Entry Bert Plasschaert

RnD: To what extend can the colour palette pipeline be improved?

This year I'm working on a research project on how to improve the Color-palette pipeline. The current state of this pipeline is very repetitive and labor intensive. There are only a handful tools available at this moment, none of which are able to use one texture across multiple files,  no solution offers Maya support and none of them have any management tools. This all makes the pipeline difficult for bigger productions and less desirable in general to use.

From this information an ideal solution was outlined and a Python demo script was created.

The script was tested with a group of participants. The goal of the tool is to improve the production and iteratieve efficiency. For this two tasks were made, one focused on the production the other on the iterative side. The participants were asked to do both tasks twice, first without the script then with the script. These times were collected and compared with each other. 

Upon completing the tasks an interview was conducted, these results were filtered and grouped. This resulted in a good overview for future versions.

both production and iterative process have an observed improvement with the status quo. The production process has an improvement of 43%, from 35 minutes to 20 minutes. The iterative process improved 44.7%, from four minutes 29 seconds to two minutes 29 seconds. This data indicates a marginally improvement in time. On top of being faster the time results were much more clustered and consistent. It also shows that transferring the Photoshop workload to Maya showed no negative time impact. Even with the extra workload Maya still performed on average 28.3% faster than without script and without extra workload.

Participants stated that the workflow with the script was more enjoyable. These results were achieved by automating as much as possible whilst maintaining a high level of creative freedom and making it as user friendly as possible.

Metal Flower

Upon finishing Horizon Zero Dawn I felt the usual emptiness inside from completing an amazing game. I used this as motivation to create a piece of fan art. These beautiful flowers can be found all around the map.

I had to be creative to collect reference images since there was not a single high-quality image online. This made me create my own refence, I went into picture mode and screen-captured the game, exported those frames into a 3d scan software and got an amazing result to use as reference.

A breakdown of this workflow is available in the images below. 

Swatch M8 script

Morphine spine injector

This is a prop I made as inspiration from one of Kris Thalers’ beautiful concepts.
The spine injector is game ready and rendered in Unreal. I was invited to make a blogpost on this piece which I used to create a breakdown and highlight some workflow tricks I have used.

The blogpost can be found here

When nature wins

This project was created in Unreal Engine. It was my first big project I made using unreal. I really had a great time working on this piece, I limited myself to three structural meshes and a collection of vegetation and detail meshes to create this scene.

Kitchen visualization

This scene is again in Unreal, I wanted to challenge myself and see how far I can push the baked lighting inside a real-time engine. I am very pleased with the result.

Porsche 930 Turbo

The classic Porsches are my favorite cars. I used this project to learn how to create hard surface objects whilst keeping a correct poly-flow. This was rendered using the Arnold renderer. 

Charge Battery

I wanted to learn how the PBR pipeline worked and how to use it. This project was my first introduction to that. The Charge Battery was baked and textured in Substance Painter and rendered inside Unreal Engine. Again fully game ready.

Thanks for checking out my work!

Thank you for showing interest in my portfolio, I hope you liked it as much as I enjoyed working on it.

Kind regards
Bert Plasschaert