Hey everyone,

With this update, the diorama is nearly all wrapped up now, which is super exciting! I had a busy weekend, primarily focused around making textures for the deer asset, lighting and post processing changes.

I received some awesome feedback around the piece, and have some final touches to make to really bring all the components together. This scene has been a real long chipping away process, but I'm really pleased with how this has shaped up.

Key things I have taken from this project:

• A better understanding of foliage creation
• Concepting my own scenes 
• Concepting my own creature designs

These are a few of the main things that I have exercised and challenged myself on throughout the creation of this piece, that's not to say there isn't room to improve it still. But I think that it would be better for me to move onto a new project and start challenging myself more on something new, instead of spending an insane amount of time tweaking tiny details.

The next update for this will come in the form of a published portfolio piece, so keep ya eyes peeled :)

Thanks for reading.

Hey! 

Not a super long update, but just wanted to drop a quick visual on some of the progress I've made this weekend. I'm very happy with the general lighting progress, as well as the new lily pads around the island.

Now, I'm going to return to the deer and focus on making the hero asset of this piece to the highest quality I can achieve. Once this last component is in, I'll take the next step to the polishing stage.


Next update, coming soon!

What's this all about?

Simply put, this blog is going to be documenting my process of creating a small personal piece that I've been kicking about for a little while. I'll be doing breakdowns of all the techniques and process's that I go through to get to the end result.

What's the project?

To best explain it, I wrote a small narrative to help guide the development of this piece:

'Under the tree, a young deer god resides. Without guidance he stands nervously, as he must navigate the world and explore beyond the safety of his home.'

This served as a base for me to get started on fleshing out some sketches for the design of the environment, and the deer god. Using the short narrative has also helped with keeping the idea on track. Despite some changes along the way, it has been very helpful as an original building block to build upon.

Research:

I wanted something symbolic that could tie into the fantasy idea of the environment; something that would ground it to real world mythology etc.
In my research I found that wisteria tree's are symbolic of longevity, and being that the piece was based around a deer god, it felt fitting to include something representing longevity to be put side by side with an entity typically associated with being immortal.

Deer God (Name pending) sculpture-

After a few sketches this is the design that I landed on, I want to create something that feels dynamic and flows, Using the bold and curved fur design into the sculpture I believe helps reinforce the flow in the character, and once posed should be even more effective!

Wisteria tree development:

Foliage is absolutely not my strong suit, but I'm keen to learn more about it and improve my skills in foliage, so what better than throwing yourself into the deep end and make a wisteria tree. Couldn't be too complicated right?

Totally wrong...It's been an incredibly tough challenge so far.

I started off with a base shape for my tree:

Once I got a shape that I was roughly happy with I brought it into the engine to check how it was working with the deer and making sure the composition felt strong overall.

Next step, making some canopies!

Base sculpt and normal map

I was certainly comfortable with fleshing out my canopies. It was definitely still a different experience, but a lot of fun to create the arrangements for the flowers. Now these have been built, I can jump straight into making some cards out of these!

I essentially used the cards to build out these two canopies and then dressed the base blockout tree, to increase size and shape variety, I placed  a few single cards around to break up the shape further.

Once all the branches are in place this is the sort of result we're seeing. And considering this is really one of the first times I've put together a complex tree like this by hand. I'm pretty pleased with the results so far. That's not to say that there isn't room for improvement on this, there most definitely is. But as it stands right now, I think I have a good base to get some visual idea of how things are going to look in Unreal engine!

Scene development-

I'll be using Unreal engine 5 to compose and render my environment

This is just a series of images captured in engine.

And this is where the scene currently sits. I'm pretty pleased with the development of this piece so far, and like the direction that it's heading in. Next steps is to figure out some extra elements to add into the foreground and around the island. Once this is all in place, I'll probably start looking at refining the Deer god asset as the final piece to go in and complete the scene!

Until the next update!

Thanks for reading.

Now I'm trying to flesh out a better understanding of the composition and the general feeling I want to achieve in the piece. There are some really cool ornate ideas I want to create for the two back rings, and I'm going to work in the bust.

I'm now picturing how it would look in different poses. breaking away for the symmetry we currently have in this piece. None the less, I like where this is headed :) 

Hi all! 

I've recently been experimenting more in 3D and wanted to challenge myself to a piece that would realise the act of 'overthinking' as a physical thing. So many great challenges, such as what would that look like? trying to realise these forms took a load of iteration and work to even get it to the stage it is now. Still loads of work to go, but for now enjoy this little render I threw together. Lets call it, a mid progress piece :)

Just a grumpy little goldfish I'm making at the moment in my free time- really enjoying this project so far, more texture detail and emissive to come in soon :) 

Back at it again with another UE5 practice study. This has been great fun, being able to come back to some old models that I have and repurpose them for rendering inside of UE5. Lumen is absolutely fantastic, and I love how simple this is to use.

I spent an hour or so this afternoon just wanting to develop from the last study I done, following the same visual language and art style, I wanted to add some more bold colours into the mix and of course change a bit of the shape language also. Lastly, to top it all off I took the image into photoshop and lightroom just to do some final touches!

Hey! So with the recent release of UE5 I decided to give it a download, and throw something together very quickly this evening.

Mainly I wanted to see how good out of the box Lumen was as a lighting method; and I'm pleased to say that very quickly I could create an interesting shot. This took only a matter of about an hour (Granted I already sculpted this Crane about a month ago) and that includes from the time of opening UE5 for the first time and getting familiar with the new interface.


All in all, this was a really fun quick test and I found the experience of using UE5 to be very intuitive! 

Took my little speed sculpt from zbrush and took it into unreal, just using a simple bronze material, and a quick pass on lighting. Throw in an emissive ball for good measure and you have something!

Pretty simple stuff, nothing overly fancy but great to experiment with different material responses in real time.

This week I really wanted to do something a little different; I turned my hand to sculpting an animal. This was a really cool and interesting challenge that I've really enjoyed. Thinking further, this is still very much a quick sculpt, so I will likely go back in and just improve the overall quality and fidelity in the piece.

This was really quick and easy to make with a few hours sculpting in Zbrush, rendering in Keyshot and finally doing some tweaks inside of lightroom. I'll probably look to do some more pieces like this in the future :)