Marmoset Toolbag 2 - Experimenting

After repeatedly seeing and hearing about Marmoset Toolbag I decided to try it out and see what potential it has. I used my crate asset that I recently created as a way to quickly get the grips of how this program works. It works similar to the way that Substance Painter by Allegorithmic works with real time rendering, of course with painter you can paint onto the mesh itself where as Marmoset Toolbag is a way of rendering assets/scene. Overall I enjoyed the experience of using this rendering tool, I found it to be intuitive and fairly straight forward (apart from figuring out how to center the pivot on my model, still can't figure out how despite it being centred in Maya). I will have to see later down the line whether or not I will purchase the full program.

Testing out Substance Painter

I have been waiting a while now for this program to roll out as a beta and today the beta has been released. The program allows anyone to take there model and essentially paint onto their model in real time. It allows for the user to add particle effects to the asset through a physics system and works incredibly well. The software is created by company called Allegorithimic and is definitely worth a look into the potential that it has.  I have included a link to their site with the trial on or alternately you can purchase the full thing on Steam.

http://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-painter

Art test - Personal Project

After approaching a creative director for an indie games company I got in touch with his producer. It originally started out with me asking if he needed any 3D environment artists for his game that he is building and I exchanged emails with the producer and it came to being he wanted an art test to see what I could do. The idea of the art was to create a 'crate' with items inside (using my creative imagination) . The crate has to be 200 tri's with a 512x512 texture along with a diffuse, normal, specular and alpha map if needed. The style of and design of the create was to be stylistic, similar styles to Diablo 3 and Boulders Gate. I had never done any hand painted or this sort of styled textures before so I saw it as opportunity to be creative and learn something new. The whole experience of creating the asset was really good and through learning new skills with both maya and photoshop I feel I created an asset worth showing on my portfolio. Below are the final renders of the crate from different angle along with renders of it in UDK. 

 

After these final renders I was unhappy with how the paper hanging over the edge of crate turned out so I moved it around the UV map and re-done the render to show the texture better and not so pixelated. 

 

Outside uni work - Shaun Slade concept art

So after many amazing pieces of concept art from a uni friend, Shaun Slade (link for his facebook group will be a link down below) I saw a piece that really intrigued me. I saw the piece as a 3D environment and asked if I could model it. To my delight his answer was a yes so below is a few images of the concept piece along with a development of the build in maya. This personal project will be a slow progress due to several projects I have already but I intend to create an environment that replicates his concept piece.

Rendered using mental ray psychical sun and sky

Shaun Slade Concept Development - TheArtOfShaunSlade