Monday, November 24, 2025

Cannon final stage

For this round, I re-sculpted my wood again, and textured my cannon. I aimed for a rusted, humid look on both the metal and wood, using various masks and grunge fills in Painter to achieve the look I wanted. Here are the renders from Substance Painter:







These are the renders I took in UE:







Additionally, since I iterated yet again on my sculpt from the past round, here is a BPR shot from Zbrush of my sculpt:



I also updated my reference board slightly, it's about the same as last time but a couple more references were added/updated.

Tuesday, November 18, 2025

Cannon baking

During this stage I went back and attempted to remake my wood grain in Zbrush, bumping down the detail from last time. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get to and detail every piece, so some have some blank spots that are missing detail. I did have a minor issue when baking involving the high poly, that being that there is a spot on the wheels where backfaces clip through, and this showed up on the AO map in my bake.

Here are my renders in Zbrush for this stage:






The low poly version of the cannon is 5,058 triangles, here is how the wireframe looks:


Here is my UV map, I didn't change it from the high res/UV stage as it worked, however some of it does need some adjusting in terms of orienting shells and laying them out:


Finally, this is how the cannon bake looks in Substance and Unreal:




Unreal shot with mid-gray material:


Unreal shot with basic textures:

Thursday, November 13, 2025

Common Art 'B' Stage

For this common art stage, I went fully ahead with creating more assets for the grandma's house, creating more props for the inside and outside as well. I textured the remaining props from last week, and also created a planks material for the inside of the house. Here are all of the assets thus far, with textured assets and new ones in engine, with a proper mid gray material this time:











Additionally, I adjusted the lighting within the level to not be as overexposed during all times of the day:








Monday, November 10, 2025

Cannon pt. 2 sculpting

For the final part of the cannon sculpt, I went ahead and pushed more of the tertiary details, and additionally worked on fixing up my wood beams from last time. Although I will note that they do look better, I think the ends still need work, and I plan on adjusting them if I have the time. I added some noise to the rusty areas on the cannon, and just overall on the cannon as well to add detail. Also fixed up the BPR floor issue from last time, turns out my rendering depth was set too low.











I also added some more references this time for wood specifically;


Thursday, November 6, 2025

Common Art 'C' Stage

For this stage I was responsible for lighting and texturing props I had created in the previous round.

To create the basic outdoor lighting for our level, as per request I utilized the Ultra Dynamic Sky system in Unreal, tweaking the settings to my preference. I only added a post process volume into the level as an addition, as UDS has a lot of functionality that would normally be created with an environmental light mixer. Here are the shots from different areas in the level at various times of day:







Still not fully sure why the rocks turn black in the lighting, I managed to bump up the gamma on the shadows in the post process volume, however that had 0 effect on that issue.

The fireplace and armoire have been textured, the rest of the meshes have finalized UVs, but no textures. I would have textured the rest, however I had to move onto lighting and capstone work. Here are the props in level with their textures:




Monday, November 3, 2025

Cannon pt. 1 sculpting

For the first sculpting phase I decided to go with a more worn down cannon, one that's been rusted away a bit.






This was my reference board:

Cannon final

This is my final blog post for the cannon project, it'll mostly be images with some captions. I'm going to go in the same order of i...