpost got shared plenty of times which was great because it was "just" a shader test.

And why it took so long to write my next article? I just finished up a few art tests, so keep your fingers crossed! It seemed like a good time to write it now. Anyways, I was also experimenting a lot with different shaders. I revisited my old sci-fi scene and created a new ocean shader. Exploring these different techniques is really fun in my opinion and it really intrigued me to go more in-depth with HLSL coding for example.

Revisiting old shader

New metal shader in action - This has vertex painted rust and scratches to add more unique looking details on the metal. This in combination with the DX11 settings in UDK can give a really nice effects showing off the reflections of the environment for example.

Shaders

What I did first was doing research! When exploring a different render/texture style, doing research is crucial. I've always loved the color usage in Mirror's Edge and I knew I wanted to show this off in my shader test. Also, I wanted to have the ability to create a shader that is specifically designed for a specific material definition. So I created a list of the following materials:

• Concrete
• Metal
• Plastic
• Tiles
• Marble (optional)
• Fabric

Concrete

The shader overview has straightforward commented areas, A = Diffuse, B = Specular, etc. For optimization sake, I made all the textures greyscaled and added a 3-vector param, With this I can add/tweak the colors and color-intensity of the textures. Orange can now be insanely bright, which you couldn't just create with a single texture node, cranking up the colors is essential to achieve these results. 

What I use mostly in my shaders is a Fresnel, it's not that expensive (anymore) to my knowledge. But what I learned from the guys at Chaos Group (V-ray creators), everything has Fresnel, it might be subtle but everything has it. So I did implement it in all of my materials but as a parameter so adjusting it would be easy.

Tip: Use paramaters instead of "hardcoded" values, tweaking Material Instances is very efficient and handy.

Metal

This is the most complex shader at the moment for the Mirror's Edge tribute. I'm not that happy with the shader itself, it's pretty messy and could be using better optimized textures. But the end result is rather good looking and convincing painted metal. I can't really go in depth with the shader, I do want to point out that I'm using DX11. This uses "image based reflections" and I added some cubemap reflections to add in the environmental reflections.

Sorry I didn't go in-depth with the shaders but please look at the setup and it should be pretty clear if you follow the structure.

Weapon scope study

I forgot to add in my weapon scope study ;) High Poly was all done in Zbrush, Low Poly in Max, Texturing in PS.

Games Photography Experimentation

Recently I started messin' around with photography within games, luckily Mirror's Edge happend to be one of the games where I could use the "freecamera" mode. Unfortunately in more recent games I didn't quit got this "hack" work just yet. One of the games I'd like to visit is Bioshock and Tomb Raider, those environments are gorgeous.

Mirror's Edge shader tests

I did some UDK shader experimentation with the style from the game Mirror's Edge in mind. I tested the materials Indoor as well as Outdoor. This gave me a good understanding how the material might react. Keep in mind these are basic material tests, so for a real environment I'd take more time to texture individual assets for example.

Also, I've been working on my Post Apocalyptic environment, I didn't do any drastic changes with the composition but I am working on adding vehicles, extra buildings and small details to make the scene feel more "alive".

All colors can be tweaked with just one texture e.g. with a greyscale concrete texture I can create a red/green/blue one with the same shadersetup.

Reference Sheet

I might do a scene based on this shader study also all feedback is welcome!

Shader Testing

Part 2 of the indoor materials

Metal Shader Overview [WORK IN PROGRESS]
These are not the final settings of the metal mastershader but for testing the bounce light in UDK it was pretty handy. On assets within an environment, fine tuning the shaders would be easier in my opinion.

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.

What I Did This Winter - Art Dump

Hey readers,

It's been almost a month since my last post, for me, 2013 didn't start off quite as well as I would've hoped! My computer had to be repaired in the second week of the year already. Thankfully the repair didn't take that long and I was able to upgrade my computer. Windows 7 is now starting within 30 seconds and Photoshop and Max are opened within 5 seconds and run smoothly with all the heavy (extra) plugins. I'm really amazed how much faster SSD's work, at first I was skeptic but I've completely changed my mind.

Besides that, my Dad (who is 71 as of writing this) has joined a computer club! He barely worked on a computer before but now he really wants to explore what these machines are capable of. I just wanted to point out I'm very proud of him that he had the guts to start working with computer at his age.

Tileable textures

The tileable textures are created in Zbrush, where I started with the high poly mesh and applied the polypaint during or after the texture composing.

Destructible Study

I was working on these destructible studies to explore how concrete reacts in different circumstances. All are sculpted in Zbrush. As you can see the top row are all concrete studies and the bottom-left one. The last few sculpts are old/rotten wood.

Organic - Hand Study

I picked this asset up after one and a half year. Back then I think I got overwhelmed with all the anatomical terms and the complex forms. As some character artists even refer to hands as being one of the most difficult shapes of the human body.

Somehow I've decided to finish off some of my older project that I left unfinished. I learned a lot of tips and tricks concerning art creation, so I've decided to put the knowledge I've gained to the test. I really enjoyed the texturing/polypaint process, it felt so easy/logical to add in small details in the texture on top of the high poly mesh. This tech is something I'd like to use more often if possible.

Low Poly - The low poly is realtime viewed in UDK with the new DX11 features like Tessellation and Subsurface Scattering  The asset was intended to be develop for a next-gen game consoles, I also kept in mind the edge-flow for animation. So if you're interested feel free to animate it!

Shader - It's a rather simple setup with the added DX11 features in UDK. Most textures are 2048*2048px except for the sub-dermal texture, for example. The tattoos, to optimize texture load I've made a multichannel texture, so in one of the green-channels I copied in the tattoos. I've also added another UV-channel, where I mapped the part of the model I'd like to show up the tattoos. The con of this method is - an extra texture (eventhough it's multichannel in this case), the pro - I can have a set of hands with or without tattoos and I have a rather high pixel-density.

Organic - Tree Branches

All modeled from High Poly meshes, baked on Low Poly planes. Was very fun to experiment with the new workflow. Texturing is done more quickly and the meshes look more detailed, compared to the trees that I've done in the past.

2D Study

As in the previous blog post I've stated I'd like expand my 2D texture skills, especially I'd like to make environments and weapons.

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.

Lighting Artist pt.2

Hey all,

Welcome back on the blog and I'd like to continue with my "special" on the job function called Lighting Artist. Last time I showed some color simplifications to visualize more of the color tones that are being used to set a certain mood in game environments. I haven't learned anything concerning color usage and composition during my study, but as I am writing these blog posts I am learning to understand these topics better. It's not a professionally written post but more or less the findings I discovered and my interpretation of artists' their work. If I'm wrong with any statements I make during these posts, please leave a comment!

Intro

Before I go any further with the lighting artist special, I just wanted to tell what I've been up to lately. This weekend I've been polishing my online portfolio. Mainly adding some extra screenshots for projects and adding some description. Also optimizing jpg's is a big thing! The smaller the images the quicker the site loads, I kept this in mind but of course you don't want your high poly mesh showing up as pixel art.

Another thing that has been on my mind, one of the biggest game stores in the Netherlands shutdown all of their physical stores and is only going to sell games through their web shop. I'm somewhat disappointed this is happening. I can't imagine any more game stores disappearing because of the economic crisis.

One last thing, I wanted to wish all the people at Trion Worlds who got laid off last week, the best of luck. I think it's a bit of a nasty move to lay off 40 staff members just 2 weeks before Christmas, unfortunately lay offs are a common trend in the games industry.

Lighting Artists pt. 2

The following examples show off how crucial color contrasts and silhouettes are to make a believable and good looking scene. With the example that I showed off last time, concerning Tomas Lidström his work, I took the liberty of showing the differences between the edited and original version. The color contrast is very noticeable at this point but also the importance of silhouettes are becoming more clear.

Halo 4

I'm a very big fan of the artwork in Halo 4, although I haven't played it myself (yet). The environments are highly detailed and has an incredibly awesomeness of varying atmospheres. Most of you have already read the article on the Environment Art on Halo 4 but here is the link anyways.

I used several screenshots of the game and took the first example a bit further. By adding some orange lines I'm pointing out one rule of composition. It's referred to by some as "edge flow" or "lines". This means the eyes are being drawn towards the point of interest because of all the edges that lead the viewers eyes to this PI (point of interest).

In the screenshot with the hallway, all the piping and  paneling is hinting the viewer towards the door at the end of the hall. Maybe it's even luring the player/viewer to let him explore what's behind that door.


With the organic/outside screenshot I added orange lines to landscape, I'm pointing out the necessity of having enough positive and negative space usage and the interest of shapes. For example the rocks have a very interesting and organic look and feel. From a distance it's already noticeable that the objects are rocks, that's why we're using silhouettes. Having shapes of objects be as clear a possible to the viewers eyes, e.g. the rough figure of rocks are very easily recognized -> makes the scene more believable.

You're probably asking, why the grey scaled images? Colors can be very distracting at times, by making them grey-scaled, I made it visually more understanding for myself. It helps to see where all the shadows and light sources come from, another important aspect is the sense of depth. Objects from far away become desaturated/blueish tinted.

The contrast becomes lower the further you look away from the "camera", the grey scales are your visual evidence it works. Of course this rule is mainly applied for outside environment/landscapes.

This blog post turned from just Lighting Artist also towards a few rules for compositions haha. I'm gonna end it here, I'm out of writing material even though I haven't discussed everything yet, but feel free to leave your thoughts down below.

One last line, "Happy Christmas and a happy New Year!".

Have a good day!

Cheers,

Stefan Groenewoud
Freelance 3D-artist

I do not own the rights concerning the work of Tomas Lidström nor 343 Industries, 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.