German Subway (Munich Marienplatz station)

I liked this reference when I found it because of it contrasting colors and sleek modern feel. This particular station had such vibrant colors and simple shapes that drew me in. I used this as another opportunity to try and let the materials and maps do a lot of the lifting, and it would be good practice to try and balance the colors with the lighting.

The shapes were simple enough in maya. I just kept it all as low poly as possible, but that also allowed me to have more in the vertical to better capture the curve of the walls as well as the light fixtures.

From there I moved right into working on the materials for the walls and floors.

Similar to the old house exterior, I called out values in the substance that would let me modify the scale and amount of tiles in the floor and walls to more accurately match the reference. However, these materials are much much simpler.

After all of that was done, I did a quick test in Unreal to see how everything was coming along.

My initial reaction would be to brighten up the walls a bit, to help take the load off of the lighting. This will require some back and forth, however.

Old house exterior

While I'm finishing up the abandoned interior, I thought I'd post some progress from another set I had started and will be finishing up after. This piece I found is the exterior to an old house.

I wanted to keep the geo fairly simple. This is the initial block. My plan is to let the materials and maps do most of the heavy lifting. 

I started with the painted/weathered ceiling boards to plan out how I would go about doing this. Here are some caps of the results. 

And here is what the substance mapping looks like: 

I wanted something that would give me a lot of freedom while in the engine (in this case Unreal) to be able to adjust any value as needed to make sure I could accurately represent the source material. In this case, all of the sectioned off values in the map have called out values that allow me to adjust everything from the amount of wear and paint to the direction of all of that weathering and extra dirt. It also allows for scaling, however it shouldn't be needed. It is nice to have the option, though.

More in-progress work!

I have a few in-progress pieces that I'm looking to finish up soon! Here's one such example! An abandoned interior that I found really interesting.

For contrast, here's the picture I am working from:

This particular piece has been a lot of fun to work on and has been a good lesson with how to quickly use shapes repeatedly by modeling one or two versions and then quickly modifying them to fill out a scene!

Shoulder cannon progress

Another model I recently started was a sci-fi shoulder mounted cannon based on a design by Leonid Enin. The specific design can be found at this link: http://conceptartworld.com/?p=868

For Leonid's art station: https://www.artstation.com/artist/leonidenin

Also: http://leopardsnow.blogspot.com/
http://leopardsnow.daportfolio.com/

Fantasy Sword

Been diving into individual props lately. One of which was based on a design by Epic-Soldier over on Deviant Art. Definitely go check out her work!

http://epic-soldier.deviantart.com/art/Outfit-weapon-commission-527496511

Abandoned Mill

I started an environment in the little bit of extra time I have. I have been finding a lot of awesome pictures online of old abandoned locations around the world, they fascinate me.

I set a goal of trying to recreate a lot of these places in 3D for modeling, texturing, and lighting practice.

The first project is an old abandoned mill. This is still at the block in stage, but I'm excited to work on this more! The original photo is below. There are some difference due to camera settings and perspective, I want to try and work these out as well

Happy (albeit belated) Holidays!

So over the holidays, I decided to make a very special gift for someone in particular. Quite the fan of BioShock, I decided that perhaps I would create a piece of fan art to help celebrate the holidays as well as preparing for the release of BioShock: Infinite! I'm quite excited for it, anyway. This is just a fun piece that I painted (except for the city backdrop, those details will follow) that I enjoyed doing.

As noted in the last sentence I do need to add that the city background is not my original work. It belongs to Tim Warnock, check out his website: http://www.thenextside.com/index.html it's a great website and he's a great artist!

(This image was taken from the BioShock video game series or from websites created and owned by 2K Games, the copyright of which is held by Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. All trademarks and registered trademarks present in the image are proprietary Take-Two Interactive and its subsidiaries.)