Titanpass level update

Latest update of Titan pass level, it was in sort of done state, but had some issues, I start making new material for walls and rocks, and slowly Rick Kohler become involved and re-mesh most of architecture and in play area rocks.

What I did: Unified texel scale between most of surfaces, new shaders for walls, rocks, statues, ground, and ground meshes. Ground meshing, boulders and rocks meshing on walls. Some additional meshing on level. Background meshing, dirt material layer, puddles material, base lighting set up and final tweaking of lighting, values, surfaces colors and post process, optimization. 

I was using existing textures made by Josh Marlow, and other artists from epic games. 

Original assets were made by Josh Marlow and Rick Kohler. 

Additional assets optimization Josh Marlow

Because of limited time, I had to simplify my original background vista from being dramatic mountain ridge dropping across the level to the valley with few castles  toward more simple lake view from one side and distanced landscape on the other.

Videos from comunity

UT Procedural Dirt and Level BP

Dirt Material layer. It uses UE4 precomputed AO as input mask and triplanar texture projection. As well it has procedural leaking effect based on object bounds. It is possible to override dirt color per material instance and add additional "contact" color, control dirt roughness, color. Add dirt effect to chatacters.

This material layer can be controlled globally trough special blueprint actor, but parameters can be as well set inside material instance and blueprint will modulate these values. 

Next steps - Most probably moving from being material layer to be part of base surface material, reusing existing surface textures to reduce tex samples, using importance masks or height maps for more natural blending with surface textures.  

Blueprint actor will control lighting and atmospherics ( image based distance fade/fog), global wetness level, water level's etc. Maybe even some simple background meshes.

Idea is that end user just uses right parent materials in his/her levels and able to control most of parameters from one spot and change level look just with few sliders. 

Unreal Tournament Underland Trailer

Unreal Tournament DM-Underworld, back to Unreal look

Level finishing, Lighting and atmospherics, Refactoring and values tweaking for surface materials, making of underwater and ground shaders, background meshing, optimization. 

Level was pretty much done by Rick Kohler when I got it to my hands, originally it was only about making ground and do something with water, but step by step it starts changing and updating, first background meshing, then lighting and mood, then had to tweak most of surfaces to make them work better with lighting, fade rocks by world height to avoid unneeded reflections on top of the cave and make fog more pronounced, adding foliage, underwater post process material, etc. 

 I didn't really made any asset besides shaders, most of the time it was about reusing existing  assets or modifying them.   

Base level meshing by Rick Kohler

Most of textures made by Josh Marlow

Paragon Main Menu

Main menu background. 

General concept and composition, set meshing, lighting. 

 All assets are Paragon in-game props made by various artists.

P.S. Watch it on big 4k TV... 

Paragon Announce Trailer and Hero Reveals

Paragon  Announce Trailer

Lighting for Paragon Announce Trailer.

1:31 - 1:42

Grux Teaser Reveal

Dekker Teaser Reveal

00:00 - 00:25

Unreal Tournament- Outpost 23 Vista

Why everyone want me do vistas?)))
Actually I am big UT fan, and having opportunity making something for UT was really exiting.  Especially when this level is - amazing Outpost 23 by Josh Marlow and Rick Kohler 

Moved. New role.

Moved to Cary, North Carolina. Happy and proud to become part of the Epic.
Senior technical artist from next Monday. Life is interesting thing.. )))

Warhammer 40,000: Chess - Regicide Teaser Trailer

Reel 2011

Unreal Ed( September 2008 build) + Beast, UDK, 3DsMax, Photoshop, Zbrush.

Levels Visual Direction, Modeling, Texturing, Lighting, Shaders, Post Process.
 00.00 -  01.30 Prabellum/ Hedone/ BulletRun  (SOE)

00.00 - 30.00 Level visual style set, preproduction research, BSP prototyping, Level meshing, Modeling(High/LowPoly), Textures, Setting up modular shaders, Lighting, PostProcessing, Sky and Ocean material, FX, Outsourced assets tweaks.
Team: Level Designer, Level artist/Lighter (me), Support Env artist (1 week)
Done in 8 weeks.

30.00-01.02 Level visual style set, preproduction research, BSP prototyping, Level meshing, Modeling(High/LowPoly), Textures, Background and Sky, Lighting, Post Processing, FX, Outsourced assets tweaks and remake.
Team: Level Designer, Level artist/Lighter (me), Support Env artist (1 week)
Done in 6 weeks.

01.03-01.30 Level Visual Redesign (90% new content), Level meshing, Modeling, Textures, Background and Sky, Lighting, Post Processing, FX.
Team: Level Designer, Level artist/Lighter (me)
Done in 2 weeks.

01.30-01.57 Personal test level, Modeling (High/LowPoly), Texturing, Shaders, Dynamic Sky, Lighting, PostProcess, FX

01.57-02.02 Personal test level, Modeling (High/LowPoly), Texturing, Shaders, Lighting, PostProcess, FX

02.02-02.30 Interior design, Lighting, Modeling (3dsmax.Brazil r/s)

02.30-03.13 Concept Art (Photoshop, 3dsMax)

03.15-04.20 TechArt Unreal ED

-03.15-03.24 Vertex paint through AO texture.

-03.25-03.33 Sky Texture/Shader. Sky animation, Textures Set

-03.34-04.20 Post Process Shader: Scene depth Colors, Scene depth Brightness. Vignetting, Localized Sun light animation (To keep light sources static), color tinting.

Antarctic lighting and shading

Little big update for my Antarctic project. Little because not much difference in layout from the old one, big because so much of new things in shaders, its logic, sharing values, etc..

WIP. Update for antarctic scene. This time about shaders and lighting Rendered in UDK

My attempt to make Custom Physically Plausible shading (PBR Physically Based rendering) inside Unreal engine. As well realization of my thoughts about data sharing on big levels.
 Basically all values across all materials are shared and controlled through material utilities, mostly same tiled textures used across every surface in world space. Adding new asset is just about importing mesh and normal map into the editor and applying correct instance material, done.. Shaders contain information about waterline high and can make meshes wet or change color on ice if mesh is placed in water. Rock meshes will use terrain main color mask to apply snow or rocks in same place as it on terrain, etc. Additional controls applied through vertex color, what reduces amount of instance shaders and gives me per object controls.
Overall process is about moving content rather tweaking individual assets


Waterfall - Mesh with animated displacement map ( texture scrolling) + vertex animation for secondary waves

World machine for terrain Water layer is terrain layer automatically projected on specific high

 Birds using vertex world space animation for wings waving. Partly distributed as particles, partly as regular meshes

Same vertex animation used for ice waving or assets which should be placed on water.

 All shaders based on library of instances, so basically if I change some rule set in one element it will affect all other shaders in same time. This saves me from re tweaking different shaders if I need to change something.

And the shader.. ( Updated)

Map - https://www.dropbox.com/s/u3sjyrmnu7qha5g/anty_ShaderReferenceMap.udk

Pack- https://www.dropbox.com/s/d54zakjjw94j38m/anty_ShaderPack.upk

Manual

• Grayscale sky lighting (Lightmass)
• Set Spec and Roughness values = 1 if use SRO (Specular, Roughness, Other) (Sample in MI folder)
• Fresnel controls for metals face=1. 90 = 1 - (sample in MI folder)
• Experiment with mixing base layer and coat layer. 
• Cube map is situated in F_Cube material function, just replace with one you need. Try to use same values ( brightness-contrast-saturation) for cube and env texture.  ( for instance Sky texture brightness 2.0, cube texture brightness 2.0) 

For instance blurry base layer and light , less blurry  coat layer for plastics.

Semi reflective and gloss main layer (0.5. 0.5), and coating with max blur on grazing angles ( face 0, 90 1+) for Velvet like effects, etc.

It still in progress, I will tweak and probably fix something. Hopefully will improve lighting model. 

Enjoy 

FishBird

Fish birds animation example.
Simple vertex animation masked by vertex colors


 And UDK pack  if you interested CLICK

Antarctic, is actually alive..

Working on some man made stuff, would be simple to build some cliché sci-fi environment, but... meh, so don't expect it to be like click )))

Some tests from summer time

About 3,5 hour per state, totally forgot how to do lighting in max))

All shots are straight from 3dsmax viewport render(quicksilver) without GI, just a lot of lights to simulate GI. No post effects and color correction.

Antarctic is back !

UDK. WIP. Still crazy amount of stuff to do...

Antarctic. Behind the scene

Custom IBL Lighting shaders

Artistically driven wind effects

Just a few meshes for all space (about 8)

Height driven ice coverage

Dynamic clouds

Depth driven color correction

Material driven lighting 

Pseudo sharpness

Vignetting

Some of high poly meshes

Syndicate

Some lighting I made for Syndicate 

Air

Teaser..

WIP, The Legend of..

WIP ( Whiteboxing and basic colors set up)

  Few shots from the personal project  (intro) I working now. Real time lighting and Shadows with Night-Day animation for Sun, Sky, Fog, Post Process. 

Aside from the game idea presentation, visual goal is to achieve  full CG films (Pixar) quality in real time. 

As usual  Unreal ( UDK)