Gennaro Dima - Texture Artist

Introduction

Hi everyone, my name is Gennaro and i'm currently studying to become a texture artist. I am very excited to be entering my in this year's Rookie awards. To be participating in this year's competition means a lot to me especially being surrounded by such a rich pool of artists. This entry will be made by two works, one of them is my last project made to try and work with a stylized style, while the other work is one that i made while studying with SkyUp Academy.

A forgotten Sword

How it was made

Reference study

To start off i went on pinterest and found some references for a stylized environment, but since it wasn't enough i went in the game and made some screenshots that i could use as inspiration.

After studying my references, i started modeling my main assets, the master sword and the rock. I modeled them to be a game asset so i decided to stay as low poly as possible.

Modeling and Texturing main assets

Modeling the asset wasn't that easy, but since it was for a game environment i used a lot of booleans and retopologized and left some parts penetrated with each other, getting the sword proportions right was the thing that made it the most difficult.

For the texturing: my workflow was going to be using just the base color channel to make a stylized type of texturing, and of course using normals too. so i started by making a base layer of roughness with 0.8 value.

Than i started with the base color, to which i added variations of color on top, darker and lighter. To make the painted style effect i used brushes that would be similar to a water color stroke, for example dirt brush or water color brushes from kyle. I used smart masks too, with the combination of ambient occlusion or curvature maps. But one of my most used effects for this project was the blur slope effect that added a lot the idea of the water color paint. When i reached this point of variations i added some more details: i added highlights to the edges of the sword where the light would reflect more and i added some scratches too. To top it all off: i made two layers, one for the shadows one for the lighting. For the shadows layer i made a dirt generator map, so that it would follow the borders of the mesh, and than i corrected it with a paint layer in multiply mode. For the lighting layer, i made a white fill layer in soft light mdoe, with a baked light filter in the fill, than added a blur slope filter to smooth it out. Reaching this point you can already see a realisitc kind of effect with only the base color channel active. I reapeted this process too for the rock, which i screen recorded so you can see in the time laps video. For the silent flower i took a 3d model online and textured it myself.

Here is the turntable:

Some of the renders i made:

Environment

When all the textures for the main assets where ready, i jumped into unreal engine to create a stylized envoirement. First thing first: the landscape. I made a small landscape with 4 color materials, that i painted using a water color brush alpha.

I than created the grass, i modeled it using planes, adjusted the normals to be all pointing upwards and imported them in unreal. I created a material that would make the grass take the color from the landscape, and of course i added the wind effect. Before modeling other assets, i modeled some flowers too, and i made a simple texturing, made the material on unreal engine and placed some in the map.

To make the environment even more stylized, i made some alpha maps some clouds and than added them in the scene.

When my landscape was ready, i modeled some trees on blender using the tree generator. To make the leaves i placed a lot of planes to make a shape of a ball and than i duplicated them to make the shape of the tree leaves. I textured the trees making color variations with simple maps in substance, than i added it in unreal engine. To make the leaves i made a material that used the alpha map that i made before, with a lot of controls that makes me change the color, wind force, thickness of the leaves. i added even an emissive so that the leaves would look more stylized since they have less shadow.

Okay, landscape ready, time to make some ruins.

I jumped straight to maya and i started modeling some temple ruins for my sword, it was pretty easy since they were low poly and after i modeled them i texture them by making a smart material so that i would have randomness in my maps and a lot of color variations. On top of all a layer of baked light.

Finalizing envoirement

To make my environment more interesting, i modeled some stylized rocks, some vines, and i lastly added some other ruins that are made by Conrad Justin. I than added more trees with different sizes and adjusted the fog so that it would make more god rays and a realistic look. One thing that i loved to make was the butterflies niagara particle system. It was quite easy, i firstly made the butterfly texture in photoshop, after that i made a plane in maya with only a couple edges where the wings start. When in Unreal, i made a material that made the part of the plane where the wings are move, and made the whole plane go up and down. After that i made a particle system that would make these planes spawn all over in a circle motion an that they would go at different speeds.

Other views of the environment:

here is the time laps where you can see glimps of what i explained:

Conclusion

Making this project was really fun, i learned a lot of new things on unreal engine, some really nice tricks when working with a sylized stle. What i loved the most is that when texturing in a stylized manner, it becomes sort of a real painting, where the canvas is the 3d model. And giving much expression with only colors it's a difficult but enjoyable thing.

He is here

Making of:

First of all, as all projects, i was given a reference to recreate, so i collected other images to help me and i jumped into the software and created the camera to understand the focal i was going to use with some initial blocking.

After the camera and the positioning was clear, i started looking for some assets and materials to use and made the city look better

City was done, time to proceed on the other parts of the envoirements such as fog, clouds, landscape

I started by making the landscape better. To achieve the result i created two master material with nodes that made possible the blending in height and texture beetween the ground and the assets.

After that i used easy fog to make the fog and the clouds. I used it to make the sand that moves on the ground too.

Last but not least i addded some volumetric post processing to bloom the city, and i made one post process material to make the heat hazard effect, than added it to another volumetric post process. With Niagara i addded some particles to create the flying sand.