Hey everyone:)

I hope that you are all doing well!

I just wanted to write a quick blog post to give an update on this New York building project and to let you all know that I have got a new job that I be starting at the end of the month.

Job Update

So after 2 years, yesterday was my last day working at Firesprite and It’s been an absolute pleasure to work at the company, I've made some great friends and memories whilst living in Liverpool and I've also being involved in some really awesome unannounced video game projects. They are currently hiring a lot of people and I really recommend applying!  

It was a tough decision to leave, however I've been offered an amazing role working on some cool VR games which I'm pretty excited about. Starting on the 26th of this month, I am now a Senior Environment Artist at nDreams.

Project Update

This brings me back to the personal project, I now have from today to the 26th to get has much personal work done has possible and really progress with the project. Since I made my original time plan, I added a lot more assets, characters and story to the project which meant the time plan was completely wrong. Another area that I misjudged was how long sculpting actually takes! A lot of the projects that I do, I don't really do much zbrush so with this project running everything through zbrush first for the high poly has really slowed me down. 

So where am I at with this project? Right now, I have the project broken down into these areas which are:

- Unique assets (all the assets that sculpted to be baked down and textured in painter including both hero props and generic props)

- Modular pieces (all the assets that I will just run tileable textures and edge decals over)

- Materials (brick, plaster and roof flooring designer materials)

- Foliage kit (all the foliage in the scene, trees, plants etc)

- Car Kit (few car models that will be retextured differently for variety)

- Story (level placement, lighting, setting up cameras, setting up project for the marketplace)

So far, I've got the good majority of the unique assets done with the low poly versions made too. I don't have zbrush on my personal PC so now I will need to wait to start the new job to get access to the program again, with this in mind I will finish sculpting the rest of the assets in a few weeks. The assets that I have left to sculpt are the stairs, doors, ac unit and then I want to make some small improvements to a few assets. 

My main focus now for the next two weeks is getting the modular pieces done, edge decals made and some of the materials. I will also try to get the props that I've made so far baked down and ready for texturing. Everything right now feels like slow progress but with the way I've done this, it will get to a point where all of this will come together all at once and it will go from block out to final pretty fast. 

 Here is a rough timeline for the project: 

- This month - Brick material, modular pieces done, majority of unique assets baked.
- Next month - Finish sculpting unique assets and get all the unique assets textured
- September- Foliage Kit and level placement
- October - Car Kit
- November - Camera work, setting up marketplace project.

This is a big project and progress can be slow when only doing a few hours in the evenings and on weekends, this time plan above is just a rough estimate and there is a chance some stuff could take longer. If this is the case I do run over into the new year a bit, I don't mind has I think the quality I'm aiming for with this project will be worth spending time on it and go for quality over quantity of projects.

In this image above, you can see a few more sculpts that I've done recently and an edge decal sheet that I will apply to the modular kit, I just need to make an alpha for it. The sculpted bricks I will use in substance designer for the brick material. The water tower asset still needs a little more work has I think I've done the middle cylinder too low poly of a shape so I'm going to brick this back to a smooth cylinder and just do some small dents instead. 

That's all for this blog post and I will try to do another one towards the end of the month to show the progress I've made in the weeks that I've had off.

Thanks for reading!

All the best,
Dom.
  

Hey Everyone,

This is the first week that I will be weekly blogging on my current personal work project that I introduced in my last blog post. This past week has been a slow one due to doing a lot of search for a star reviews for the Grads in Games competition. I've managed to do a few nights on the project this week which has mainly been planning and modelling.

I've started out by blocking out the main architecture modular kit and you can see a few images below:

I've kept the modelling very simple has I've decided that I'm going to use a trim sheet to texture this kit so all the edge chamfers and damage will come from the sculpting on the trim sheet. I'm going to do two trim sheets, one for all the concrete and another one that will have window variations, metal and a bit more concrete variation.

In the image below, you can see the plan that I quickly made of how I'm going to lay out the trim sheets.

In the first trim sheet, you can see I have a few variations of trim and generic damage along with some ornament variation. The windows on the second sheet, I will have two variants of see through/ dirty windows then I will place a plane behind the window glass that will be mapped to either blinds or curtains. The interiors are not the main focus of this piece and some will have ac units or flowers on the windows so I think that I will get away with it.

On top of this, I also collected more reference for the buildings and cherry picked what I wanted to use in the environment, you can see this below:

With the week just gone also being focused on the student reviews, this is now my first week that I will be solely working on this project so I hope to get a lot done and I'm going to count this week now has my first week on the project and will start to follow the time plan showed in my last blog post. I'm aiming to get everything blocked out, the architecture modular kit modelled and start to work on the trim sheet this week. I'm also going to add an extra week to the original project plan for the trim sheets. 

That's all for my update this week! Thanks for reading:)

All the best,
Dom. 

Hey Everyone:)

I hope that you are all doing well!

I just thought I would share some work in progress shots of my current personal project. I'm still playing around with composition and story but hopefully in the end these images will be one girl poisoning the other on a bright sunny day and the environment is set in the 1700's.

I have two variations of this image and I'm not sure which one to choose to take final, In the first image you can see one character passing a glass of wine to the other (imagine the wine glasses, not added them yet). 

  In the second image you can see the character to the left pouring the poison into the wine glass.

I'm still not 100 percent set on the story and compositions so if you have any ideas that could improve it please let me know! At the moment, I'm leaning more towards the second image has the story is more interesting but I think it's a shame to cover up the furniture behind the left character has I think that really sets the time period of the image.

I have to take a break from this project now whilst I do a bunch of student reviews for the search for a star, grads in games competition but once I have finished doing them I will be back to finish this project. My next steps will be sorting out the poses properly, remodelling the balcony railing and then start to texture everything before painting over the image.

This is just the interior shot, I plan to use the modular kit to make an exterior image after if I get the time.

I will keep you updated on how this goes!

All the best,
Dom.
  

So I just looked and apparently it's been 4 months since my last blog post?! Time flies when you are in lockdown playing Cod Warzone...

I hope that everyone is doing well :) I just wanted to write a post to let everyone know what I've been up to and give you some updates on how my personal projects are going. Over the last few months I have been working from home and I've pretty much barely left the house which i'm sure is the same case for a lot of people right now due to being in lockdown. At first during the first month of lockdown, I just wasn't in the mood to do any personal work what so ever and I ended up playing a lot of Call of Duty Warzone with my mates as it was quite fun to play and it was nice to get some social interaction as I currently live alone and I wasn't really leaving the house to see anyone.

I think it's always good to take a break from personal work because you don't have to do it 24/7. However, moving onto the second month, I was ready to get back to the personal projects that I had planned, Unfortunately, work really picked up that month and we ended up having to do a lot of overtime which meant that I just didn't have the time to do any personal work what so ever. One of the plus sides of this is that I was that busy, I barely even noticed that we was all still in lockdown and that month pretty much flew by. 

At the start of this month, I was ready to get back cracking with the personal work and I've managed to get a lot done despite taking a week off to play through the last of us 2. Amazing game if anyone hasn't played it yet, really worth getting! My main goal at the moment is to get better at concept art and I'm trying to come up with a good workflow that I can use to quickly concept environments. In the images that you can see below, the workflow that I am using is:

•  Quickly model and throw assets in to UE4 with the help of some mega-scans assets to quickly block in the scene.
•  Render out an image using the Octane Render plugin for UE4 which gives me more realistic renders. Making sure the environments look good.
• I will then use Daz 3D to pose characters and Marvelous Designer to dress them and then place the characters in to the UE4 scene.
• Re-Render a final Octane image with a few render passes including an ID map to help selection in Photoshop.
• I will then paint and photo-bash over the entire image.  

My process for these concepts are quite 3D heavy at first and that's because i'm used to doing 3D and I've gotten quite fast at modelling so I can get environments blocked out pretty fast. I'm using some mega-scans assets in my concept art with the intention to paint over them or replace them with photos. I recommend using these in concepts as they are great for saving time but I wouldn't use these in my 3D environment pieces because I've not made them myself so I can't call and present them as my own 3D work. 

I have a tonne of different concepts ideas in mind of what I want to create and I've decided to work on several concepts at once and get all the environments done for them at once. I will then move onto doing all the characters for them at once and then all the paint overs at once. The reason that I'm doing this is because I hope that by the time I've repeated this workflow so much I will then be so used to it that I hope to be fast enough to create one concept per week.  

Below are a few concepts that I've been working on and I will talk about the idea for each one.

Starting out, I have made a small abandoned building scene, a little bit last of us inspired. The story is that there will be a character sneaking into this building whilst two enemies unload the truck. I have placeholder crates there at the moment but i'm thinking of changing them into medical supplies or weapons. The character sneaking in will be crouched behind the concrete barrier in the bottom left of the image. So for this image i have three characters to create. The building just has a base texture for now and I plan to have more appropriate colours for the building but I will do this in Photoshop. 

This image below will have two characters stood looking at the TV discussing the case. 

This next image is a Captain's living quarters of a space ship, you will be able to see planet earth in the background and stars all around. The story, I will have for this is a father character sat on the sofa and then a kid playing with toys to the right with his mum, so there will be three characters needed for this scene. 

I have a lot more concept ideas sketched out that I want to create and develop which I plan to do. However, this is a new skill and workflow to me and I have a lot to learn and a long way to go to match the concept quality and speed of a lot of professionals. I want to make sure that any piece that upload to my portfolio is a good quality which means that for the next few months, maybe even for the rest of the year I won't be posting anything to Artstation. I will be instead just focusing on improving my concept art skills offline and hopefully once I'm at a good enough quality, I will be able to show to you all the finished versions of the images above and a lot more concepts.

I am also about to submit my train project to the ue4 marketplace and that will hopefully be available on my store soon.  

That's all for this update and thanks for reading! 

All the best,

Dom:)
  

Hey Everyone, 

It's been a while since I last posted, over the last month I have been doing some student feedback on the GradsinGames competition https://gradsingames.com/game-dev-challenges/  so I've not really had the time to be doing any personal work. The competition came to an end last week and there were some really cool projects done by the students, with the reviews now out of the way I can start to crack back on with my personal work. 

In my last blog post, I mentioned how I will be trying to get better at doing concept art this year and I just wanted to share my progress on this concept that I have been working on the last few days and I also want to tell you about the future projects I have lined up for 2020.

The current concept that I'm doing is called 'Moving Day' and the idea is set on a porch of a house with a family moving into the property and you can see the current progress below.

In this project I've tried to go for a nice and happy mood with bright colours because a lot of my portfolio is quite dark and I've decided to try tackling a more stylized painting rather than a realistic one to show more range of styles in my portfolio. 

Moving forward, I plan to add a lot more story telling elements to the scene and establish more of a focal point because at the moment the scene is really lacking one which needs fixing. I was thinking about trying my luck at painting a character in the scene as the focal point, but this is going to be a real challenge for me.

In the image below, you can see a quick sketch over of an earlier version of the piece with some props that I plan to add, such as more furniture items like lamps and plants. 

I'm still quite new to doing concept art and I have a lot to learn and improve on, I also have a lot more work to go on this concept before calling it done but please feel free to give any feedback:) 

After I have finished making this concept I will be moving on to making a realistic police station concept so that I can practice my workflow. Once this is done, I will be doing a big concept art project with about 8 concepts that all relate to each other. All the concepts will be based on a book series called 'Red Rising' which is a really good series that is worth reading if you haven't already. I plan to concept key moments in the book as well as the locations that the book is set in, this will be a real challenge as I have to make the concepts make sense to people that haven't read the book just by looking at one image. 

I'm hoping to do three concept pieces per month which is a lot faster turn around than the 3D environments that I normally do, hopefully I will be able to stick to this plan. After I've done this big concept project, I do have plans to do more 3D projects but this will still be a few months away before I start them so I can worry about this when the time comes.

My main goal is to have a portfolio that shows both good 2D concepts and 3D environments so that I can show that I can do the full game art pipeline. 

That's all for this blog post, if you have any feedback/ suggestions on how to improve on concept art please let me know:)

Thanks for reading!

Dom. 

Hey Everyone,

It's been a while since I last posted an update on the train project so I just wanted to give you all a quick update on how it's going.  

I have been working none stop the last couple of weeks and I've nearly got the project finished. I've also added a whole modular subway part to the level now and I am just doing to the final touches and improvements. My plan is to get the project completely done by the 1st December and give it to a few people from the industry to get feedback and then hopefully get the full project done by the 13th December after improving the project based on the feedback I get. I'm heading home for Christmas on the 13th and taking a nice break, so I definitely want to get this project finished and posted before that date. 

I've included just a few images below of the project and the next time I post will be the final project that will include the video fly through, some images of each area and  some 360 VR images. 

I know that I have been working on this project for a long time now but I just want to make sure the project is perfect before I call it done. The main thing that I have left to do now is to improve the tile material for the wall in the subway. There is a lot more work to show you from the project and a lot more props that I have created over the last few weeks but for now I am going to keep it all under wraps and wait for the final post.

Thanks for reading and I promise that the next time I post on Artstation, it will be the final project.

All the best,

Dom. 

Hey Everyone:)

I just wanted to write yet another blog post to show you some updates on my train project. I still have a lot of work left but the project is now really coming together and I can start to see the end result that I had in mind. The last time I updated you all on the project, I was working on props to fill out the scene, since then I have continued to add a whole lot more props and mainly I have added a world aligned snow texture on the props. 

The snow has made a massive difference to the level and has made the project feel more complete, I have added the snow on the red channel and on the green channel I have added some frosty puddles like black ice that I will paint around in some areas of the level. You can see more of this in a later image in the blog. 

I have chosen a few main compositions from my video and started roughly placing some props around and doing a bit of dressing which you can see in the images below. I plan to do a overall placement pass of the level once I have completed all of the props. 

Now that you have seen all of the exterior shot updates above, I will talk a bit about what I still have left to finish on this area. Currently, I am making some snow mounds that I will be able to put in some places to get build up of snow that will then blend in the vertex paint of the snow texture but using mesh distance fields and dither temporal AA. I will then be adding more trash to fill out the scene such as garbage bags, coffee cups, pizza boxes and so on. I am also thinking of adding some foliage but I am on the fence about this one, in some reference images I have found some scenes have snowy ivy and some dried grass, I will try to put them in the level but if they don't look right I will get rid of them. 

Once I have finished the pass of generic trash I will be working on the stairs area that you can see above, I plan to have this a bit flooded so that people won't want to venture down there. I then have a list of small tasks that I need to complete such as making dirt decals that should take me a bout a week to get through the list. 

At the the end of this month I have a week booked off work to complete some of the more difficult tasks such as finishing my graffiti generator so that I can place graffiti all the over the trains and add a bit more colour that way, creating the telephone hero asset and making sure all my master materials are set up for the train so that people will be able to change the colour and dirt amount of each train. 

Once all this is done, I am going to make the final cinematic video that will be the end result of the project, I will also be putting this project on the UE4 marketplace and other stores as I have set up the project all modular so you can get a lot of reuse out the scene. I plan to have the project complete by the middle of November and far it's looking positive if I stick to my Trello time plan. 

I have also changed some bits on the interior of the train, the main thing was is the lighting. On my old images, the contrast was way to much and it made the train feel more bright than it should of been, now that I have fixed that the train feels way more moody and fits the overall environment more!

I plan to scatter some of the generic trash inside the train and dirt up the chairs and walls a bit more, once I have done this I will decide if I need to add any more props into the interior to help tell the story of the environment, such as someone living in the train. 

Thanks for reading and I hope you like the images!

If you have any feedback or ideas for interior of the train please let me know!

Hey everyone:)

I just wanted to make a quick blog post to show some to props that I have been working on over the last week for my train environment. I've been sticking to my schedule quite well and I've made some really good progress on the level. Hopefully, If I stick to my current pace, the environment should be done towards the end of next month. 

The first image that you can see below is a in game screen shot of my environment, I have placed a lot of the props that you will see in this blog post around the level just to show what they look like in game, the current placement of them will be different in my final level. 

This is a platform sign so that you can tell the time and the next train that is coming,

This is a simple cone as a filler asset, I need to make a lot more generic props like this one to fill out the scene more, such as rubbish, destroyed cardboard boxes etc. 

These pallets are more filler assets for the scene.

This is pillar for the platform to hold the roof up, I will add signs and pay phones attached to these in game.

This is platform roof. 

The next model that I am making is a payphone which is a hero asset so I may do a Artstation post for that prop as it's quite detailed. I will also do another blog post at the end of the month to show more progress on the environment. 

Thanks for reading!

Hey everyone:)

It's been a few month since I last posted any update on my Train game environment. I keep planning to finish the project but life keeps getting in the way. Over the last two months I have packed up all of my stuff and moved to Liverpool to start a new job as an Artist at Firesprite Games. During this time I was without my PC for a month whilst I got everything sorted which meant that my personal work came to a grinding Holt.  It's been a stressful move but so far it has been really worth it and the job is great.

I am now all settled in to my new place and new job which means that I have no excuse to not get the project finished! Last week I made a Trello board with all the remaining tasks that needs to be done for the project to be complete. There are a lot of tasks to do and I won't be finished with the project until the beginning on November.  I have set myself the challenge of working on this project every night and weekend until it's done as I think I have been working on this project for too long now. You can see an image of my Trello board below with some of the remaining tasks: 

Over the last week, I have started working on the project every night and I have made a few props in this time which you can see below. 

Here, I have made the yellow railings modular kit that I can place in certain parts of the level.

I have also made this platform modular piece. 

I then went on to make a AC Unit to place around some of the walls, I'm also going to make some pipes and cables to go with this. 

I then made the pillars that going in the middle of the train tracks, I'm going to make a rust texture and vertex paint this on to the prop in game so I can get more variation to each pillar. 

With these cardboard boxes, I will set them up in unreal so that you can change the colour and the dirt amount, that way they can be a nice modular pack that will help fill out the scene. 

Moving forward, I will start to update my blog more on this project and in the next two months there will be a lot more work from me to show. 

You may of also noticed that I added a new portfolio piece focusing more on concept art rather than 3D environments. This is a project I did during my work dinners which you can see below: 

After, I have finished my train scene, I will be starting to do a lot more concept art projects and trying to improve my skills in that area so that I am able to do the full workflow of games from the concept all the way through to the final game engine level that you can play around. I think by doing this it will make more hire-able in the future and it will improve my overall skill set. I have always been interested in concept art and it's what I originally wanted to do as a job before I started doing 3D environments, I am now hoping to use the skills that I have learnt in 3D to help me produce my concept art pieces. In the image above, I started with a 3D block out and then painted and photo bashed over the top to get the image. The one good thing about doing this method is that I can see the overall image in around 10-20 hours of work whilst if I was to model this, it would take me a few weeks to see the final result. By doing proper concept art first rather than just quick sketches that I normally do, I will be able to check and make sure the scene works before I spend weeks of my life making it into a game level.  

When I first started at Firesprite, I was lucky enough to make friends with two really good concept artist who have helped me a lot with the concept side of things and given me advice and feedback on my last piece. You can check them both here:

https://www.artstation.com/jonashassibi 

https://www.artstation.com/vernonzwlee 

That's all I have to say for now and within the next two months you should see my train project finished. 

Thanks for reading:)

Hey Everyone!

I just wanted to share a recent work in progress video of a train level that I am currently making. You can see the video below and I hope that you like it! 

If you have been following my blog posts, you will know that I have been working on this project for quite a few months now and unfortunately, it has been really slow progress so far. Over the past two months of not having a full time job, I thought that I would have plenty of time to finish this environment. However, I have spent the last two months doing several art tests for different companies to try getting another role in the industry. I have been very fortunate to get given  art tests to complete but unfortunately, none of the roles have panned out which means that I am still looking for a new role. 

Moving forward, I have a solid plan in mind for this project and an asset list that I have to work through to get this environment fully finished. I still have a lot more work to do and I think that it's going to take a lot of time. I don't want to rush the project and I think that once it is full finished it will be worth the time that it has taken. 

I have included some stills from the video below.