Hey guys, I just remembered I can make blog posts!
So quick story time, I haven't seriously worked on a project of my own for quite a while. After I graduated school and wrapped up my mentorship I very quickly started my first job in the industry. It was actually super stressful because I was still doing school finals while I was ramping up at my job. Around that same time I was streaming game art on twitch which was fun, but ultimately I didn't have enough time to keep that up. It also started to make me feel weird about doing personal art, because I felt like I was enjoying the art less because I had to stream it, and then I felt like I couldn't JUST do art because I could be growing my stream and I'm not. ( I do however plan on returning to stream but, I'm taking it easy for now)
anyways,
long story short, all that burnt me out pretty good, but now I'm not burnt out and art is fun again. Yay!
I've been working on a new environment in UE5 for a little bit now, just getting things planned out, starting on some basic model work, planning out trim sheets, and troubleshooting lumen. This started as a project I was going to do with a friend of mine, he ended up getting a new job and having no time so its just me now :)
I have some goals for this project:
- go in depth with unreal's materials, focus on vert painting
- this project is kinda huge so trying to trim out as much as I can and work smart
- experiment with a vertex painting based workflow (mainly for the larger structural assets)
- get some good prop work in
- lastly, I want this project to push my own threshold for creating realistic environments and be better than my last environment
Progress so far:
I'm definitely past the blocking phase at this point, moving on to getting some models roughed out and trying to see where I can use a trim sheet. spoiler (almost everywhere lol) Here's the env as a whole, keep in mind the final project will be this room and the room in the background.
Pretty happy with how its progressing! Troubleshooting Lumen took a little bit to troubleshoot but for now I'm happy with what I have. For reference, these are the two main concepts I'm using for this room and the study on the other side. Shoutout to Andrej Rempel, this concept art is amazing! https://www.artstation.com/andrej_rempel
I started a wood floor material as I really wanted to visualize how it fits in the space, it was a fairly complicated pattern so I wanted to make sure it wasn't too busy. At this point I've just figured out the pattern and got a base layer working. I plan to revisit this material eventually of course. I also started figuring out some vertex painting setups I plan to expand upon for the project, but this is a first look!
wood base + basic dust (R channel vert paint)
There is a hefty substance designer file with this whole wooden parquetry pattern and masks and everything...but I'll spare you all ;)
anyways, that's all for now thanks for takin a look!