The challenge I faced with this update was the fact that I've never done Ivy before and had a very rough idea as to how the heck I'm going to tackle it. One of the things I did was look at a breakdown that Billy Matjiunis shared during my mentorship which insanely helped with the process. 

So the breakdown is by Vytautas Katarzis who worked on a Seaside Town environment piece. THIS breakdown of the Ivy that he did was incredibly useful as he showed almost step by step on how you go on to tackle Ivy.  

I pretty much took the same approach with mine. I took some scans from Megascan that had vines, leaves and modelled them out on Maya, lay them out like how I wanted the Ivy to look like and used SpeedTree to bake them down and create an Atlas on photoshop just like the breakdown and then it was just a matter of adding variations of them into the scene. It does get a little repetitive when you're laying out the Ivy but once you start spamming them into the scene, you do appreciate the effort a lot more. 

pretty much all of the props that needed texturing have been textured and added in the scene. With the exception of the Jeep that i'll be making later in the process to learn some Vehicle Modelling techniques. The generator prop has been added. I really wanted to give it a weathered look and maybe have a scratch on the side of it just to tell a story that a raptor or small dino dropped by and scratched it with the claws.  It was a nice break from doing repetitive process like the foliage.  Some of the textures of the generator will likely change depending on what it looks like close up on the rendered shots in UE4 but we'll see how that goes. The scratches at the bottom of the generator are there due to a metal stairs being there to be able to get to the control panel as it's quite a tall machine for an average human. Since it's portable stairs, it would hit the generator often and scratch it out. 

NEXT UP: The Treeeeee

So in the coming week, I will be tackling the tree! (HELP MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE) 

Before I tackle it, I know I need a good tree bark texture so I decided to go into substance designer and make a simple tree bark texture that you see in the rendered still below. I'll be adding more things on top of it such as moss and some ivy starting to grow onto it from the bottom. 

I'm pretty sure SpeedTree has a tutorial on Clusters for trees that I'll be taking a look at and learn more about the process. I will keep you guys updated on that front. Sorry it took so long to update with a progress but as you can see, I've been busy spamming Ivy everywhere and try to make sense out of it. 

Once the tree's been added the plan is to sort out the plants around it as I feel like they don't look settled in the scene as well as the others and doing some Decaling and material blending with repeated props and the on the wall etc to really add some Dirt, Grime, and some discolouration to make the vegetation sit better and make it seem like they've been there for a long time. 

But yeah, thank you for reading my Blog on the progress of this environment! Still got few weeks left to finish this piece off. It's been one heck of a ride so far. I hope this helped, even a little. If it didn't, I'm sorry. I'll do better. I promise o_o. 

As usual, if you guys have any feedback, be sure to let me know! 

I'll try and make the next update, sooner as this one was quite a bit apart. 

Cheers!

-Raj

Hey all! 

This'll be one of my first blog posts (amongst many more to come.. I hope) and I just wanted to share some progress of the project I'm currently working on. I'm building the Exterior of INGEN lab, the concept is from an artist called Sung Choi who was awesome enough to give me permission to work on this concept in 3D! - Check out his work, he's awesome! 

At the same time, I decided to take on a mentorship from Billy Matjinuis with Mentor Coalition. Btw I highly recommend you guys check this out if you want to step up your environment art!.

So to start the project I started with a blockout and Billy was nice enough to tell me it's trash so with his guidance I re-did it and it looked so much better and gave me a more clearer idea on the scale, how many props are needed, the prop placement the composition etc. Thanks Billy! (He didn't really call it "trash" but he should have). I also used some Speedtree to add in a basic tree for the blockout as shown in the progress Gif. 

After the blockout, I decided to just gather a crap load of references. I followed Tim Simpson's guide from Polygon Academy. Really helpful content on his channel. So I created a mood board, lighting and a benchmark sheet to help me with the project. 

After that, I just identified what pieces would be modular and which would be unique and started working on the modular pieces first. Big to small.  Some of which are still work in progress. Some of the Unique pieces have nearly been done already. 

During the mentorship I really wanted to learn Foliage and Billy was awesome enough to teach me how to do foliage, so I'm currently in the middle of adding some more grass and variations in the grass. I'm also currently making some plants for variation and to add to the right side of the building. 

Also learned some substance designer along the way to create a concrete material that you see on the building. Still trying to use it more and more often to learn better. Nodes are awesome! 

I got some great feedback on Dinusty's Stream and on the discord group that i'll be implmenting that you'll see in the next progression gif!... whenever I get around to doing an update on these blogs. 

Do I need like a catch phrase at the end? Like "Peace out ya'll" or a simple "Thank you" is fine? 

I'll do both.

Peace out ya'll and thank you for reading!  If you guys have any feedback, lemme know! 

I shall update you guys soon with more progress :) 

-Raj