Pod Racer Update

Been working on the pod racer a lot recently trying to power through and get this done, hopefully sometime after Christmas, so I can work on the scene and some rocks! The two main textures and baked and at the moment the colour has been baked down from the high poly, still got a few errors I have to clean up and tidy up and then on to making a pipe texture.

Going for full PBR with this which is going to make it look super nice and realistic once its done. 

Sebulba's Podracer

Small update on personal work, as been super busy with the release of Need for Speed Rivals, but its doing really well so all good news.

I got a bit tired of working on my Reactor Environment so to avoid boredom I decided to balance two projects in my spare time as this allows me to keep it fresh and keep pushing the quality and improvement from piece to piece. I started making Sebulba's Podracer from Star Wars, and the plan is to make a diorama desert environment to pose it in.

Here is the high poly as it stands now which is pretty close to finished but it needs some more work on the front piping as each side is unique. Once I have finished with this I will be making the low poly and moving onto texturing. The plan is to render this ready for PBR which once all the materials are set up should look really sweet.

I also made a start on the Terrain which it will be posed in once its all finished. I plan on making a couple of tileable terrain textures and some nice rocks that I can place around the immediate area of the ship. I am also thinking about a possible crashed spinning through the air image but depending on how well the in tact version turns out I may or may not make.

New Project: The Reactor

So I feel like its time to reveal a bit of what I have been working on in my personal time while not working hard on Rivals, In an effort to address things I want to get stronger at I have planned to make an environment using only High poly to Low poly Workflows.

Currently I am planning to Develop this environment with PBR which should bring it into the next Gen quite nicely, can't show any of that yet though! I wanted to choose an existing concept so I didn't spend time trying to design a scene. The concept I am using is the following;

This is a concept for Mass effect created by Brian Sum, which I grabbed permission to use but I thought it would be a nice test of High poly skills.

I figured I would stick with standard textures for now, making use of DDO for the main props, once material definition is nailed I can then move onto using the Metallic and Roughness textures, assuming I keep it clean it should be fairly easy to translate. I started by making a blockout that I could run around and then moved into production on the main support beams that hold the centre piece in place. Still not decided whether these should animate yet.

Above is a shot of the High Poly for this piece, uses about 3 textures at the moment. Below is a shot in UDK but as I plan on making this environment for PBR anyway I figured it would be quicker to put it together in CryEngine as its just simply faster (no Lightmaps etc, Better Lighting)

Edit: Thought I show a render with textures, as I was really trying to nail an oily kinda feel for the dark metal, and a worn more chipped feel for the other types. 

Still got some balancing on the texture side, as the greens are looking a little yellow at the moment, and I need some cooler blues in the metals to match the concept. 

I then moved on to creating and floor and Trims texture, which I modelled instead of NDO, following some advice from work, as NDO doesn't create as good results. Baking gives a much better AO as well, and for DDO creating a colour map from high poly is a lot quicker than manually doing it in photoshop. Here are the textures for the floor and trim as they look currently but I have done no texturing, this is purely the baked textures with AO etc

Will Upload a shot of the environment once I have made a bit more progress on it.

Hey Guys,

Got a new portfolio website I have been working on, fairly similar to the old one but using weebly now so I can add Video and don't have an image limit. Still can't figure out how to get the URL working properly.

You may have also noticed I have a sneak peak for a new personal project I am working. Shall be posting some shots of that soon. So stay tuned.

Benkeeling.co.uk

Flythrough

Here is the fly-through I made for the presentation, please watch in 1080p :)

Final Renders

Thought I would share my final Renders for the project, will be posting a fly-through shortly but because there is secret stuff in it for the presentation this will be done in a few days.

Sketchfab

Update on Interior

Not a huge amount has changed on the Interior side of things recently just been tightening up textures and unwraps so it is finally getting there now. 

Been working a bit on the centre piece a bit more getting the crystal to pulsate after some crit as well as the smaller floating pieces which move in and out with the power of the crystal. curtsy of Rich Carey's fantastic paint-over. 

Also got little robots flying around scanning crystal which is cool. 

Again not a huge amount left to do for the inside.

Here is a list of a few left to finish

-Finish of some more unwraps

-Finish Rock texture

-Finish track viewing robots

-Pipes for steam and spotlights for beams

-Holds for screens

-Decals

Update on Exterior progress

So been working Hard to try and get this finished to a really polished level. Its definitely getting there now just a few more bits left to populate on the outside. Finally got round to replacing the Skybox with a sky that was a bit closer to the sunset vibe I was going for.  Got a few more textures to finish off as well such as the piece below. 

Working on the transition from outside to the interior which was causing me some weird issues with the Vis Areas and portals and I have finally fixed that with some flow-graphing and now the transition is nice and seamless. Got the Vault style door in and animated too which looks Bad ass. 

Also been getting the exterior base all cleaned up and finished, Now that the door is in place it looks a lot nicer and more finished, always helps when you get rid of a giant hole in the level! 

I have wrote myself a little list of things to finish off now so can almost taste the celebratory pint at the end :)

Here are some of the things I have left to finish off for the outside 

-Finish population 

-Door textures

-Pillar for outside base

-Replace and update some terrain textures

-Decals 

Level Jam

Way back in the group project we organised a day where we all worked on the level and incorporated changes in engine that we thought were needed. This really helped to get a fresh perspective on the project and make some new stuff. I organised a similar thing at Uni with other 3rd years where we switched around each others levels and worked on everyone's stuff for 40 minutes. It went really well and everyone seemed to take the changes made on board. Below are some suggestions to what people wanted in my level.

Ant wanted some minor props so mocked up some chairs, book stand and plinth. He thought it had a religious feel to it, although I am not to fond of putting chairs where you are supposed to walk in I will be incorporating some smaller props. 

Max added these little sentinel bots which animated around the environment and scanned the crystal, which I always planned to do. I will definitely be adding some sort of animated bot, however as this is a blatant rip off from the bots in Halo I will be changing the design to be a bit more original! 

Matt made these big ships that are docking on the base on the outside. He mentioned the shapes were designed off  bones as he knew I used something similar for the design of the base. The ship in the last shot was animated to fly overhead which looked really impressive, especially if I put some sound in. Again this will be a case of redesigning stuff. 

Rich did me a nice Paint-over which really helped illustrate his ideas for the crystal. I especially like the small crystal fragments that are floating beside the crystal. This is definitely something I will be playing with as well as making the light source the crystal itself.