TWahl
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Posts posted by TWahl
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Just a couple more shots I felt like posting for fun.
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Almost done modeling and baking 40 of the 50 ish trim textures.
I will be using these to aid in creating modular environment kits.
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Sometime in the very near future, I think I will move all work in progress updates to a thread on polycount. Once I make that thread, I will post a link in here. Main reason is that there are a lot of talented/known CG artists who work on there and I would like to have their critiques.
However, that does not mean I will cease any updates here on the leadwerks web site. I still plan on doing blog posts, in fact that was something I have been planning for a while to get this project a tiny bit more publicity. Instead of intermittent updates I want to do a monthly/biweekly blog post where I can hopefully present more and richer content.
Any replies to this thread I will still answer to for the time being, but I wanted to let you guys know about this so it does not seem like I am abandoning this project.
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I will also be including a nice selection of detail textures, like this expanded metal texture (baked from a real cad model):
I have many more of these, ranging from vents to pressure plates, bare/painted metal, rust, mesh fences, slotted grates, etc. They were very simple to model and render. The above could also be used in more modern settings as well, which is nice. Overall I am going for a gritty and industrial look so it fits nicely. I can see this being applied to dividers, walkways, or fence railings.
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Some more pictures from today. Mainly worked on finding the best and fastest way to create some material ID maps for more specialized textures, as well as figuring out how to best take advantage of substance painter's masking capabilities within layers, etc.
Substance is great because I can tweak on the fly as well (change colors, remove certain paint sections, and more).
Screenshots from the viewport:
Things are really beginning to come along, although I am still in the process of trying to optimize my workflow with painter in conjunction to my toolset.
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Played around with substance painter a little bit today. Not a final result by any means but I was just experimenting with colors and layers.
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3 hours ago, Josh said:
If you go the PBR route the new raytracing stuff I am working on will make those metal surfaces look really good.
Yes I will definitely be using pbr materials - I'm particularly excited about raytracing though! I've seen it implemented in a few games on youtube and it looks pretty amazing. Looking forward to that Josh.
In other news, built the pc and got it up and running. It is a beast. Previous renders that took multiple hours only take a few mins now! And I don't have to worry about choking my pc when modeling anymore. I can't wait to do more with it.
Currently I am taking my old files off of my laptop hard drive and organizing/decluttering them. I have another laptop I have to take the hard drive out of as well to do the same thing but it is not with me.
Next step is a monitor, looking at 1440p or 4k IPS. But for now I am going to go out and buy a cheap one to hold me over for a week or two while I finish up some more cad modeling/basic rendering tasks.
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20 minutes ago, havenphillip said:
So wait you're actually making 3d models and then creating 2d textures from them?
Yes, actually. This is quite a common technique in AAA games and has been around for quite some time, albeit with some evolution over the past 10-15 years. It's generally called hard surface modeling or some variation of that.
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34 minutes ago, havenphillip said:
These are top-notch. How are you making those initial designs?
Thanks!
I use Fusion 360's toolset (sketch extrusions, fillets, chamfers, splits, etc) to block out high poly details, then I go back and add micro fillets to smooth hard edges and make nice bakes.
I export the solid cad geometry as an Autocad .sat file, then reimport into 3ds where I prepare the highpoly models for baking by tiling them 3x3 (for a tiling ambient occlusion map). These are exported as a .fbx file and thrown into xnormal, where the models are baked down to a simple plane mesh. Some of the high poly models can have anywhere between a million to more than 50 million polys after exporting for bakes! Quite taxing on my laptop (I only get about 5 fps at that point).
I find this method way easier and less destructive than trying to fool around with turbosmooth in Max. I can also apply this method to props and scene items as well.
This link to this person's workflow more or less explains the general process of using fusion 360 for a highpoly, although I do not need to clean up meshes for lowpoly models in this case (because I am baking on simple 2d planes). If I were doing game props the workflow would very much be similar.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/xzKWRY
There are many other artists who utilize Fusion 360 for game assets. Definitely google around and look at what can be achieved. It is pretty cool.
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Build ordered, parts will be arriving this weekend. See parts list below for specs:
I went a little more conservative on the build this time to save money, however it will still be extremely powerful. The first one I posted a while back was a bit overkill. If I need to, I can add another GPU or expand on memory in the future. That was also the reasoning why I went with a 1200W platinum power supply.
I really lucked out and was able to get all of these components shipped from Newegg, with the exception of some extra case fans from Phanteks on Amazon.
Stay tuned.
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Been plugging away during this quarantine and spending a lot of time indoors, working from home, skyping college friends (aka happy hour), playing NFS Heat/Resident Evil 4 on my new XB1, and watching textures render.
Also, about to order new computer parts sometime this weekend, along with a copy of substance painter.
I'll admit I took a few months off of this to build up some funds, but with the stimulus check coming in I think the time is ripe for me to build a dedicated PC. Shipping times are going to be interesting however and part of me is a little weary of ordering electronics from overseas. I will be looking into this as well just as a precaution.
Just wanted to check in with a small update, thanks everyone.
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1 hour ago, BES said:
going all out with that build ?
Does that case have a clear side panel? ..it makes things fancier..lol
Yup haha.
I am actually going to use a different case than I listed above. Gonna find one that has an actual glass panel. I'll probably put some bluish-white lighting inside to make it look cool but not distracting.
Likely I will not get a 2nd graphics card initially (since they are 1.2 large a piece). I'm sure one card will be fine until I start launching substance painter or 3d coat/marmoset or something. I also have to deal with checking to make sure when they are restocked by nvidia. For some reason I don't know if I want to go with a 3rd party for these cards...
Your pc looks nice as well
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3 minutes ago, Josh said:
Impressive! You might want to check if a mid-tower case will be okay for your purposes. A full tower is very very tall.
I might look into this, but I am honestly not bothered too much by the size of the thing. It will probably be fine. Might mock it up in cardboard to see how it fits in my room though haha.
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Specs:
Might just go with 64gb ram for now unless I get a good deal on a 4x32gb package from Corsair
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Pc build is going to be coming very soon. Black friday and christmas deals are gonna be my friend.
Currently planning a build that will utilize an Intel Core I9 9900KS, two RTX 2080ti GPUs, and 128 GB RAM. Not going to do water cooling but will be buying a decent sized tower that will allow for placement of many case fans. Also not going to bother with running SLI, but may add that in the future. I read a bit about Quadro cards, but after looking at the price tag those are out of the question (probably beyond overkill for what I need). I like the idea of running two gpus instead of one, which will make more sense when using multiple high res monitors or one ultrawide display.
For a monitor I will likely shell out for something 4k, which will be great for clarity and color.
If any of you have good reccomendations on some 4k monitors that are a balance of quality and price let me know. My budget is around 4000 dollars and I will be buying the parts over the course of the next 6 weeks. My goal was to allow for some futureproofing and take into account the fact that I will probably be too lazy to reupgrade later down the line.
This is also going to be a more conservative build so I am not giving a damn about spending excess money on RGB lighting and alienware-looking cases.
I based a build off of a CAD/engineering and game development workstation on PCpartpicker, the guy who uploaded it (back in october this year) used it for zbrush, maya, substance painter, solidworks, fusion 360 and such. I will post some final specs next week if I can.
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This thread has 11000 plus views. I am wondering where they are all coming from honestly.
Also thanks again everybody for the encouraging comments.
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13 hours ago, Josh said:
I'm approaching a point where I need to start creating game templates for the new engine. One of the templates will be an FPS demo unashamedly based on Doom and I am interested in using your artwork for the level design.
I actually just started a new job working as a Product Development Engineer last week (at a major automotive OEM manufacturer in the US), so right now I have been in the initial steps of planning out a new development PC (finally!).
Need to save up some money to pay off some important things first though because I am still kinda college-kid-poor. I'd definitely be down to make contributions to an FPS demo though as long as there is some reasonable compensation for myself, but I'd rather discuss those types of deals when I feel like I am ready to get back on my feet again with this project, that is after I get on top of other things financially also.
Having a brand new PC to work with for the first time in years is going to be a gamechanger though and I am really looking forward to that! But... I need to be wary of the fact that I will need to work around a full time schedule as well as any potential social obligations that might arise (friends, family, weightlifting, weekend "activities" etc.). I don't want to burn myself out that way.
It feels like every year new software comes out that dramatically changes a game dev pipeline and I have been paying attention to see what programs are out there which I can buy in order to get the highest quality possible for textures, models etc. Most of those decisions are going to be based on what speeds up my workflow the most without making sacrifices in terms of visual quality.
I'll keep updating in here as usual for now when I have news.
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Quite busy with career-related obligations at the moment, I have put this project on hold for the past couple of weeks but plan to return to working on it as soon as I can.
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45 minutes ago, carlb said:
am sure some people would love to get your stuff and they looking good as well
Thanks!
I will probably put my older texture maps up for between 3 to 6 dollars a piece depending on their size. I think there are around 30 of them if I remember, most of them I made somewhere around 8 years ago.
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Some more examples which will eventually get painted
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If anyone is interested I might upload some of my old materials to the steam workshop individually for a small price - the money I would get would go towards supporting this project. I will try to figure this out in the coming weeks if I have any time for that.
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Making good progress, most of the floor textures that I originally created have been remodeled in fusion and had their 3d geometries baked. Some wall textures I have rebaked as well. For context there are 55 or so floor textures, I have so far re-done around 90 percent of those, maybe 15-20 percent of the wall textures. The speed at which I get through each depends on the complexity of each image and how much detail is involved. Some only take me one hour, some take me 4 hours to do - I try to do at least one per day and on weekends when I have free time I try to get at least 7-10 of them done.
Today I screwed around with my old scene and made some newer, better screenshots. I figured you guys would like to look at this stuff rather than what I usually post. It is a combination of some older materials I have made and some new ones. I wanted to take a break from what I usually work on anyway and it was a nice way to get some general concept of an overall look that I want to acquire for the final product I intend on creating.
Once I have a larger library of assets I will work on creating a brand new scene to showcase my work. Also, I decided to stick with a 2k texture size instead of 4k due to some diminishing returns in quality. The floor texture in this scene is 2048, while the rest are 1024.
Thanks again.
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47 minutes ago, Josh said:
It looks very good but there isn't much variation in color or other properties. It looks like just a really nice normal map with a plain metal texture on top. IMO the little details should be gold or silver, and there should be more variation.
I have not started the painting process yet at the moment - that will come later (I promise). I have compiled a massive amount of reference materials to help aid me when I get to that step.
The 3D modeling and highpoly baking part is probably going to be one of the biggest and most tiring obstacles I have to get through right now, so I am trying to power through that while I have the time. It is a long process and requires a lot of finesse, and at times a lot of headaches when things don't go the way you want to.
Right now I am just trying to showcase some 2D baked lighting that can be generated from the maps I baked in Xnormal - I just overlayed a simple metal texture to give some idea of how some metallic surface lighting might look with general lighting conditions in a game engine (without having to put it in one).
Parallax shader
in Showcase
Posted
I will have to let you try this with some of the materials that I am making, when I am finished with them that is.