Diorama, a Prop and an Environment
Diorama, a Prop, and an Environment walk into a bar, and the prop orders a whiskey on the rocks... While it may sound like a beginning of a bad joke it's actually a pretty good summary of the work I've done in the past 8 months. Well maybe except for the bar and the whiskey.
The Diorama
I've been always very interested in both stylized and realistic art, and I've always enjoyed experimenting with combining the two. And after a long night of binge-watching "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of The Rings" movies I decided to make something based on the elvish architecture I've seen in the movies. After a short while, I found a concept by Ji Young Joo on ArtStation that I absolutely adored and I got to work.
I knew I wanted to combine the exaggerated shapes of stylized concept art along with more detailed, realistic materials. It was a challenge but in the end, I think I've found a nice balance. I also gave quite a bit of thought to optimization. I was trying to use as little unnecessary geometry as possible, keeping the texel density consistent at 1024px/m² and using tileable materials, trim sheets, and decals where I could.
The Prop
One beautiful sunny day I found myself scrolling through ArtStation as I often do and my eye got caught by the beautiful concept art of a dagger by Timur Akhmetov. When I saw it I immediately knew what would my next project be.
With its organic shape, it proved to be a great sculpting exercise. I also paid a lot of attention to optimization. Merging down unnecessary vertices during retopology, stacking UV islands, and trying to keep a consistent texel density roughly around 1024px/m² which I achieved with a single 2K texture set.
The Environment
This project started as an entry to Dinusty's Monthly Challenge. When the challenge ended the project wasn't really where I'd like it to be, so I decided to work on it after the deadline and give it my own spin in the process. Instead of being a cold, sterile, concrete city monstrosity, I went for a more warm and cozy natural setting. I think that has worked wonderfully with what I already had.
I've also put a lot of effort into optimization and consistency. The whole project has a consistent texel density of 1024px/m² and I heavily utilized tiling materials and decals. Everything is rendered in Unreal Engine 4 with fully dynamic lighting. Trees, crows, and foliage are assets from Unreal Marketplace, the graffiti decals are from Megascans and the Dr14 locomotive was made by Blend Swap user: "simserg".
The... Rocks?
As the year 2020 was coming to its end, everybody was excited by the vision of new beginnings. A group of artists over at "The Club" discord really decided to rock things off and started a challenge.
The concept? Sculpt one model of rock for every day of January. Every model should take about an hour to complete and they provided some basic base meshes so you wouldn't have to start from scratch every day.
I decided to join them and here are the results, along with some of my personal favorites. I think it turned out pretty... solid. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
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