My name is Brandon, I’ve been teaching myself Environment art for close to 2 years now and I’ve recently decided to work on some portfolio art in my spare time and it had to be something that is not Sci-Fi. Almost everything I have so far is Sci-Fi so I’ve decided on a really cool Apocalyptic scene done by “Marina Ortega.” You can check her work out here - https://www.artstation.com/artist/marinaortega
The image was created for a game called “Beyond Flesh and Blood,” It’s funny because the game is sci-fi but luckily the image is not!
My goal
My goal here is to strengthen my workflow, Create assets that I have not before along with reaching fairly high quality but sticking to the gamedev workflow. Meaning. stack RGB for textures, maintain a reasonable poly count, and using Modular Design where I can. I would like to stick closely to the concept but also add some of my own style or uniqueness to the image as well. Lastly, I just want to have fun being creative!
I’d also like to add that there may be gaps in the updates because I am also working on a small indie as well so it will be all about managing my time and health.
While doing this I want to show it from start to finish…so, the ugly, looks okay, then dayyumm that looks good! I hope
If you have any questions just let me know and I will answer the best I can. Thanks!
For this part I found a placeholder shipping container so I could figure out a decent scale. I also made a large concrete block and a fence kit. At the moment I am just trying to get simple assets in place with simple textures so I can get more of an understanding of color and layout. I will then keep iteration on the assets and improving them as I go.
The concrete is only 1 mesh with all of the sides looking different. I will eventually create possibly 2 more for the spot on the left where it is more broken up with rebar hanging out.
The fence is very simple geometry for the metal poles and a plane with a tiling texture for the chain link part. I created a blueprint with the pieces so I could tile them easily. These will need improvements but for now they help sell the idea!
Here are the pieces for the fence along with the blueprint. You can do this by creating a blueprint, select “actor” and then on the top left under “add Component” you can select the meshes you may need. You can add lights if needed as well, you can actually do a lot more with them and I will show this once I get to it.
Heyy! I worked on a piece of painted sheet metal and thought I’d share a little bit about it.
For something like this I use Quixels DDO to create a mask so I can control everything about the look in real time in the engine. This also helps because If I do this for many other assets I can just create an instance and then swap textures.
This one is for objects that have paint on them so I use a painted metal in DDO and then tweak the wear and tear to my liking. Below is what I call a paint mask.
I then Export that mask along with the Roughness, Metallic and AO. I like to use a feature called RMA packed, this will stack the Rough,Metal and AO all on the RGB of a single texture to save performance. This is shown below where it says “Export Target”
I then bring the textures to the Engine and use the Mask with a lerp to add the Paint and Metal colors. I also like to control the roughness and metallic values with a parameter, this can be useful for when I instance the material. You can also use a lerp here for
the high and Low values but I wanted to keep it simple.
I can also control the contrast of the mask with a parameter and this will increase and decrease the amount of wear. It’s good to clamp these values because going below 0 and above 1 will sometimes push the mask too far and break it. I didn’t do that here but I’m the only one using this so I know how to use it.
Here is the final result! Pretty basic and simple but I can go back and add decals or even tweak the textures in DDO if I need more detail or a different look later on. This all took maybe an hour or less and you get a pretty good result.
Thanks! Hope this can help you in some way. I’ll be adding more like this as I go.
I was working on some road chunks but needed a break from it so I started working on a ground mud material in substance designer. It’s just the normal map so far with a brown color so I can get an idea as I work on the normal. I plan to make it fully dynamic so I can tweak it in the engine or in bitmap2material to get the results I want later.
In the reference it looks kind of muddy or like there is a little bit of water covering the ground right in front of the door so I plan to put this material in that spot.
An Update to the mud. I added a smaller rock and also used a histogram to mask out the peaks and valleys for rock placement
Here is the final render of the mud, I only hope it looks good in the scene. I may have to come up with something else. I will put this up on the Substance Share as soon as I clean it all up and get the time!
I got the front gate textured, I was going to paint some markings on it like in the ref but I decided to do it with decals instead. I also changed the mud color to something closer to the ref to keep that blue grey feeling it has. I was going to do more but I ended up getting a headache and then ended up with a cold. Planning to start back up on it during the coming week.
I imagine hordes of zombies piling up in front of the gate (like in that Z movie), you can create relatively easily for free, zombie models with Adobes Fuse creator …
Lol well, my motherboard decided to catch on fire from so much humidity. I saved everything else so it’s going to be a little bit before I get started again. Found a couple mobos on eBay so as soon as I get one I’ll be back to work on this haha. I’m actually not sure if it was humidity or the water cooling leaked but I’m going back to an old fashioned heat sink!
I managed to get my computer all fixed but my free time is really limited now that summer is coming around. I hope to get back to this and finish it but I am going to have to put it on the back burner for now. I will leave what I have so far in case someone finds it useful. You can check out my main project that I am working on with a small team at www.solarpurge.com or www.indiedb.com/games/solar-purge
