Ross Langston - 3D Game Art Portfolio

My name is Ross Langston and I'm excited to show you how I put together 3 of my projects from this year. The Terra Tortoise, The Smith Self-Loading Pistol Collection, and The Arrowvale Tavern.

Project 1 – The Terra Tortoise

The Terra Tortoise was produced as a part of the “Intro to Prop Modelling for Games” course completed through the CG Mastery Academy. Whilst I haven’t worked on anything professionally yet, my journey with learning the 3D skills and studying to become a games artist started way back in 2015. After finishing my degree in 3D Games Art, I was very naive and believed I already had what it took to step into the industry, but I very quickly realised I needed to learn more and really develop my skills. Fast forward to this year and I was finally able to step up my game and really push my skills in a direction where I feel like I’m starting to really get to where I thought I was 6 years ago. The Terra Tortoise project was a game changer in that I suddenly felt a massive jump in my abilities and whereas I had been producing work I was comfortable with; this took me back to my time at University where working to tight deadlines got me out of my head and working efficiently and decisively towards my end goal.

Reference

The overall goal of the project was to produce a mechanical animal that may have some form of ecological purpose. The choice of what animal or style we worked to was completely open but for me I really wanted to push myself and aim for realism. The choice to make a tortoise came from what I was inspired by and the story I wanted to tell with this piece. The Horizon games played a big part in designing this piece as I wanted to tell a story of a lost earth where humanity was reliant on machines to survive. In the case of the tortoise, I wanted it to be a walking terrarium, something large and with the function of pumping oxygen produced by the plants in its shell, back into the atmosphere.

I started by researching different types of tortoises, looking at machines and other existing designs for mechs and robotic animals. I quickly found myself leaning towards something that would resemble a Galapagos Island or Pinta Island tortoise as I liked the overall size of them and shape of their anatomy. Whilst picking the animal inspiration was quite easy I struggled to find the design style of the robotics and found myself jumping between references to really get an idea of where I wanted to start.

Modelling

The modelling stage of the project actually proved quite frustrating. Throughout this stage I still hadn't fully settled on a design style and so at first the overall shape language wasn’t cohesive. The one thing I was sure of was that the style of the head and the shell were definitely heading in the right direction so after a few more iterations and tweaks the rest of the model started to feel more in line with the direction I wanted to take it.

A key part of this project was ignoring the usual restrictions of polycount and embracing Unreal Engines Nanite system to handle the mesh details. I found this actually sped up a lot of the modelling process as I no longer had to worry about being the usually restrictions with polycount. The only downside to this I found was the UVing stage took a fair bit longer as working with such a high polycount made it a bit harder to really define where the cuts were.

Texturing

Texturing the Tortoise also proposed its own challenge. I was aiming for a photorealistic style and whilst I felt confident in texturing, achieving that photorealistic look with something so obviously fictional was a new challenge for me. I played with a few different colour patterns and at first the final product just looked way too dark. 

I decided to change the colours I was using to try and push the values higher, using real world reference to try and pick colours that would make the final product feel more in line with the references I was using. Once I got the colours locked in the last step was weathering. Up until now it still had a very CG feel to it and was still missing that element that would allow someone to picture this as something very real. I decided to lean into the weathering being on the heavier side, selling the idea that this wasn’t fresh off the production line, but instead already roaming the world and doing its part in the story.

Rendering

With rendering I really wanted to give Path Tracer a try and whilst at first I was really liking the results I was getting, there were a few details that still felt off. I used the Rural Australia pack from the Unreal Marketplace as a stage to render the tortoise in but whilst the environment rendered great the glass was rendering foggy and the details on the tortoise were being denoised a little too much. I opted to instead focus on pushing what I knew about rendering with Lumen. I rendered the same shots in the Australia scene before moving away and decided to instead use a clean render stage with a HDRI, 3 point lighting setup and a clean backdrop to get my final renders. Even this setup went through multiple iterations as I kept feeling like something was just a little off and that photorealistic feel I wanted still wasn't being achieved. 

Eventually after playing with all the lights, setting up the camera to use a really high focal length, and inputting a few console commands to change the way Unreal was rendering, I got to my final results. With the look finally meeting what I wanted, I set up a few renders, using leading lines and clear focal points to set up a range of high detail renders that showed off every part of the model.

Project 2 - The Smith Self-Loading Pistol Collection

This was my latest personal project and my first attempt in working on a high quality weapon. The gun itself was based on a concept by Ivan Yakushev as a part of his ‘Squad Orchid’ concept project.

I loved the idea of doing a project where the design of the model had to not only be functional but also be modular. It proposed a challenge that I felt the confidence to do right off the back of my Terra Tortoise project. 

Modelling

I set out blocking out the model using the concept as a direct reference in Maya. I blocked out each part to ensure everything looked like it fit together currently before planning out how the firing mechanism would work. Once I felt I had a good plan in place of how all these pieces would work together I modelled the basic details into each of the parts. I got each part around 80% of the way complete with the plan to use booleans to cut out a lot of the last details as well as using Dynamesh and polishing in Zbrush to get a quick final result for each mesh.

This process worked far better than expected and I was quickly able to add that high quality finish to each part of the model before hand sculpting in small bits of damage and wear and tear to parts of the model that would realistically show it, such as the butt of the grip.

Retopologizing this was also a rather simple process. Having the base meshes I took into zbrush I was able to simplify these and blend them with the cutter pieces I had made as boolean to replicate the high poly mesh quite quickly. The most time consuming part was removing any details that would be seen or affect the overall silhouette of the final model such as flattening the interior of the barrel or merging the separate parts of the grip.

Texturing

One goal I had set myself for this project was to have every part of the model share one singular texture set. I spent a lot of time to make sure I really optimised this, hand placing the majority of the UV islands and making sure that the texel density would hold up with the final textures. 

Texturing the actual model took almost no time at all but with the end goal being a photorealistic gun I used a lot of real world references from WW1 and WW2 era guns to get the final look feeling correct. The biggest challenge with this stage was just to make sure that the gun didn't feel too flat. With it essentially only being made up of 3 materials I wanted to add some slight colour variation between the metal parts to add a layer of depth to an otherwise flat surface. 

Rendering

Unlike the Terra Tortoise project, for this one I stuck out the process of really learning Path Tracing and spent a few days researching cinematic rendering in Unreal Engine. Using a lot of tutorials from William Faucher I felt far more confident with creating a scene that would not only capture the detail in the guns but would also add an element of visual storytelling. I found on Artstation a series of renders for the guns used in The Hunt: Showdown and decided that this was the same visual style I wanted to achieve for my renders.

I used Unreal Engine’s modelling toolkit to create the wooden surface as a base for the render, taking some Quixel Megascans textures and using the displacement map on a high poly plane to create a surface which would better catch the light and sell the realistic detail of the surface. With that I created a basic material using the Megascans texture and set up the lighting using a previous process as the Terra Tortoise project, a HDRI and three point lighting setup. My aim was to sell this story that maybe this is a workshop or a place where some soldiers are briefly taking shelter during battle. I created some basic rags and scattered some of the bullets I had made around the scene to add some visual details and break up the empty space.

Then it was just a matter of adding the guns. I set up the scene twice, once with all the guns together and then once with each gun centered on the surface. I set up some cinematic cameras with long focal lengths to try and minimise any camera distortion. For the up close shots this also helped achieve a macro photography look and focused each shot on a particular part of the model.

Using Light Forge, playing with the post process settings and using some console commands to tweak Path Tracers rendering, I was then ready to capture each shot. Straight out of the engine there were still some elements that felt off about the renders so I made some batch edits to the final renders with Photoshop that allowed me to push the values further and really draw focus to the key parts of each shot. 

Project 1 - The Arrowvale Tavern

A popular trend of concept art I kept seeing on Artstation was semi stylised, almost anime-esque, concepts of elaborate fantasy buildings like taverns. For the longest time I wanted to give one of these a go but never found one that would suit the time I had available to work on it. That was until I found this beer tavern concept by Shiyi CG painting (拾艺CG绘画). 

I went into the project wanting to focus on replicating the image one for one and using a stylized look somewhat inspired by Overwatch. Another goal was to try and make the scene as modular as possible to save on textures.

I started with blocking out the general shape of the building, refining the shape and proportions as I went to match the concept. Then the first modular set I built was a series of wooden elements. These would turn into the base models for almost the entire scene. I created a few wooden beams that differed in length and thickness, the door and doorway details, the signs, window details and roof details. I also made a tiling wood beam texture to use in places where the surface wouldn’t have a noticeable silhouette.

The next modular set I worked on was the roof tiles. As this was just a portfolio piece and not a playable level I wasn’t too worried about performance and so opted for each tile to be 3D geometry instead of a tiling texture. The issue that immediately stood out to me was the repetitiveness of the tiles. I opted to use a multi-UV workflow to allow a second texture for adding dirt and moss as a way to break up this repetitiveness as well as match the concept. I also made this second UV texture vertex paintable so that I could match the placement of the moss and dirt to the concept as much as possible.

This same process was also used for the stone steps and flagstones around the garden area. This was so I only had to make a few bricks, texture them once but then add colour variation and weathering through the second UV.

When it came to making the additional assets for the scene I followed a lot of the same workflow I used on the building itself. The barrels, boxes and cart were all made using the wood set I made previously and then extra details were added as a modular metal detail set. The bottles were also quickly modelled and I created a simplistic stylised glass material and some labels to finish them off. 

The foliage in the scene was key to capturing the stylised look. I wanted the foliage to seem soft and almost cell shaded, with colour variation to break up the scene a bit. I created a series of atlases for the grass, trees and plants and then constructed meshes using these. I then made a simple stylised foliage material that used runtime virtual textures to add colour variation and achieved the simplistic stylised look.

All that was left was to add some mountain silhouettes that were created by drawing a simple mountain silhouette in Photoshop and then make a material in unreal to make them seem distant and faded due to the distance.

And then finally a cloud material which consistent off painted clouds being distorted over time to give the idea of them moving and changing shape as they crossed the sky. 

With all this done it was ready for lighting and rendering. 

Thank you for taking the time to look through my work!