Jesus Guerrero | Hardsurface Prop Artist & Generalist

Hello! I'm Jesus Guerrero, an Interactive Technologies of Digital Animation Engineering graduate from Mexico. After I graduated I've been working on multiple personal projects that help me improve my skills as a 3D artist. Here are my best projects so far and what I've learnt with each one of them.

Hardsurface Integrated Sidearm 

This Sidearm I made on 3D was originally designed by Jamie Martin. I used his concept art to practice my Hardsurface, baking and texture techniques. Working on this took me around 2 months to complete, going through High, Low and Mid poly models built in Maya, following with bakes in Marmoset Toolbag, Textures in Substance painter, and finally, Render in Unreal 5. It has a total of 2521 Vertices, optimized for Videogames use.

Here's a link to Jamie Martin's Concept Art project in Artstation. 

Personal Improvements

During this project, I improved my baking skills, producing better maps overall to make texture process smoother and make the low poly model shine. I had the chance this last week before the entries for this challenge ended to learn and improve my texture skills; all that knowledge is being applied in this project. Some of the new techniques learnt are: better use of grunges, masks, color & roughness variations, filters and blending modes. I know there's still a long way to go, but I'm willing to learn with each project I work on

Below there's a group of sliders, showcasing the difference between old and new textures.

Model Breakdown

 Volkswagen Baja Bug Bealte

A modified Volkswagen Beatle designed to run on dunes and rough environments. Optimized for videogames with 11,761 Vertices. It was a project in which I learnt how to bake with Marmoset with along with mentorship help. It took me around 9 months to complete, going through reference gathering, Low, Mid, and High poly models, baking, textures and renders. 

The software used was Maya, Marmoset Toolbag, Substance Painter and Unreal 5.

As this was my first time working with baking through Marmoset and 3 different quality models, I had some issues getting used to it. The project was large enough for me to understand how its done, good practices, work arounds, and with mentorship help, be able to learn the process and how to get better results.

References and Breakdown

Sci-fi Ship Reactor Environment

Spaceship reactor

This project started as a challenge along with a friend on my twitch channel. We gave chat 4 different themes to work with and the outcome was the inside of a spaceship. We had 1 month and 15 days to produce our own projects, and people should vote for the one they considered the best. 

This scene main use was thought for render only, as it's not optimized. I worked on some sketchy concept art to composite the scene and assets. The first version was worked on Blender and Substance Painter. After the challenge was over, I tweaked here and there to improve and learn more about UVs, UDIMs pipeline in Maya, textures and Unreal 5's Nanite along with some Niagara VFX simulations. All of this took me around 1 month and 7 days extra to learn and apply.

Before and after comparison

Thank you so much for going through my entry, I appreciate it! I hope you liked it!

The End