Cody Trenholm - Environment & Prop Artist

Hello everyone! 

Below are some of the projects that I've completed over the last year and a half during my time at CGMA and Think Tank Training Centre, as well as some personal projects - newest at the top, oldest at the bottom. Two years ago I knew absolutely nothing about 3D, and today I couldn't be happier making props and environments! I hope that you enjoy some of the work that I've shared below - thanks for viewing! 

-Cascadia-

This is my most recent project, completed during my Mentorship term at Think Tank Training Centre. While I've tried my hand at creating outdoor scenes before, this is without a doubt my most complex outdoor project. With the exception of the trees and some of the ground foliage and decals, everything in this scene was created by me. It was a big undertaking and I learned a lot about how to best manage the scope of a project. There are things I would have changed in hindsight, but in the end, I'm pretty happy with how it came out! 

This shotgun was a fun prop to model and texture. This is the first time I've ever tried my hand at any form of weapon and I made it over the course of about 3 days. It was a great way to practice balancing speed with fidelity and was an excellent prop to use my Maya-ZBrush prop workflow on. I definitely want to try another in the future.

In the end, I used a combination of custom PCGs and splines to create both the landscape and foliage for this scene. The foliage was populated using PCGs and bounding boxes, while the landscape was sculpted using the Landmass plugin for Unreal. Afterwards, important foliage and rocks were hand placed. Things like the road and electrical poles where populated along splines. The background mountains are large static meshes. 

This was an excellent project to practice creating high fidelity materials in a timely manner. I used a wide variety of methods to create the textures and decals for this project, though one of my favorites was Quixel Mixer > ZBrush > Substance Designer. I also experimented with personal scans > Substance Sampler > Substance Designer, which was a lot of fun. This project taught me that when creating textures, "nothing is true, everything is permitted"

Prop Showcase & Detailed View

If you'd like to see a video fly through of this environment, check out my ArtStation post! 

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xD1ALO

-Private Investigators Office-

This is my advanced term project at Think Tank Training Centre. Everything in the scene is created by me. This was one of my first times trying to tackle a larger environment with storytelling as a chief focus. The base concept is by Tongtong Zhu, you can find their ArtStation linked below. I deviated from the concept slightly with some deviations from the core props and some alterations to the theme - I thought it would be fun to go down the 'occult detective' route. Out of all the props in the scene, I think the pizza box or the flag are my favorite. 

https://www.artstation.com/zhutongtong

This project was prop Armageddon for me, especially compared to some of my work prior to this. Working quickly was a real learning curve but taught me a lot. Probably the best new addition to my skills set was the incorporation of  ZBrush to my prop workflow - totally revolutionary. Beginning my props in Maya before completing tricky high-poly elements in ZBrush has been a game changer. For anyone interested, Dylan Abernethy and Simon Fuchs have some really great tutorials available. My personal workflow is heavily inspired by theirs - really recommend! 

-Sony PlayStation 2-

This was my intermediate term project at Think Tank Training Centre, though admittedly it was also a total passion project. I love the PS2, and War of the Monster's is one of the greatest games of all time in my opinion. I really wanted to push my textures with this project. A relatively clean prop has always been more difficult to texture then a dirty one for me, so I really wanted to try and keep this one fairly clean. It certainly helped that I had a personal PS2 to use as reference! In fact, the used game sticker on the game box is straight up stolen from my personal copy of the game :)

No doubt the hardest part of this prop for me was the controller. The curving grips attaching to the cylindrical top gave me nothing but trouble, topologically speaking. In the end, I created a rough base mesh in Maya, sculpted and smoothed details in brush, then manually re-topologized it back in Maya, creating a new high and low poly there.  

-Gas Pump-

For whatever reason, I really love the look of old gas pumps. I love the wear and story telling on them. I had made this prop with the intent of eventually turning it into a little scene, but alas, I never did. Still, I think this is a fun looking pump. I had a really hard time finding reference of this one at the time, but have since found quite a few nice images;  maybe it calls for a re-make in the future. I also had a good time trying to get this guy to fit on one UV set, and you can definitely spot some creatively mirrored UVs if you look hard enough!

-Payphone-

This is one of my personal projects completed near the beginning of last year. I'd say it's probably the first prop that I created that I was really proud of. I was watching Breaking Bad at the time and there were some quality looking New Mexico payphones in there near the end of the series, which really inspired this one. This was also the first time that I really got into Marmoset, which I have to say is the bomb.com. I had a blast texturing this one! 

That's all from me! Thank you for taking the time to view my entry; I hope you found something interesting in it. Keep on rocking the CG world everybody!