Hey there! What a wild year so far - not just globally, but my life has been super busy! I recently started a second job as a 3D artist on top of my normal day job as a technician at a hospital. On top of all of this, I'm planning a wedding. It's been insane. Work on this project has definitely slowed down for me, but I've still made a lot of progress since my last post.

A lot of the work has focused on laying down the megascan assets that were going to frame the scene. Very quickly, one of the issues I encountered with the megascan assets was that their albedo maps were very noisy, and detracting from the composition of the scene. I noticed that by working without albedo maps, the scene read much better, so I worked to create a custom albedo using the existing mesh and normal information to create something cleaner and easier to read. I ran the megascan normal through some curvature nodes in Substance Designer to get a result that I could use to generate some wear and dirt in Substance Painter that wouldn't detract from the forms with all sorts of high contrast spots.

The end result is a scene that expresses the warmth from natural lighting that it needs to, and showcases lots of the nice bounce of RTX features. There are no distracting splotches of local contrast from noisy albedos.

In addition to some reworking of the megascan albedos, I wanted to create the impression that sand had collected in the cavities of these rocks. However, sometimes my assets were rotated around for visual variety, which meant that I needed a procedural way to make sure that the sand always collected according to gravity. For this I used a combination of a cavity mask and a node that used the PixelWorldSpace (masked out to the Blue Channel for "Up") to ensure that the sand would only collect in crevices + according to gravity.

Next up, there have been the additions of some extra details for dynamism. These are still work in progress, and need many additional adjustments, as well as more variety. One addition has been to add a world aligned "glint" to the sand so that as the camera travels through the scene, the impression of reflective pebbles of sand and glass is created. Another addition has been to capture a sense of wetness and running water through the cracks on these rocks, which collect to form the flowing stream through the floor of the scene.

Lastly, beginning to flesh out the beginning of some storytelling, along with some hardsurface stuff just to help contrast the mostly organic shapes in the space. I'm excited to continue to work on this project although the pace is going to change going forward. Thanks for reading!

New year, new project. I wanted to revisit an old fictional universe that has been on the backburner, which we publicly called "Project Phantom." There is some old work from that project already in my portfolio. The universe is very colorful, with lots of allusions and references to ancient Egypt, occultism, alchemy, science fiction, psychology, religion, psychedelics, esoterica, and other fun stuff, told through an immersive-sim style shooter similar to System Shock 2.

One of the areas of the game takes place within a synthetically created gold mine, where the natural processes that create stone and minerals are artificially induced so that occasional gold collected from space debris can coalesce. 

Within this space, my goals are to have a balance of different dualities - light and dark, synthetic and natural, wet and dry, rough and smooth. 

This recent work began with some simple reference gathering and a quick and dirty B&W composition, looking to capture dimensions, line flow, and some of the key features of the space.

Some of the things that I was looking to gather in reference were things like the specularity/roughness of the rocks, the effect of not only direct light but indirect lighting from natural sources, and the different frequencies of detail and how they are distributed - where are the big rocks, where are the medium ones, and where are the small ones usually? What are the typical dimensions of these spaces? How can I sell this kind of space?

A big primary goal for this project was to utilize Ray Traced lighting in UE4 with some new hardware I have. I think Ray Tracing will offer me the bounces from tiny beams of light piercing through all this rock and bouncing around everywhere that I'm going to need to really sell this type of space. Here are some quick block outs using just the basic cube shape and default shader. I've noticed that the RTX de-noiser really doesn't like high contrast areas, but I have yet to truly fiddle with this new tech and understand how to best utilize it.

I'm looking forward to continuing to work on this project and develop this space. Right now these spaces are very dark because I'm trying to focus on the amount of natural light that is bouncing around with Ray Tracing, and dial that in before support lights are added. Much work is ahead.