Hey guys my name is Athanasios Velissaris and together with my team, Michael Velissaris and Apostolos Kazakis, we proudly present "80 years later" the environment of a vast once blooming metropolis that is now just a remnant of the atrocities that war brings. 80 years later the time travelers visited the now decimated city and in respect to the floral growth created a research outpost that resembles a vast tree overlooking the Tower of Camberlith a monument of what once was.
Like everything this piece started with some concept art, I knew I wanted to create mostly the tower so I painted the tower first and then some examples for the rest of the buildings.
And of course someone had to do the Outpost and since Apostolis IS the only one with actual architectural studies we decided that he should do both the concept and the 3D part with only minor guidance....
Aaaaand we're off....
Maya was definitely the right decision for the tower 'Our goal for all the assets was to be as low poly as possible while retaining the PBR look as if we wanted to create a supper responsive game environment ' And low poly we DID go, I am a huge fan of Marmoset and decided that we should at the end be able to upload as much as possible. My technique was to work part by part unwrapping and modeling at the same time, making sure everything was nice and tidy.
As far as the flora is concerned I used Blender's hair particles on low poly bases to create vines bushes and trees, "particle leaves" in my opinion is what gives to trees a special look while still retains the stylization I'm after
Low poly trees of course means that we could afford some minor particles/hairs, each tree is approximately 1500 tris with particles.
The ship was arguably the most unorthodox build since I had to build it ,explode it for texturing, rebuild it for details and destroy it in order to make it look like it crushed on the tower
these are obviously some iRay renders for demo.
Apostolis doesn't use Blender or Maya so he did his whole piece on 3ds max
while he doesn't have much modeling experience he makes up for it with pure ingenuity as he displayed some of 3ds max's greatest functions especially when it comes to creating the grid that supports the outpost procedurally and as I'm typing he completes the texturing in substance painter. He really did an overall great job utilizing reference from modern buildings to contrast the destroyed architecture!!
Finally Michael did the destroyed house in blender, not much to be said that man is a damn photocopier he saw the concept and two days later he spew out the models with perfect topology and two days after that he had 'em textured and ready to go!
Michael is actually really obsessive with his textures as he created himself each and every material he needed in SD, before porting it into painter!
With our main assets near completion I actually took some time to create some duplicates of the buildings and modified them to increase the scenic diversity.
Since we had bombarding steampunk airships how about a romanticized version of ww1 tanks. How would that look you ask... well here's how:
So the time finally came that the main tower, the city buildings and vegetation was completed. I hand painted the ground and assembled everything in Blender?
It's no surprise that Blender is at best sub-optimal for environment building BUT unlike Maya
Blender requires less keystrokes for the same results + if it crushes it recovers really fast and once the million tris limit is hit you are ALWAYS in danger.
So that's it for now the final submission will be up the latest two days from today what more will it include? Handpainted HDRI? a flythrough? Puddles of water? Stay tuned guys and any comments will be appreciated!!!
Aaaaand we're back bringing you the final submission for the challenge and oh boy it's been an experience and a half. Did you know that marmoset has a clipping plane that's way too close for comfort? Well I didn't and imagine my surprise when I learnt it...
The project was about to go without fly through when I thought "hang on let's use the Unreal Engine 4!!! ". No offense to the wonderful Marmoset toolbag and it's great development team but the UE4 performed great.
OK drama aside here is our final entry rendered both in Marmoset and the UE4 with custom handpainted/PBR stylized enviroment and handpainted HDRI, the environment of course is in the style of a more traditional diagrama so we elected to leave the edges sharp and not have them blend with the HDRI.
Unfortunately some marmoset files were exceeding the file limit of the Cubebrush forums so I'm providing external links to my artstation post so you can enjoy everything plus the hand painted HDRI
Fly through Video:
Marmoset
The Tower model
Tower.mview (15.3 MB)
The Outpost model
ArkedemianOutpost.mview (10.7 MB)
Enviroment Assets
Camberlith.mview (18.7 MB)
Artstation portal for the handpainted HDRI and more:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/5Genz
it's been quite the great experience for us, thanks a lot guys, any feedback is much appreciated
-TH-
