Apartment Update

I spent the weekend doing alot of polish on this apartment. Since I started, I bought substance painter and zbrush, and it was really fun to add that extra organic detail to the things that needed it the most. I still have a long way to go before I call it finished. Next up is...more polish. After that, I'll be working on different lighting setups, and swappable material instances for things like lights. My goal now is to use this environment as a template for various lighting setups.

Cave update and new shaders

 I saw that blogger likes to tonemap stuff I upload, so I tried brightening things up a bit. For this update, I swapped out a lot of temp textures. the new ones were made using Bitmap2Material, and I plan on doing research into substance painter next. I added in an animated caustics light and did some nicer set dressing for this particular composition.

I also did some research on fancy shaders! The one below is Parallax occlusion mapping- emulating higher poly surfaces with a single plane and a complicated shader network;

 And some vertex blending between two textures. Oh, I tried reproducing the MGS5 chamfered corner technique, but since I dont know how to script, I did it manually in Maya. I think it worked out well, but I implemented it poorly on that brick fence.

More tools to use in future projects! I'm gearing up for a new one. I just have to decide on subject matter

cave update

I made a few more assets, plus a vertex paint texture that blends between jagged rocks and drippy rocks.

Cave Props

Lately, I've been inspired to try and come up with  some modular cave assets. I did some research into basic stalactite/stalagmite shapes; where they happen and how they can compound onto each other. I was also interested in the interplay between dry rocky textures and wet drippy textures, but I'll have to look into more of that later. My goal for this was to create as few props as possible to replicate this complex growth in old limestone caves. I'm hoping to create a few more pieces ( with nicer details) in the weeks to come.
On another note, this is the first time I've exported zbrush obj's and baked the details to a  lower res mesh! Lucky for me, stalactites are pretty goopy already, so it was the perfect sculpting project for my skill level. The grey assets on the right hand side are basic maya geo ( my proof of concept phase)

A Weekend with Marvelous Designer

I had alot of fun with my first foray into Marvelous Designer- a digital clothing maker. It was very forgiving, allowing me to adjust patterns on the fly when they didn't fit like I wanted. Our model today is Bazt, who's sporting the same clothes as he had before ( except the old ones were box-modeled). I think the hardest part will be exporting it and making it usable for animation because it creates alot of issues with n-gons and impossible geo once it exports. I have alot more experimentation and practice ahead of me ( next time I'll have to use a real pattern too)