TWahl Posted September 14, 2020 Author Share Posted September 14, 2020 Had to take a brief hiatus from working on this due because I was busy with moving. I plan on resuming progress this week as normal, when I feel comfortable. If anything it felt nice to take a break after being "on" for such a long period of time. Thanks everyone. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Angelwolf Posted September 28, 2020 Share Posted September 28, 2020 Just wanted to say that your work here is incredible. Great job! 1 Quote My Games: Nightmare Prism:::WolfTale:::Dungeon Creeper:::Despair of Ordinary Men:::Piano Simulator 2016:::House (W.I.P) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Posted October 4, 2020 Share Posted October 4, 2020 This forum thread has over 18,000 views. ? 2 Quote My job is to make tools you love, with the features you want, and performance you can't live without. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TWahl Posted October 4, 2020 Author Share Posted October 4, 2020 4 hours ago, Josh said: This forum thread has over 18,000 views. ? Yeah - makes me wonder where they come from, some of my pictures from this thread show up on google image results, I am thinking that people are viewing the thread to look for reference material/inspiration for their own 3d models or textures. Only reason I think that is because I typically will do exactly that when I need some ideas/references for things to create! I also wonder if there are any visitors from other game engine forums... Again I apologize for the lack of updates. Since the weather has started to get cold again I have been hit with allergies (non covid-related). So my mental stamina has been slightly lower than usual. Luckily I have been feeling better lately, so I plan on firing up my rig again to resume content creation very soon. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Posted October 6, 2020 Share Posted October 6, 2020 All the popular content on this site gets about 20-30K views. 1 Quote My job is to make tools you love, with the features you want, and performance you can't live without. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TWahl Posted October 6, 2020 Author Share Posted October 6, 2020 Renewed my Fusion 360 license tonight, apparently it expired while I took a break. Luckily I got it at a discount! Going to resume progress tomorrow. Might try to do a timelapse video as well, would be cool. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Posted October 7, 2020 Share Posted October 7, 2020 I checked Google Analytics, and most of our traffic comes from "top ten engines" type of lists. Quote My job is to make tools you love, with the features you want, and performance you can't live without. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TWahl Posted October 8, 2020 Author Share Posted October 8, 2020 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TWahl Posted October 9, 2020 Author Share Posted October 9, 2020 4 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TWahl Posted October 13, 2020 Author Share Posted October 13, 2020 Finished modeling all textures, currently burning through all of the color ID maps at a fast rate. Aiming to get at least 10 done per day so I expect to have the remaining ones for the wall textures done within the next week or so. After which will be time to hop into substance painter to begin creation of a master material set and begin painting/exporting the completed maps. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Posted October 13, 2020 Share Posted October 13, 2020 The timing on this is actually pretty good. It looks like Xamarin forms has recently been abandoned and a lot of people are probably twisting in the wind. QT does not have a draggable treeview: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45619624/implementing-drag-and-drop-with-qtreeview 2 Quote My job is to make tools you love, with the features you want, and performance you can't live without. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TWahl Posted October 14, 2020 Author Share Posted October 14, 2020 Spent some time today working on making more realistic base metal for future use. Will be working with SP in parallel to creating the remaining ID maps so that when I get to the painting process I will already have some idea for how I want to move forward with the final look of each texture. In SP I will be able to tweak the individual values of the metal to produce the final look I want, for each specific part of the texture (this is where color ID maps come into play). In addition to metal, I will also be doing some studies for creating more realistic paint, wear effects, lights, insignia/signage, etc. In some of my previous test screenshots within SP I mostly played around with adding filters on top of each other which produced somewhat decent results, however there were areas of the textures that still looked weird or the grunge did not make sense, so I am going to spend a pretty good amount of time making sure that all of my materials will look good on each surface instead of being too mudgy or homogenous. This step will also allow me to more easily organize my layer stack and make the actual process of churning each final texture out a much less painful process. The details need to look as good as possible overall, since this step can easily make or break the final product. Stay tuned for more updates. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marcousik Posted October 14, 2020 Share Posted October 14, 2020 lol that's so good i'm not even able to imagine how this could be improved! I think so much games even on steam doesn't offer such quality. Or maybe I don't have the hardware it requires to see them. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TWahl Posted October 14, 2020 Author Share Posted October 14, 2020 13 hours ago, Marcousik said: lol that's so good i'm not even able to imagine how this could be improved! I think so much games even on steam doesn't offer such quality. Or maybe I don't have the hardware it requires to see them. Thank you - I take a lot of cues from polycount threads critiqueing other's 3D art and apply it to my work. People over there are very detail oriented and will shred your work apart over things that others would not normally pick out right away, so I like to take my time to ensure that everything looks as real as possible with colors, normal details etc. Reading/lurking a lot of those threads and the advices that are given there have taught me so many things about how to create good 3D assets and I regularly visit the site every other day just to see what gets posted. Part of it too is that when I eventually have to go sell these materials I will have to compete with other works of similar quality, so it is important to stand out and make sure that I deliver. Take a look at some of the top sellers on Turbosquid or other 3D asset marketplaces and you will see what I mean. Hardware wise my computer that I built is pretty darn beefy, even for SP but honestly even a mid-range PC will allow you to make decent 3D assets. A good CPU, 16gb ram and a decent mid-range graphics card will allow you to do a good amount of high-poly modeling for example. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Posted October 15, 2020 Share Posted October 15, 2020 One of my old pre-Leadwerks projects at one point had an official forum on Polycount.com. 1 Quote My job is to make tools you love, with the features you want, and performance you can't live without. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TWahl Posted October 17, 2020 Author Share Posted October 17, 2020 Spent the last day or so working on rust and more realistic procedural peeling paint. Still a few kinks I have to work out, but overall the maps and material properties are looking really good, a lot like I have envisioned. Next steps are going to involve more work on rust (for pieces that are fully rusted), as well as cleaner materials like aluminum for tech, latches or rivets to make them pop out more. More work to also be done on "spray painted" materials (for decals like numbers, arrows or signage) as well. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TWahl Posted October 18, 2020 Author Share Posted October 18, 2020 A close-up shot of the peeling paint and rust: Paint removed: Extreme rust: Flexibility accross different texture map inputs (normal, curvature, AO, world space normal, ID map). 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Posted October 18, 2020 Share Posted October 18, 2020 With these latest shots, I feel like your work has gone from "cool, it has a lot of detail" to having that extra AAA touch that makes it looks like more. 2 Quote My job is to make tools you love, with the features you want, and performance you can't live without. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TWahl Posted October 18, 2020 Author Share Posted October 18, 2020 Heavy machine grease: 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josh Posted October 18, 2020 Share Posted October 18, 2020 I love the yellow / gray / brown. Having variation in metal / roughness across a surface has a very big impact on how good a material looks when anything is in motion. I have found with the new raytracing system that reflections tend to look best when materials only have small bits of highly reflective areas. Flat mirror-like surfaces actually tend to look the worst. The floor of the train station in Half-Life 2 is a good example of this, you can actually see the effect in this screenshot. The floor is sort of reflective, but the little red squares really shine when the light hits the right angle: Your material above is an ideal example of this rule because I assume the yellow would be the most rough / least reflective, the metal beams would have a soft reflection, and the worn edges, bolts, handles, and little details would probably be highly reflective. Come to think of it, this concept is probably why chrome is used sparingly on cars as trim, instead of making the entire body silver: 1 Quote My job is to make tools you love, with the features you want, and performance you can't live without. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TWahl Posted October 18, 2020 Author Share Posted October 18, 2020 Finished adding a fixed spray paint material, which interacts with underlying surfaces and generates procedural overspray effects as well as slight variations in opacity. Emissive lights are still WIP, trying to improve that by having the underlying grease and dirt layers restrict their emissivity appropriately. Beginning to get close to a final master material - not much left to work on other than some different types of metal surfaces to break up some bare metal details, and possibly add a layer or group of layers for signage (like warning labels that are stuck onto the paint). I need to drag in some different textures to see how it interacts with different maps as well. Overall I have been very happy with how this is turning out, prior to this I was very worried that everything would look very off in painter after I had spent so much of my spare time modeling all of these textures. I am going to continue working on the master material set over the next week. When I am finished I will create another blog post to showcase a finalized result and possibly include a few technical explanations. 4 hours ago, Josh said: I love the yellow / gray / brown. Having variation in metal / roughness across a surface has a very big impact on how good a material looks when anything is in motion. I have found with the new raytracing system that reflections tend to look best when materials only have small bits of highly reflective areas. Flat mirror-like surfaces actually tend to look the worst. The floor of the train station in Half-Life 2 is a good example of this, you can actually see the effect in this screenshot. The floor is sort of reflective, but the little red squares really shine when the light hits the right angle: Your material above is an ideal example of this rule because I assume the yellow would be the most rough / least reflective, the metal beams would have a soft reflection, and the worn edges, bolts, handles, and little details would probably be highly reflective. Come to think of it, this concept is probably why chrome is used sparingly on cars as trim, instead of making the entire body silver: Yes for each surface I have included a few color variation layers that break up smooth roughness and generate more interest and detail, makes for a more realistic surface. For the paint in particular, the beginning paint color/surface layer is set to a low roughness value (to mimic new paint), and each layer added progressively over top (wear, dirt, dust etc) takes the roughness back down until it looks worn. The masks/height variations of all of these layers are linked to underlying surface wears as well, which is how I was able to achieve a peeling paint and bubbling rust effect. When working in painter I have found that it is best to envision the progression of how a surface wears or ages, instead of trying to replicate the final result right off of the bat which gives weird results. I will tweak the roughness/height/color channels accordingly. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TWahl Posted November 2, 2020 Author Share Posted November 2, 2020 I have been replaying dead space lately and that game has so far given me a lot of design ideas for the future. Same with Lost Planet 1 which I finished a week or two ago. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TWahl Posted December 7, 2020 Author Share Posted December 7, 2020 My apologies for the lack of updates over the past weeks. Lately I have been busy with the holidays, and very recently (as of last week) due to the pandemic I have had to shift my focus towards finding new employment after mass layoffs at the company I work for as a consequence of restructuring. I have been chipping away at this project here and there for a while, however things might be slowing down for just a bit. I'll see what I can get done over the next few weeks but I cannot promise a lot for right now as my schedule and priorities are going to be shifting considerably. Thanks again for the continued support! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TWahl Posted January 13, 2021 Author Share Posted January 13, 2021 Little progress update: Not much to report since the holidays, however I have been experimenting with different resolutions in substance painter. Also practicing with making some more materials in my off time. I have been fine tuning the same master material I worked on previously, however upon opening it again after not looking at it for a few weeks (at least), there are some glaring flaws that became apparent which affect the overall realism. Still going to go for a rusty, sort of abandoned space station look (kind of like the derelict crafts in the dead space trilogy), however I am trying to focus on having nice textures that are not too muddled by granular details. In particular I was not happy with the paint and rust, so I will be working on fine tuning those more. I am also working on bumping up the texture maps to a working resolution of 4K. Then I will either export directly or downsample to 2K, although I think it might just be best to include the 4K material, along with downsampled 2K, 1K or even 512 x 512 maps. Then the end-user can decide on the resolution involved for their application (VR or cinematics come to mind). While 2K is still fairly high resolution it makes some detail painting in substance painter a little bit tricky, especially with the ID maps. The aliasing from the different colors can produce some artifacts which are undesireable, bumping up the resolution will help fix these problems. This will involve quite a bit of time rebaking all of my old maps, but the good news is that I can do this in the background while working on other more important tasks aformentioned. I have been thinking of trying to start creating a few modular assets out of the trim sheets and textures which I have already baked out as well. Thanks again to all who have been watching this thread and I apologize for being quiet for some time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TWahl Posted January 14, 2021 Author Share Posted January 14, 2021 This is where I am leaving off for tonight, overall I am much happier since the metal looks much less like gray pitted stone: 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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