Games Britannia Festival and textures for the Subway station

I recently came into an opportunity to be part of a workshop run by Sumo Digital, a Sheffield based games company. The workshop is focused towards the company's work on certain games and how the assets are created and incorporated into their engine. It also allows participants to work with developers to use there own assets and get them functioning in the engine.

It also provides a good meet and greet time for graduates like me and hopefully the chance to network a bit.

Carrying on with main project I have been adding some more textures to the subway station. I have been sourcing textures from CGtextures.com which has really helped. Also normal maps and other maps were made using crazy bump with some adjustments in photoshop.

The far right of the scene is starting to look quite nice. I am not sure if I am keeping this particular tile design on the wall but it works for now. Also I have to alter either the lighting or the specularity of the material because its creating a horrible section between the stairs and the vending machine.

Current progress of the station

As you might remember a little while back, I created the colourscript for the scene to visualise lighting and colour. I knew I wanted a red-ish glow coming from the vending machine and bouncing off the floor. Below is just 1 attempt at it on a blank scene. I am still trying to work out the best way to create it so will look more into whether the material should have some form of light coming from it or if light should be made to fake it.

Experiment with lighting

Train Modelling Progress

I have been working a lot more on the train adding windows and doors to the sides. One of the parts I wasn't looking forward to modelling is the 'undercarriage' part between the main train and the tracks itself. I took a risk and just went straight for it with little to no reference. I think its turned out well and I am happy it looks good enough considering it actually won't be shown off at all.

Current model of the train. (windows removed temporarily)

Undercarriage of the train

Colourscripts for the Underground Scene

 I have added some more details to the underground scene and now I am getting close to texturing but first I will sort out the lighting at least to a decent standard. I always had these ideas of where light sources would be but it helps to 'paint' them on on. Some of the lights in the scene are already looking nice its not a case of actually tweaking them and adding some more light to areas of interest.

A very rough colourscript of lighting and colours in the scene

A very early render of the atmosphere. Need to actually create light in more areas to pick out the details.

Bike Shaders and Chromatic Aberation

Work in progress

Been working more on the motorbike. Mostly on Animation but today have been working on the shaders. Thankfully this is quite an easy process because very few objects need to be uv mapped (and even those are simply planar projections so not much hassle there).

I have added a bump to the engine's logo 'Dafra' and also there is a bump on the bikes rubber handles which work really effectively.

I have also been experimenting with trying to get more realism from my images so I rendered out a single image and then tried adding 'Chromatic Aberation'. For those that don't know what this is, Chromatic Aberation is a distortion on a real world camera lens that give a subject an ever so slight colour fringe depending on how the light is split. Ironically, most professional photographers try to remove this colour fringing to create better looking images while CG Artists add it to create realism in the picture and to better reflect a real world camera.

The above process was quite basic, just a simple case off-setting the colour channels of red and blue. However, for an even more realistic look I should use a depth map to control how strong the effect is closer and further away from the camera.

Bike Animation Work

The bike animation so far. Its getting there. Need to create the movement for the rest of the objects and also fine tune the animations of some parts to look nicer and more flashy.

More progress on the bike animation

I am slowly getting there. I have been quite busy lately trying to get my showreel sorted out for a possible job *fingers crossed*

Will post up the showreel soon once its uploaded

Showreel

Finally got around to creating my showreel. Quite a few months late but there we go.
Here is a link to the vimeo version: http://vimeo.com/65107712

Lava Cavern Environment

This was the environment I was working to create while at Red Star 3D. I stumbled upon this image on my memory stick so thought I might post it. My favourite part was creating the atmosphere with fog and lighting. The thing that could be improved most was the lava texture but at the time that was placeholder.