Rookies Awards 2023 | Gramps Chen 3D Game Art Showcase

Gunsmith's Workbench

This piece was made as part of my final Demo Reel while in Gnomon. I was an avid fan of Science Fiction and I particularly like the sort of sci-fi aesthetic that was grounded in realism. I decided to look up references on recent sci-fi works like Star Citizen and the futuristic Call Of Duty entries to get a better idea of how to push my art direction.

The idea started off from a piece of advice by my mentors who told me that as someone vying for a spot in Environment Art in the industry, I should consider taking my hero props made in older classes and have them put in an environment that would really bring it to life. Since said props were weapons, I felt that a gunsmith's workbench would be very fitting and thus this scene was created to compliment the Precision Pistol I made for my Props and Weapons for Games class. Kris Thaler, the concept artist behind the pistol who has already seen my rendition of his pistol prior and given me his approval for the latter was similarly wowed by this piece.

Flyby

Stills

Breakdown

Workbench UI

For this piece I wanted to go for something that's futuristic but nothing too crazy and out of the realm of possibility, so nothing like those projected holograms in Star Wars, instead I thought it would be nice to have a UI right on the surface of the workbench that can detect what firearm is placed on it and can provide several options, like showing the condition of the gun, step-by-step instructions for disassembly and so on. Due to the latter feature, gun components like the firing pin and slide also are highlighted on the UI. Additionally, I decided to give the workbench a glowing hexagon pattern that moves along the length of the bench like a wave. This was done by exporting the hexagon mask from 3D Painter to determine where the glow can show up, and then multiplying it with a white bars that are blurred that're then put in a panner node to move it along the UVs. The UI also has a weather app that shows the forecast for the upcoming week, so I created a bunch of icons and had them in a panner node as well to move them, and those were multiplied by a rectangular mask to contain it to the top right of the UI. Once all the elements are accounted for, they are then stacked together with Add nodes.

Workbench UI In-Game

Hex Glow In-Game

Props and their Processes

Good props can only be made with good references, which meant I had to scour all over Google Images, Bing and Flickr, to look for good references to what I'm building. A good number of the props were based off real life ones, tweaked for either copyright purposes or to futurize it more. Probably the most obvious real-life object I recreated was the Lulzbot 3D Printer, which I renamed the Sefirot Crown for copyright reasons. Thankfully for me, the Lulzbot site had very detailed images for assembling the printer and had dimensions listed out for components so that I can get the proportions of the printer right. I also needed to get some inspiration for the environmental layout and design of the room the workbench was in, so I looked up various concepts on Pinterest and Artstation, mainly from science-fiction works like Star Citizen, the futuristic Call of Duty games and others to give me an idea of what such an environment would look like.

The Printer

Arguably one of the more eye-catching props would be the aforementioned 3D Printer, I had this modeled out based on the information given by the Lulzbot site and then textured it in 3D Painter before adding a skeletal system to give it the animation. I had a root joint that connects to 2 joint chains that are controlled with IK handles, as well as 2 other joint chains. The former controlled the movement of the wiring and the spool's material. The latter controlled both the printing base's movement as well as the rotation of the spool.

Printer's Joint Setup

Printer In-Game

Asset Layout

Precision Pistol

In the above piece, I made use of the Precision Pistol I created as part of my Props and Weapons for Games class in Gnomon. The original concept art was done by a weapon artist by the name of Kris Thaler, who works as a firearm consultant for different game projects and has created several concepts for Cyberpunk 2077. I picked the Precision Pistol as my midterm project since we had a strict polycount limit for that. While I was looking for concepts on ArtStation, Kris' concepts caught my eye with its near-future science fiction look which I've always liked since they are based on real-life weaponry, which for this piece's case was the German H&K USP. Kris was very approachable when I was asking questions about the concept and was thrilled when I told him I was going to recreate his pistol in 3D. When it was finally finished, he gave me his approval. Due to the aforementioned polycount limit, I had to decide which bits of detail can be created solely through bakes in order to optimize the mesh and the resulting bake turned out well. I had fun adding all the little details like the decals in 3D Painter.

Beauty Renders

Marmoset Viewer

Rifle Rack

Like the Precision Pistol that came before, the Precision Rifle I did also needed an environment in Unreal. I came up with the idea of a rifle rack with stasis fields that served 2 purposes. One, to prevent the rifle from falling off and two, to prevent unauthorized users from grabbing the guns since should they try, their hands will just get stuck in place. Game effects aren't really my specialty but I decided to give it a try from what I've learned in my class and I was actually pretty satisfied how it turned out for the stasis field's particles. I also rendered 2 additional shots of the rifle in the gallery on a more standard display stand in Unreal.

Stills

Parallax UI

There's just something I love about a futuristic looking UI. I actually was inspired by Ace Combat 7 when I decided to watch some gameplay on YouTube. I noticed that before each mission, the briefing was shown on a really cool looking holographic map, and one thing that really sold the futurism was the fact that the hologram had a parallax offset to it to give it depth. That was what I decided to do to the control panel on the rifle rack. I made a custom UI in Illustrator and then made separate elements for anything that moves by using Panner nodes, like the yellow chevrons on the top and bottom. After placing the textures in the material editor, I made a copy of the base texture and then used the Bump Offset node to give it the parallax effect as show below.

Parallax UI Material Network

Parallax UI In-Game

Fog and Stasis Field

A good environment has subtle elements in it to complement the main assets. In this case, I felt that having a slight fog would add to the atmosphere. Instead of using the Unreal Engine's default fog, I decided to use the Niagara particle system to create a flipbook fog sprite and using the sprite in a fountain preset. I then added some curl noise so the movements feel more organic and then made the sprite fade in and out from the start of its lifetime till the end of it. After that was done, I placed several of the emitters around the racks to make it foggier. Meanwhile, the stasis field was made from scratch using a regular circle sprite for the main emitter. The particles are then spawn from a box location that is elongated and rotated to match the orientation of the rack, then the particles are given a scale from a curve that makes it start off expanding from nothing to the standard size near the beginning, so that particles don't suddenly spawn at its default size from the get-go, before shrinking over time. After the main particle was done, I created a ribbon renderer that leaves trails by following the main particle as it generates a location event while the ribbon receives the location and follows the former.

Stasis (Left) and Fog (Right) Niagara setup

Fog and Stasis In-Game

Precision Rifle

As is the case with the Precision Pistol, the Precision Rifle used in the scene above was also created as part of my Props and Weapons for Games class, the latter as part of the finals. This piece was what won me the Best of Term Award in Gnomon's 2021 Fall Term. This one had a much looser polycount but I was still optimizing the mesh as much as possible; some of the details like the indentations and screws are created with floaters rather than actual geometry but they still hold up with the level of detail. This one was quite a bit of fun to work on texturing wise as there are quite a variety of decals to create and place on the rifle. Like the Pistol before it, the Rifle is also a futurized version of a real life firearm, in this case an SVD sniper rifle.

Beauty Renders

Marmoset Viewer

Indoor Gun Testing Range

As part of my post-graduation project, I decided to create another props and weapons piece from an ArtStation concept, the Serium Sector Assault Rifle by Eldar Safin. I did a more futuristic rifle this time and my friend chimed in saying that he'd love to use the rifle as part of his animation portfolio by creating different player states while using the rifle. That gave me an idea and I decided it'd be nice to have the rifle in a gun range environment in Unreal. 

This environment was actually partially inspired by my first time going into an indoor gun range with my friends during one of the term breaks, it was really quite an interesting experience and we enjoyed it, even the ones who weren't really into guns to begin with. Like with any other environment pieces, the props can tell a story and I figured that with a more futuristic gun like this, it would be brought to a range for test-firing prior to commercialization or the like, hence the pelican cases in the rear with all the various accouterments like optics and muzzle attachments.

I also decided to add an extra still render by creating a smaller environment for a rifle rack. Compared to the rifle rack for the Precision Rifle, it is a little more low-tech, but I decided to play with some decals to create emissive displays on the modular walls. The render for this rifle's storage rack was actually path-traced rather than real-time unlike the other shots in the gun range. The real-time version didn't look half bad, but the lighting looked a lot better with path-tracing due to it calculating Global Illumination more realistically.

Flyby

Stills

Breakdown

Props and their Processes

Just like the Gunsmith Workbench, the piece had quite a few elements that were based in real life. Probably the most obvious of which were the weapon attachments that're copyright friendly versions of actual muzzle attachments and gun optics. 

I found that the manufacturers of said attachments usually had PDF manuals which gave specifications like dimensions and different angles of the products for reference. Sometimes when that isn't enough, I make use of review videos on YouTube that usually provide the additional angles needed to get the props accurate to the letter.

Due to only really having been to one indoor gun range ever, I figured it's a good idea to look up a few more places to get an idea of how I would build the environment. They are for the most part utilitarian and designed for practicality, so I wouldn't be having a gun range looking like the inside of a starship. That said, there's still room for futurism to be snuck in, so I decided to create a holographic range control UI from scratch using Illustrator to make it more striking.

Range Booth UI

Just like the UIs from earlier, I made use of Bump Offset nodes to create a parallax effect for the holograms and added 2 noise maps moving in different directions and speed to break up the emissive values so things don't look too still. The same breakup was also used for the gun cloth's emissive map for the same purpose. The UI on the booth's screen was created in Illustrator.

Booth UI's Material Network(Left) and design(Right)

Attachments

Probably the most complex part of this piece would be the weapon attachments, even more so than the Assault Rifle that's arguably the centerpiece. The muzzle brakes especially are difficult due to the topology and the fact that it is hollow and can't exactly be cheated from angles. Getting the boolean shapes for the brakes wasn't too bad, but retopologizing the mesh afterwards was a challenge. The optics and suppressors aren't that much easier either, you'd think something like the suppressor would be easy seeing that it's a cylinder with a hole, but it's a lot more complex than that. The optics meanwhile, have indentations that are not exactly very topology friendly, especially for the scopes.

Muzzle Attachments In-Game

Optics In-Game

Asset Layout

Serium Sector Assault Rifle

The rifle used in the gun range was created from a concept art by Eldar Safin. Unlike the previous 2 weapons, this one doesn't seem to explicitly based off an existing weapon and by comparison is a bit more futuristic, but certainly not something out of the realms of possibility in the near future. For this weapon, I actually learned something new. I wanted to make a functioning red dot sight just like you'd see in your typical FPS games, so I learned that you could actually do it by adding a bump offset node to the reticle texture that you place on the glass to create a parallax effect but annoyingly, the Marmoset Viewer for the gun doesn't allow for parallaxes that you can otherwise make in the Toolbag program.

This particular weapon was a bit frustrating at times to make because the concept art was actually a bit off. For example, the perspective view was actually longer than the side orthographic, so there were bits I had to compromise. Some parts were also a bit ambiguous and I had to think of my own ideas, like the ridged bar thing just behind the sight, on either sides. It kinda looked like a battery indicator of sorts, even though there was no such indication on the concept, so I decided to make it just that.

Beauty Renders

Red Dot Sight In-Game

Marmoset Viewer

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