Summary of the Year 2023 - Year of Ends & New Beginnings

General / 25 December 2023

Hello!

Another year has past and it's somewhat time to summarize what I've been up to this year in chronological order. Though looking back at this whole year you can tell that I've been straight up living game development as much as I can. O_o


Main Menu Challenge

The Dinusty Empire hosted a Main Menu Challenge (my idea) and I wanted to create an animated main menu to give me some more opportunity to do animation, VFX & Tech art. I ended up only doing it for a few days but it was a fun exercise either way! 

I made this portal where you could stick objects and they wouldn't show up on the other side. Which was kind of neat!

Then I also animated this little dude jumping out of the portal the thinking here was to Close & Open the portal and have different things coming in and out of it for this little fake Main Menu I was making.  In the end I didn't end up finishing it but it was a fun experience none-the-less!

Kiru-Project

I stopped production of my Kiru-Project even after I added a bunch of awesome gameplay to it. It was super cool though however I would say, but I got a bit overwhelmed with the amount of characters & animations I would have to make to be able to make this something that is actually viable as a game. I learned a lot from this project though and once I have more experience in animation & making characters I will definitely revisit this game. For now though it's been benched even though its been promising and fun from the start.

Tenement stopped & re-branded into something new.

So my main issue with my Tenement project was that it relied too much on scripted events for it to be able to make it interesting. It kind of started to feel a bit too heavy in terms of production and too hard to make "fun" or "interesting" early on. Ie lots of it had to do with the general writing & mood rather than have something interesting going on with the gameplay. So I decided to take a break from it and essentially re-brand some of it into a new project that I started later during the summer with the same style.

I did manage to make my own little dialogue/typewriter in Unreal though which I also utilizes later in the newer project.


Joined the Lighting Bot Podcast

Joined Amit & Jeremiah to try and have a monthly podcast where we talk about Game Development in general.


LD To Art Project

Early this year I realized the LD To Art Project together with the Dinusty Empire. It never got lots of attention but it's still there and acts as an opportunity for people to take an already set level design with game-mechanics already implemented and could be used to create art-theming ontop.

The Design was made by Peter Fields and I converted it all over to Unreal Engine and into a project that people could try and enjoy for free.


Shipping Jected Rivals

So between 2021 & 2023 I worked remotely from Sweden for Pow Wow Entertainment. Ambitious, Talented & Nice company from Vienna that was creating this game you see in this gif above. Jected Rivals. A free-to-play, competitive arcade hybrid racer that takes place both in vehicles & in the air/ground as people doing stunts and using gadgets to race their way to the goal.

At the start of development I was Lead Environment Artist and by the end of it I was promoted to Tech Art Director since I generally took over all art-production for the World & dealt with all technical art issues that came in-between. Tech Art Director felt like a big step, but I also figured it was an opportunity for me to take more room & learn new things. The game was a challenging game to make overall, large-worlds, lots of of players, lots of vehicle physics etc.


We were a very small art-team making this game (2 junior prop/environment artists & me , at max at one point in development we were 5 including one intern, and at the later stages we also had 2 VFX Artists helping out)

Essentially there weren't enough artists to even cover 1 artist per level. So each artist had to be responsible for multiple levels & props & textures. In the end it made more sense for the development to lean more towards making larger re-usable levels instead. Rather than setting up individual levels for each map (having to redo work over and over again).

Sequence made by the awesome Enrico Labarile - https://www.artstation.com/enrico_labarile

Early on when I arrived on the project I essentially started out pointing out all the issues, explained them as well as I could and then got started on fixing all of them. It took months before the game was in a decent state performance wise having some consistency in the visuals. Everything ranging from memory budgets, reworking every material in the game, making tools & reworking workflows & pipelines, as well as act as an advisor for other departments.

One of my major focuses was to not use Megascans or Marketplace Assets for the game, generally because:

  • All marketplace assets are made in different ways.
  • It would take a lot of time to just remove the bloat and fix the marketplace assets

Dominik Uhl - https://www.artstation.com/hawk33 - Made this awesome level

In the end the game ended up not doing super well but for me personally it was a great experience. I learned a lot about Unreal Engine during these two years and pushing it through production to a released thing was a good experience. As a lead it was also a great experience, leading a smaller team , learning peoples strengths & weaknesses, teaching them to trust themselves and not feel bad for not being like X person or Y person but appreciate their own strengths and use them to their advantage.

I think it's some of the most and best praise I've ever gotten in my life & lots of personal thanks and messages from both Directors & my team. In the middle of 2023 though it was time for something new. I had been approached by a friend about a very particular matter:


Co-Founding A New Game Development Studio

I co-founded a new studio together with 4 others. Bloom & Gloom Games. Built in mind with specific pillars on how we work, that everybody deserves to do meaningful work, be creative & have proper ownership. We're all grunts & veterans from the games industry with opinions about how we should do things and what it means to make games. 

It's been a dream of mine ever since I was a kid to be honest, to found a game studio. Its been lingering on my mind forever even to the point where I felt like I should just do it solo but oh boy am I glad that I didn't. Making games is one thing, running a studio & finding funding and the whole business side of things is another.

I can't really talk about any details about what we're doing right now but I'll just say it's been quite liberating to work in a very small agile team that makes decisions pretty quickly. I'm currently responsible for all prop art, world art, materials, tech art and vfx but hopefully I'll be able to let some stuff go as we grow as a studio, but I'm not gonna lie, I truly enjoy doing a bit of everything :)


The MistSea Project

Even though I've already co-founded a game-dev studio and we're working on our game. I still have my own hobby project that I keep spending time on now. On this project since I'm making it solo, I truly have creative freedom to do whatever I want with it which is quite nice to fully control something like that. It's been around 6 months development already on it.

The game is an eerie atmospheric horror first-person exploration / light puzzle game that is set at mostly at sea.


I've been using the project as a way for me to do productive stress-relief (if that even make sense) that is other than gaming and let's me implement what I've learned from other systems & disciplines in a more simplified manner without having to worry to much about achieving great modern visual quality.

Also letting me implement some of cool modularity in my work and use it as a teaching moment for my Patreon & Twitch channels.

Overall it's been very fun for me to implement this type of aesthetic and keeping true to the overall texel density to give the whole thing a very accurate pixel-art look with modern lighting.


The Launch of Avatar Frontiers of Pandora

I worked 5 years on this game and I wasn't there for the end-push since I got an opportunity to work for Pow Wow and try out smaller-team development that I've always wanted to do. On this game however I did a lot of things.

Early on I was one of two artists at the start of this project, later on the team grew and I took on the responsibilities as Biome Head leading a small team of artists dealing with the art production of Biomes & the procedural generation in regards to biomes.

A while after that they asked me to move over to World Tools & Design. Where I was responsible for the World Building & Generation of the world. I helped design & create tools. I setup standards & procedures on how to build the world, made benchmarks & held workshops for artists/designers to get the most out of the tools and make them aware of the new features coming into the production.


and a while after this, I was asked to join the Landmarks team as an Associate Lead. Point being able to help the landmarks team do their work (I also owned landmarks) but also since I had been working on the World Proc Gen for so long I could also help the landmarks team setup their landmarks properly to work as they should.

Overall it was a really long but giving project, but after 5 years of development I kind of felt like I needed a change which is why I left before the end.
The game launched now in December and has been really well received. The World Design & World Art being praised by a lot of people and even by Digital Foundry themselves. :)


What have I learned this year? And looking ahead

Oof it's kind of hard to answer this question. This year I've done a lot of things, I've lived game-development to the best of my ability trying to improve on all areas. I wish I also delved deeper into C++ but the sad truth is that I havent had time to truly do that, right now as I write this is the first real vacation I've had this whole year and its usually during my vacations I spend time learning about bigger topics so that I can get into it.

In general if I were to quickly list the things it would probably look something like this:

  • Scoping & Evaluating Production for my own projects
  • Gone deeper into VFX
  • Become very comfortable in Blueprint & Making tools in Unreal Engine
  • Learned some Houdini
  • Delved deeper into PCG from a Production Standpoint
  • Animation & Tech Anim
  • Learned how to take care of & love a bunny :P

I dunno its kind of hard to like figuring out everything I learned this year, looking ahead this coming year though. It will definitely be interesting! Lots of more focus on what I'm doing for Bloom & Gloom and I can't wait to share with you guys what we've been working on. 

And I just want to say another thank you to everybody that has supported me this year, letting me act all important and give advice left & right even though I barely know what I'm talking about :P

Let me know what you guys have been up to in the comments or maybe write your own blog-post! It would be cool to read!

Here is to a great 2024! 

Until Next Time!
Warping out

Summary of the Year 2022 - The GameDev Focused Year

General / 01 January 2023

Hello!

I thought I would try and summerize the last year of my life in a blog post just as a reminder as what has happened during the year, what I've been doing and what I have learned. It's actually quite suprising how much time you have to learn how to do different things during a whole year O_o

So in general this year I've been streaming a bunch of Art but also a whole bunch of game-development in general. 

Opening up UE3 again to look at old scenes

At the start of year I decided to open one of my old UE3 scenes, a Konoha Scene I made back in 2013. It's made in UDK and it was actually lovely to see it in its glory in DX9 and FXAA but in 4k resolution. I'm super happy that I've kept this scene safe mainly because it reminds me why I love stylized art and how that started quite early for me.

Testing UE5 Lumen Early Access

To try out UE5 I decided to make a quick little scene just portraying a rather empty kitchen relying on mostly the lighting setup to make it look nice. It's actually quite hard to make a really nice interior daylight look without the exposure going crazy and all the windows looking outside becoming full-white. That balance is a very tricky thing to get which I struggled with a lot but still managed to decently succeed with.

I still decided to go for a night shot since I wanted to check what Lumen was capable of when it came to moving objects, lighting through a window and having moving/flickering lights. The rest was doing some blueprint work to get wind, cloth and some moving parts in there all tied to the wind.

You can see it specifically on the window curtains, the lamp and very subtly the cupboard door.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lRNLVJ

The year I learned Unity

It's also the year I decided to learn how to use Unity. Where I wrote a detailed blogpost regarding being a new user in Unity and coming from Unreal. I had a deep look at the tools they provide for world building and their viability for bigger productions. Since that time I have actually dropped Unity because of several reasons. That said though I did learn a lot and I did produce some art in Unity as well as a whole other bunch of stuff which I will showcase below.

  • Learned how to code in C#
  • Learned how to Use ShaderGraph
  • Learned world building & tools in Unity in general

Made an Ocean Shader (ShaderGraph)

Created a new? technique for shader-based variation for grass (ShaderGraph) 

Learned how to make these types of breakup shaders, this is in (ShaderGraph)

I also learned that you can utilize the Matrix 4x4 Node in ShaderGraph to store data kind of like how Unreal Engine does their Material Attributes. It really sped up workflow when working with bigger graphs.

On the side I was also making some art inside of Unity URP just to get a feel for how it works and what is available to you, this particular scene was inspired by Journey and making use of a sand-shader that I made from scratch plus learning how splines work in Unity.

Made a lil flag shader.


Kiru - The Samurai Arcade HordeMode Game

My prototype hobby game project Kiru actually started in Unity during the Summer Vacation. I was doing a C# Unity course and learning, at the same time I decided to make a small prototype project written in C# , it ended up as Kiru my hobby project. In this particular case I was making a combo system in C# + learning how the animation systems worked in Unity.

After I decided to drop Unity I decided to remake the project in UE5 instead. Currently it's completely made in Blueprints and features

  • Robust Combo Component System
    • Combo Component can be attached to any BP
    • Combo system based on Animation State Notifies telling the combo component what attack to execute next using Montages + Interface calls.
  • Wind Manager
    • Manages the wind direction and the shaders
  • Round / Spawn Manger
    • A round-based spawning system that uses completely abstracted data to easily add whatever BP classes you want to spawn where the enemies/projectiles etc are responsible for their own behaviors. Ie you can spawn anything and when whatever you spawn is destroyed it counts towards completing the wave.
  • Enemy Base Class / Projectile Base Class
    • Health, AI, Behaviors, Attacks , Projectile Deflection
  • Custom Character in Blender -> UE5 on the UE5 Manny Skeleton

  • Runtime Retargeted for maximum compatibility

Wind Manager

Blender to UE5 Manny compatibility + Runtime retargeting

I also learned how to animate in Cascadeur and import the result into Unreal Engine. Animation isn't really my strong suit but it has been a fun side-activity to learn as well during the end of the year :)

Special Jump move implemented in Kiru Unreal, the arrows representing the character direction and the player input direction.


Tenement - Retro FPS Horror

On the side of everything else I also started dabbling in creating a retro-inspired FPS horror game called Tenement. Though its currently on ice. It's kind of hard to show off since its just a very dark game in general made in UE5.

  • Real time lighting using Lumen
  • Interfaces for interacting with objects
  • Reading notes / Using flashlight
  • A system for sequential events (ie one event can trigger another event in a sequence setup manually by the user)
  • 256*256 sized textures (max), definitely a feature.

I guess that has been the whole year. It went by rather fast to be honest and in the middle of it we also moved apartments. It's been somewhat crazy.

Looking ahead towards the year to come

I don't think I have any ultra specific goals this coming year. In general my approach is just to strengthen my weaknesses.

I need to do more of:

  • General Tech Art
    • Dive deeper into HLSL
    • Tools Programming (Editor Utility Widgets)
  • C++ Deeper Dive
    • I still do most of my programming in Blueprints would probably be good to spend more time in C++
  • Learn more about procedural generation
    • I study procedural generation a lot in general but I haven't actually implemented anything myself
  • Animation + Tech Anim
    • It's been my focus for the last two-three months. I need to go deeper to be able to feel comfortable and achieving what I need to achieve for successfully being able to prototype gameplay + characters.

Hopefully I can do more mentorships and add more value to my patreon as well. I know that not everybody is interested in game-development specifically and want me to do Art-specific patreon content but the truth is that I feel like I want to go beyond "just art". It's starting to be even less important to me than game development as a whole so I think I will stick with it and see where it goes. Art will always be my main strength but I feel like I have the luxary to expand into other areas and should do so while I have energy to do it.

Thank you all for supporting me throughout this year and for following my progress, it's been a really crazy year with lots of learnings, let's look forward to the next :)

Until Next Time!
Warping out

//Chris R

Unity - WTF is going on

General / 15 July 2022

Hey guys!


Like a lot of you guys know, I've been delving into learning Unity with the plans of potentially making game prototypes and creating tutorial resources for it. However in the last few weeks of me evaluating it and especially in the last few days I'm just left with a bitter taste in my mouth regarding some of the high-level directional choices that Unity are making.


Unity Merging with IronSource:

https://twitter.com/sh4na/status/1547220546458361859


Unity Game Developers obviously not being happy about Unitys Direction

https://twitter.com/gamemakerstk/status/1547313023236427777


Unity decided to shut down Unity Anwers and then went back on their decision [Support forum for Devs]
(they decided to shut it down, community hated it , because its obviously a bad decision.)

https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-answers-shutdown-canceled.1293360/#:~:text=On%20June%2023rd%2C%20Unity%20Answers,on%20the%2023rd%20of%20June.


Unity CEO calling its user-base "Fucking Idiots"

https://mobilegamer.biz/devs-not-baking-monetisation-into-the-creative-process-are-fucking-idiots-says-unitys-john-riccitiello


Unity Cancelling Gigaya


https://forum.unity.com/threads/introducing-gigaya-unitys-upcoming-sample-game.1257135/page-2#post-8278305


I think the cancellation of Gigaya is somewhat of the last straw for me, because Unity has issues for medium and large scale development. It's the number one complaint from its game dev user-base, Unity doesn't have a flagship game that push their own tech forward, that makes the engine better for everybody, that inspires its users to push onwards. Game development is hard and costly, and they cancelled it because of these reasons believing that they've learned "enough" and its not worth pushing further. It's just proof of the fact that Unity can't even push through their own issues of their own game development.

They don't believe in game development enough to even support their own internal game dev team financially. In the end, they make it really hard to defend them or Unity as an engine you want to stand behind.

in fact, it's so hard to defend that most successful games don't even advertise the fact that they are made in Unity and most devs actually pay to remove the Unity Splash Logo in their game. It's even advertised as the first feature of their Unity Plus subscription.

^ Right there, the first feature in the list of features of the Plus subscription.

So yeah, it's hard to defend them at times like this. Does this mean that you can't make great games in Unity? No, of course you can. But you're also making games in a "Game Engine" for a company that seem to care little about games.

So where does this lead me in regards to what I was planning in terms of evaluating their toolset, tutorials and what not. Well essentially this:

  • I will not continue the Unity Evaluation Based Series
  • I will not continue to make art in Unity
  • I will be sharing what I've learned so far as free resources on here
  • I will be spending my focus on Unreal again

As for the wonderful devs that use Unity, keep on working hard! It just sucks to be spending so much effort on a company that doesn't care about its core-users.

I opened up UDK/UE3 again and repaired an old broken scene.

General / 06 January 2022


aaand check it out people !

it's running in UDK/UE3. This scene was made back in 2013-2014 way before...any fancy rendering or tools. (photoshop ftw) but now I can see it in high-resolution in the viewport (from which I grabbed these shots below) and in ultra wide as well because..why not since I have the monitor for it :D

Winning the Artstation Challenge & Moving Forward

General / 30 March 2021

Hello!


It's that time again for another update, so what has happened in my life lately? Well!


We got ourselves a puppy a while ago, her name is Ginza. It was slap in the middle of the Artstation Challenge which severely hampered my motivation in the middle of the whole thing but I did spend the last week pushing more time into by forcing myself to do it even though I was exhausted by taking care of the puppy.

and I ended up winning.. somehow.

(alternative banner shot)

Generally if you didn't check my art-station challenge post, I've uploaded the final work here:
(https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nYBz4o)

The main purpose of this piece was to explore my ability to create soulful and striking art whilst limiting my color-range, and as usual with these challenges I tend to focus on very specific things I want to learn or explore for it. I also decided to go with my own concept design, the reason is because personally I feel like there is definitely value to learning how to create your own designs and not always rely on copying someone elses concept. At some point in ones artistic journey you'd want to make things that are solely your own and I hit this point for sure maybe 3-4 years ago where I started focusing way more on just...becoming better at doing this. 


Progression Shot:


So what is happening next? Well, as soon as my life calms down a little bit more I can start making art again, generally I'd want to put more of an effort back into game-development so I guess that is the stuff you'll see in the future.

I guess I'll give a shoutout again to my Twitch & Patreon. I guess if you're interested in my thought-process when I make art or learn some of the tricks that I use when working then maybe it might be a good choice for you to check out.

(Or if you wanna see the puppy on stream which is the reason most people come to it) 


and if you're wondering what we're creating on stream, here is a quick work-in-progress screenshot of that:


It's a bit different from other things I've been doing , we're making something STALKER like and we're focusing on composition & mood. We also talk about how to set things up from scratch as we go. The thought of it is to create several areas of interest which can be moved through with a camera that ends up inside of this abandoned military base, and we create composition and ideas on the fly by talking through things.

I usually stream on Tuesdays at 8pm CET and if you end up missing the stream I always update the videos to my Patreon page, I also update the Patreon page with secret sauce knowledge articles written by myself.

 So be sure to check it out!
Twitch & Patreon


Until next time!
Warping out

//Chris Radsby

Art Streaming & Mentoring for the Masses

General / 17 February 2021

Hello There!

Some people have been wondering about what I'm doing on my art-streams so I thought I'd do a quick gathering of the topics I've been covering and some screenies from the stream. Essentially what I'm teaching in my streams is what I teached my mentees the last 2 years but I do for the masses instead.

If you like this idea, please consider joining my Patreon to help me in my quest of world domination & glory.

In reality it's a way for me to be able to fund me keeping on doing this in my spare time, buying UE4 marketplace stuff and reviewing them and if in the future it goes well, then maybe it could potentially fund me spending more time teaching/mentoring and maybe even some game-development. But hey...starting small, for now I'm just teaching people what I've taught my mentees whilst having a good time making art.

 You will also find articles I've written about this stuff as well the streaming sessions that are directly uploaded to the patreon after each session.

Here is my twitch, for the ones interesting in joining my sessions live. They are currently happening every tuesday at 8PM CET. 

(http://www.twitch.tv/chrisradsby)


Session 01 - Getting Started

1h Fundamentals

1h Starting Scene from scratch

In the first session we spent an hour going through some art fundamentals before we even started doing some art. Then we actually started working on the scene without any reference, just an idea of what could potentially be the Setting/Atmosphere and we did compositional work & talking through the thought-process as we went along.

We covered these topics:

  • Going through the basics
  • Choosing the Right Scene
  • Gathering Reference
  • Composition
  • Infusing Narrative
    • Using Composition to your advantage for your Narrative


We basically had something nice going in 2 hours :)

Streaming Session 02 - Continuing with Fundamentals

1h Fundamentals

1h Art in the Scene
 

In the second session we went through:

  • What to think about when making Blockouts
  • Blockout Techniques
  • Lighting Fundamentals and Why we do a first pass early
  • Planning / Organizing your work

And then we continued doing some art on our scene, found some weird Raytracing-specific issues, figured it out. Started talking about what the scene could turn into and trying a new compositional angle.


So yeah if you're interested in following the progress and learn together with the others then I suggest you hop onto the streams and the patreon!

Until Next Time!
Warping out

//Chris Radsby

2021 - New Avenues

General / 30 January 2021

Hey there!

The times have gone fast and 2020 has really been a great and fun year for me to learn new things and explore new aveneus as a game-developer. So for 2021 I have some big news to share with you guys.

I have decided to leave the Mentor Coalition. 

My two years together with the Mentor Coalition has been great, I love the opportunities Josh and his team has given me but now I'm readying myself for trying out a new format. This new format will rely on me regurarly streaming me creating art, having educational art & game-development streams and sharing some more exclusive access to some of my stuff on Patreon. In general, I'd like to spend some more time building my social medias and gaining followers that would be interested in getting mentored by me during streams but also later on 1-on-1 opportunities as well.

So, to start small. I will start up weekly Art & Game-development streams.

http://twitch.tv/chrisradsby

Every Tuesday at 8pm CET starting on February 9th I will stream when I work on my art or game-development.  It'll start with a once-a-week stream and eventually grow to something more.


I will also launch my Patreon. It'll be a slow start, but my followers on Patreon would get more access to some of the stuff I'm doing and open up more learning opportunities and maybe potentially help me fund some of the time that I want to put into doing art, mentoring and game-development on the side. If you've been following me for a while then you know that my interest in game-development as a whole have grown and I would love to one day be able to truly call myself a one-man solo dev, and hopefully you guys can be there to grow and learn with me.

 So if you're like me that enjoys environment art but possible also technical things like tech art or game-development in UE4? Well then maybe my patreon would be a good entrance-point for you to partake in all of that.

http://www.patreon.com/chrisradsby

So what is happening with my mentoring now?

 Well right now not much, I need to focus on getting these new things in order first. If you're still interested in me mentoring you then please contact me here on Artstation and we can talk about it. I would also like to thank all of my mentees that have stuck by me during the years of me mentoring, you guys have been awesome and it's been a lot of fun so I thought I would highlight some of you guys in my portfolio as well.


https://www.artstation.com/artwork/KrdZgG


That's it! Be sure to stay tuned as I'm going to update things here & on my patreon to reflect some of the new changes that are happening.


  Warping out!

//Chris Radsby

The World of Cyberpunk 2077 - Through the Lens

General / 22 December 2020


 

Hello there!

So I've spent the last 100 hours of my spare time playing Cyberpunk 2077. During this time I've really tried to enjoy myself playing the game and I found myself spending hours inside of the photo-mode. I've been trying to capture the world away from what you see in your regular cutscenes and frame them in a way that makes it look like high-quality main-content using the in-game photomode with no third party editing afterwards. These are shots that you might potentially just see for a moment during your play but never really consider twice. I'm here to give you that second look though.

There are no obvious spoilers inside here but I'll give a warning anyways!

If you look closely, if you spend some time immersing yourself in the game, spend some time in your car, listening to the rain falling onto your car roof you'll find that there is a lot of personality in Night City, lots of mystery and plenty of alluring areas to explore. 

It's a beautifully crafted game, despite its' flaws,  so tip of the hat to the craftsmen over at CD Project Red. 

My 100 hours have been well-spent in your game and thank you <3

 

 



Cyberpunk Challenge - Part 04 - [UE4] Detailing Animations / VFX / Drone / Rain / Char

General / 01 April 2020

Hey there!


I've been slowly working my way through this , I was already in quite a good position time-wise during this contest so now I'm just adding more stuff that I find fun and I try to teach myself more stuff in the mean-time. Since the last post I've done a bunch some of which I'll show you just below here, but first :)


Answering some more questions:

How do you have time for all the things? 

  • I tend to preach this all the time but people tend to overscope, a lot. The "secret" with mine is that I went with a really tiny scene art-production wise and an even less heavy art-production pipeline. The only real texture I have in this scene is the concrete texture. Which is just a tiling simply concrete-texture, there aren't even any normal maps.

  • The point is that to make art you don't have to really rely on really time-consuming workflows and for me, that's perfect since I don't actually want to spend a lot of time making lots and lots of unique props or textures.

  • Top down approach, work on bigger things first, things that take up most of the screen-space. (Screen real-estate) those are the most important things (except for hero props). Once most of those things are sorted out start with smaller things, it makes things easier when it comes prioritizing your work.

  • I guess the last point I want to make is that: I make time for it. By sacrificing other things in my life
    but that said as well, I also do the above stuff, I make sure that I don't do something too detailed or something that has too many unique things going on.

Keying Lightning Strike


Drone:

I decided to quickly model a drone, I also taught myself how to Rig and Skin it in Blender AND getting it imported into Unreal. Sad thing is that I later realized you can't seem to access the bones in the sequence editor? (correct me if I'm wrong anybody). So that I would have to do most of the animations in a 3rd party software like Blender and import animation data. I was kinda hoping I could just do it all from sequencer so if anybody 

knows how to do that let me know ! ^__^


Testing the rig in Blender


Imported rig in UE4.


Shading and look inside of UE4.


Character VFX:
So for the character I kinda wanted a pulse as well, maybe even a small pocket computer that would have a display on it. What I quickly realized though is that it's kinda hard to make something all cool and sci fi and have it be visible without too much noise or ehm... focus in the scene. So right now this is what I have until I figure something better out.


Lighting Strikes:
The Lightning strikes are polygon modelled. ie , you take a picture of a lightning strike and you start to edge-model it from the side. Then you make sure it has depth by going into different directions) Then you make sure that it has a gradient, from the starting point to the end point which you can "Fill up" during it's life-time as a particle.

You can probably also do this type of stuff with a texture-card , as long it has a gradient, but if you want really clean looking things without compression issues this is probably the better way to go. If you want to be really optimized you can do a channel packed texture or even more optimized 1 channel with several strikes with different gray-scale values and a gradient made in the shader.


Electrical Arc:
It's a beam-particle with a stylized electrical material. The beam itself has several subdivision with added noise to it to make it jump around during it's life-time.


Rain:
I think my biggest concerns with most of my scenes is that I always want them to feel somewhat alive, somewhat realized and with things happening. The rain I wanted there but most people tend to do really obvious rain-effects, like if it's raining you notice but most of the time looking out the window you don't really spot all the rain so I tried to make sure it was pretty subtle from a distance.


Cyberpunk Challenge - Part 02 - Figuring stuff out

General / 29 February 2020

Heya!

So I thought it was time to write another blogpost regarding what I've been doing lately. So generally I haven't spent too much time on the Cyberpunk scene, I've just been doing small stuff here and there that I've found fun/interesting since I've been somewhat swamped in work and other things BUT I have made some things but first up:


More information about my scene

  • It's completely rendered in real-time in Unreal Engine 4.
  • It's real time dynamic lighting, no RTX-features.
  • I'm going for a stylized look. (influenced by animé) I don't want to make it realistic.
    • Character is cel-shaded with no baked textures, only colored polygons.
  • I'm currently not doing any heavy production workflows, ie no high-poly/low-poly baking etc etc.


Flying Cars VFX 

- Mesh Emitter + Lens Flare

What it does is take any mesh you feed it and emits them as mesh particles. These have an attached lensflare to them as well and they just push them in a certain direction. It's probably the easiest way to go about this type stuff.

I also have lightning strikes going on around the scene with a big light to add more to the mood of the scene.


Cable Physics

Physical cables that have a start-point and an end-point. They conform after the COL-geometry around them.
Makes it easier to get natural looking cables hanging and lying around. For more elaborate setup a mesh-spline is probably the better choice.


World Location Pulse Emissive

I've used this before, this world location pulse is a material-function that I can plug into post processing, materials or lights. It allows me to set a point in the world and have a pulse-be generated from that location . That pulse I can use as a mask to do different cool things. It's sometimes handier to use if you need a pulse originating from a location spreading in all directions.


Progression shot

So I decided to show progress from even earlier stages of my blockout, my first post showed a couple of shots in since I felt like there wasn't really much to show at the moment but I also thought that some people thought appreciate to see the whole thing. So with every blogpost moving forwad I'll show the full progression.


Latest Shot

Below is the absolutely latest video-shot of my scene . I still have lots to do but I'm trying to take it easy and not kill myself.


"


A "short" list of stuff I still have to do.

  • Fix the scale issues I'm currently having, need to re-adjust things now that I've decided to show more in my scene.
  • Add more opportunities for story-telling in the foreground and don't be afraid to change things up to make it look more interesting.
  • Probably add rain or something else to increase atmosphere and mood. My only worry is that it might end up too noisy.
  • Figure out a better design for Character Helmet
  • Figure out a better design for the power-generator he's jacking into
  • Add more detail to the foreground sewer opening
  • Add more detail to the circular opening in the background
  • Actually do a pass on the buildings
  • Add huge power-lines from the green area below leading to the circular red shape.
  • Figure out VFX for the power-lines.
  • Add more car variations to the Flying Car Mesh Emitter.
  • Make small detail props to place around the foreground



So there you go :)
If you have any questions let me know!

Warping out!

/Chris Radsby