Wicksy's Washable Wonderings: 2011

Tuesday, 26 July 2011

Fire Base Fly Through

So I've whacked the whole thing into UDK to get a quick fly around going. Getting things blocked out in 3D ALWAYS helps :D

Saturday, 16 July 2011

I've been mucking about with my sandbag textures in UDK to see how it works using Parrallax mapping (or Bump offsetting, there's so many different names for it floating around out there :s).

Basically it uses a height map to give it more depth (which I rendered out using Xnormal) and the results look OK. I don't think this does so well up close but at a distance, like the top image, it works very convincingly.

I think for the walls that you get up close to you just need to put geometry in there...

Friday, 15 July 2011

Baked bags

So I ended up making a ridiculously high poly wall in Max from the mudbox sculpts. I was actually pretty surprised that my computer and Max were able to handle the some 5 and a half million tris, and as a result it gave quite a good bake through Xnormal.

The piece itself tiles but at the moment the baked texture doesn't, so I'm going to have to tile the geometry a bit and hope my computer holds out.

But I'm pretty pleased with the results, nice and clean, can't wait to see the results of parallax normal mapping in unreal using a height map as well...

Thursday, 14 July 2011

Sandbags

Been doing some sandbag walls, this is just with the normals. It's a tilable wall piece that clocks in at 1,344 tris.

Tuesday, 28 June 2011

Mud-Rocks

I've been getting into mudbox a bit lately since I've been doing more organic structures. This is a rock sculpt thats baked down, but there are a few errors and overall the bake came out a bit grainy :s

Wednesday, 15 June 2011

Rocks Finished

Rocks are finsished now. Textured in mudbox

Afghanistan Fire base

I've been pretty busy with bits and bobs lately, from degree show work to some personal stuff. To strengthen my portfolio as and all round environment artist I've undertaken a mini project that should fit quite nicely with the organic forms I plan on practicing on.

This project is based around a Fire Support Base in Afghanistan. This base is basically a strong point that sits on top of a hill with good sight lines, which gives it the ability to give support fire and defend the region. The base features heavy machine guns, grenade machine guns, sniper posts and motors pits. For my scene I will be focusing on the machine gun nests that look out onto the valley.

These nests are trenches that are dug into the side of the hill and then fortified further using sandbags, wire boxes, rocks and wood beams for support. These trenches also double up as living quarters, which would be a great chance to get some human touches in there.

This nest is based off of a real life base, which was featured in the documentary Ross Kemp in Afghanistan. It has a fairly comprehensive base tour that shows quite a lot of details and traits of the fortifications.

I plan to use UDK, and to use UDK terrain to create some nice looking Afghanistan valleys for the machine guns to look out onto.

This is my block out below, taken about 4-5 hours it maps out my ideas and preferred layout of the trenches and the sort of details I want to include. As ever I aim to reuse as many assets as possible to get a modular and efficiant scene. More to come soon...

Rocking out!

I really need to do more organic structures to expand my portfolio and skills, so first off rocks.

This is a method that uses a combination of several noise, displacement and turbosmooth modifiers. All non destructible and highly editable!

Thursday, 28 April 2011

Spitfire revisited pt.2

And here's a few more shots of the Spitfire...

Spitfire revisited

It's job applying time, so I'm getting together some more polished looking images of my work.

Check out my portfolio here... http://tom-wicks.daportfolio.com/

Wednesday, 9 March 2011

Quick shot...

Quick update. Have been importing assets as of late. I'm still struggling with the lighting, there seems to be loads of fuzziness in all the shadows. Have also nearly completed modelling the low poly z4, will post pics up when it'd done.

Monday, 7 March 2011

Speedy...

Need to paint more!!!

Monday, 7 February 2011

The pretty blunder...

This was done for a bit of fun whilst I was at BMW, whilst the world cup was going on. It's a high poly model and is made up of 2 x 2048 diffuse and normal.

It's a great looking piece of kit, that ruined the world cup and was dubbed a "Disgrace" by legendary boot designer Craig Johnston, the creator of the Predator boot.

BMW stuff...

So I just remembered that I've never posted any of the work that I did at BMW on here (the non-secret stuff that is) so here goes...

These shots are of an environment I created when there when work was quiet. It started out as texturing practice, where I wanted to really get the most out of tileable textures. I started with the road an built outwards, and as I progressed people started to like it and suggested that I turned it into a realtime environment in which to view cars.

The setting is a mountain race track, featuring the iconic tunnels found all over the Alps and similar mountain ranges.

The rocks are made out of a modular system, where a tiling texture is placed over one rock formation. This rock is then duplicated and intersected to make a wall featuring interesting grooves and ridges. I picked this up from Crysis.

This scene is rendered in real time, with RTT Deltagen, one of the programs I did the most work in at BMW. I also rendered a HDRI from it for reflections and Image Based Lighting.