Creating a Series Pt 7 - Work Starts, Substance and Finalizing some props

Making Of / 19 January 2019

Hello!

Heya again! It's the middle of January, work started 2 weeks ago so life has started up properly again. The Februrary Mentorships were announced but I ended up selling out all the slots super fast O_o , it's super exciting to see that people want to sign up for my mentorship , it makes me really happy :)

So far the January mentorships have been great, the progress of my mentees have been amazing. Everytime they post some work I'm insanely impressed with their evolution. I also know that they work super hard during their mentorship and that in the end is the defining factor for how to grow quickly. Work hard and listen well XD

Hopefully they'll have something good to say and show about it at the end of the Mentorship :) oh and if you wanna be in the March mentorships just keep a look at the Mentor Coalition Twitter and follow them and you'll get all the latest news which will allow you to hop onto the mentorships quickly. It's first come first serve after all :) 

Project Legacy Progress

So what's been happening with my Project Legacy, in all honest I've been taking it quite easy since the last updates. I've been a little bit tired of trying to design and focus on modelling while I'm getting used to the pace of work + Mentorships. So I've been doing a bit more laid back work since last time I updated the blog.


I've been doing substance designer studies on how to be a bit more efficient in the way I make things. I also started looking at a bunch of stylized substances which in the end in my opinion ends up pretty hard to make. 

So I've made like a "Master" Substance for the future temple assets that I'll be working on. It allows me to plug in varied shapes and it'll handle most of the things on its own with little super-vision and like the rest of the look of my project I wanted something that was relatively easy to read and not overly noisy. 

(I really should just sign up to @JoshLynch mentorship xD and learn properly haha)

Though I've set up my noises and masks in a way that allows me to make more detailed decay if I want to. Like this picture below:

It was quite interesting since you could go from a realistic result to somewhat stylized result with nice and clean carvings out of the tiles. In the end I obviously end up using the stylized result for the materials.


So I ended up thinking about what temple-type stuff I'd like, I ended up thinking mostly about how the temple-of-time is setup in Zelda and I'd probably want something in that direction. I generally really enjoy Zelda-type dungeons & the stuff you see in Shadow of the Colossus , so something in that vein would be nice.

I just ended started making these shapes, though I can obviously just plugin whatever shapes I want in the end but here are some previews of the shapes I'm currently using. It's probably prone for change anyways.



These are directly from the Substance Designer viewport, using tessellation, however in-game I won't be using tessellation at all since it's very expensive, so I've also been focusing on shapes that would read well through the normal map. Which means that bricks etc aren't necessarily 90 degrees around the edges, they're beveled, it'll read better as a flat surface + normal map later.

Obviously most of these patterns are quite easy to get out of the box in Substance Designer, but I was also able to plugin more custom patterns made in Substance Designer to get a nice result out for more specific type textures.


I'm also using similar techniques to deal with some trim textures that I'm also currently in the process of making. This however is more in a WIP-state trying to make use of some of the trim-techniques that people have been posting here on ArtStation.


While I'm doing all this I'm trying to put some more time into actually finalizing some of my simpler assets. I've been trying really hard to have a super simple workflow that wouldn't be so production heavy.


As for the rest I need to finish off my trim sheet, it's more of a pain since the trim sheet will have different materials etc it's a bit more annoying to set up honestly. I've been thinking of just pulling it into Substance Painter and doing everything everything in there. It's probably more efficient if I want specific detail but yeah , we'll see.

I also need to get off my butt and finish off some of the buildings and the street-props so that I can make a little scene , make it pretty and basically finish of the area for now.

Looking to the future, I'll soon start working on the temple-kit for the grassland temples stuff. It'll be interesting and fun :D


Until next time!

Warping out!

/Chris Radsby