Warhammer And Hard Surfaces

The best work I've done so far!

I'd like to say a few things about each piece, starting with the environment art I made at FutureGames:

The assignment brief we got was to recrate an existing concept art piece for a game in four weeks. I settled on "Warhammer 40K: Darktide" very quickly as I love 40K and I was playing Darktide at the time, so it was an easy pick.

I picked the specific concept based on the number of assets I needed to create, and what I thought the challenges of realizing it would be. For this project, I only had to make two unique models and the most challenging aspects were lighting and composition.

During the process of making this, I integrated two new ways of working that I hadn't used previously: Using Photoshop for post-processing, and using a masking workflow for tiling textures.

Here's a couple of the reused assets for the scene:

The difference between what I submitted for the school assignment with only vfx added, and the final portfolio piece with full post processing.

For the largest pieces, I generated a mask in Substance Painter to layer in materials to break up the obvious repeating textures. I only grabbed a picture of the walls, but I used it for the crucibles and the wheels too.

This way of working was super interesting to learn and explore, so it's something I'm gonna keep experimenting with for the larger assets going forward and see where the limits are.

When I was almost finished with the scene in Unity, I was sitting and observing it for a while, and I realized it was missing a few smaller bits and pieces to really tie it together. 

This is how it looked before I went in and created the edge rails for the floor and stairs, anchor points for the wall tanks and adding in additional smaller pipes to fill out the empty spaces:

Next up, let's talk guns! 

Starting with the Remington 870 shotgun, which was also the 2nd major project with my old mentor, Ryan Bullock.

This was an interesting one, as this was the first portfolio piece I started adding a fleshed out scene to the project, instead of just letting the prop floating in nothingness. 

Initially when I had the shotgun placed on the cloth background, it looked too empty so I decided to add the shotgun shells and the small ammo box to make it more interesting to look at.

This was also the first project I finally felt happy about the wood material I created. Given the large amount of environment props that require good wood materials, it's definitely worth spending the time exploring the different looks. 

To this day, rifle stocks are still a pain in the rear to model, but this one holds up well enough that I still use it as reference for any stocks I model now days.

Last but not least: The Colt M1911A Pistol!

This was one of the first models I worked on with my old mentor, Ryan Bullock.
I can't thank him enough for all the guidance he gave me. I truly wouldn't be the artist I am today without him.

More than anything else, this project truly stands out in my mind as the one where I finally understood that feedback isn't something to fear, it is in fact the greatest tool for learning, ever!

I had previously made a version of this pistol on my own without help or feedback, and it was about as good as you'd expect... So I reached out to senior weapon artist from Sledgehammer who I met on Twitch and asked him for help. He was kind enough to agree to mentor me and together we reworked this pistol into what you see today.

I don't recall anything specific about the modelling or UV process that's worth bringing up, I do wanna touch on the texturing process and mentality.

Some texturing advice Ryan gave me was to blend in image textures with a low opacity, which gives a lot of extra details that might be hard to get with the standard grunges and generators in Painter. Adding a sharpen filter to get that tiny bit extra quality from a lower res texture, and adding Ambient Occlusion to give the illusion that parts are fitted together better than simply hanging out next to each other.

Another thing he taught me was to truly see the information in a reference. Anyone can look at a gun and see a gun. Can you however see all the micro-discolorations from use? Spot all the surface imperfections and the roughness variations? Until he pointed all of those things out to me, I hadn't a clue they existed, but now years later I can't unsee all the small details in any object I look at. I often take pictures when I come across an interesting detail variation and save it for a project where it will be useful to have it as reference. 

Ryan also taught me that it's okay to ask for clarification if something doesn't make sense, which for me as someone who struggles with really bad anxiety was fantastic to hear. There were a few times over the course of his mentorship that I had to ask for clarification, and he was always super cool about either explaining in text, or do a quick paintover to show what he meant when I didn't understand his feedback, and It never felt uncomfortable to ask for more info. That's a sign you have a great mentor!