Working with LUT's

Just playing around with some color look up tables for my short. Bottom is before top is after. Trying to bring more of the saturated summer look out of the lighting, specifically in the blues and greens. I also wanted to avoid getting too contrast-y in some of the darker parts.

Daily Environment Studios #161

Back to painting finally!

Things are starting to normal out so I'm excited to get back to painting! Ill be changing things up though. Instead of 5-10 speed paintings Ill just be doing a single painting from a to help with a different skillset.

Still alive...Again!

Hey folks.

It has been almost 2 months to the day of being laid off, and I have now moved on to my next big project professionally. While I am keeping most of it under wraps, it is an exciting new thing for myself and the folks that I work with. This blog will become active again tonight after my first day of work!

Alex

Still alive!

Hey Folks,

For those curious I am indeed still alive. For those readers who do not know, I was caught in the layoffs that hit Sucker Punch and am currently looking for work. With that taking up most of my time, I have not had as much time as I would like for personal art, though I am hoping some of the content I am making will eventually be visible.

More soon!

Alex

A retrospective on painting

Just for fun I went and found some of my early collections of daily paintings. Pretty scary thing. Here is where I was around 18 months ago:

Here are some samples from my portfolio website of daily paintings I feel turned out well.

More are available on my personal site here: www.digitaldracott.com

Daily Production Still #5

Technically not  a still, but one of the big "quality" techniques I just implimented was a radial change in seasons instead of a passive one. I can still scale things passivley, and probably will for some instances but for some shots/effect changes, having the radial change is going to be super cool.

Warning: This Gif is large

Daily Production Still #4

Hey folks. Been a while since I was at Siggraph, then traveling (so essentially out 10 days). I did lots of concepts for the main device and have some cool stuff to show coming soon. In the mean time, just polishing up a few things (more on that soon).

Here is a still from me playing around with the amount of light the trees are picking up. Trying to remove some darker spots.

Daily Production Still #3

Lots of hours spent tonight populating the environment. Here is where I started:

After some work I got to here:

Nothing crazy. Much later I ended here:

This shot is a good representation of the final visual quality I will be aiming for. I consider the environment and lighting (not post and rendering) to be at ~85-90%.  It uses every asset I made over the past few weeks.  Here are my thoughts:

What I like: 

-The density feels great in spots. Very natural

-The lighting holds up very well. This is better than I had been hoping for.

-The grass blends much better than I thought it would, and shrinking down the flowers was a fun touch.

What I dont like:

-The big trees feel to sparse along the trunk

-Parts of the background still give that feel that they arent in a forest (specifically the back left)

-Some shapes still feel strange, like the big rock to the left

-Some ground meshes were lost, and some of the leaves don't hold up that well on the saplings when viewed from this angle

-The small tree to the center left is just too dark.

Daily Production Still #2

A second still. Last night was focusing on setting up the birch bark (which turned out excellent).

What I liked: The detail and blending around the base of the birch tree.

What I dont: The tiny weeds are not casting shadows, and the value of the secondary bark is just too dark and boring.

Daily Production Stills

Going forward on my current project, I will be capturing daily stills as a form of accountability, and to help motivate myself (and to track progress).  I will also be including what I like and what I dislike (for fun and to stay objective).

As of today, Most of the environment is near shippable quality. As a result I have switched over to shot and world building.  Here is my first true production still (an early WIP of one of the shots, no foliage, no real lighting, no ground painting, etc).

What I like:
A fan of the rocks blending into the mid and background, how 3D the grass reads despite being flat planes

What I dislike:
Still needs bark textures, Grass height feels very random.

More Foliage

Slowly wrapping up art production on the environment. Testing some foliage coverage with grass. Pretty pleased with the results (color is incorrect due to vert colors).

Leaf transitions

A WIP gif showing my leaves dissolving away for winter.

Working on Ground cover

Really pushing for the right feel for ground cover and meshes, as well as small shrubs. Needs more flowers though.

More Foliage

Another update on my forest. Getting some foliage that is smaller in there

Quick tree update

Been working hard on my trees. Iteration has been key over the past week but finally getting results that are close to final quality for the short.

WIP foliage shader

Hey folks, a quick beauty shot testing some lighting for my short I am working on. The dynamic GI volumes are fantastic, and the foliage shader and technique I used for the leaf cards is turning out great.

Daily Environment Studies #157

Environment Lookdev

last night I spent some time doing some lookdev for different times of day and various compositions for my short.

Daily Environment Studies #156

Some ground cover

Wip progress on some procedural ground cover for my short.

Ripplin.

Been a while since an update but definitely hard at work. Locking in some final features that have to do with rain on my master shader. Nothing too fancy. Lots of foliage texture work besides that. Below is a fun preview of  Sébastien Lagarde's implimentation of some ripples. For the most part I have what he describes but I had to use some texture optimizing tricks to fit the samples into my master shader but nothing fancy.

Birch Texture WIP

Decided to relax on the shader stuff tonight and just spend a relaxing evening with Birch Trees. WIP texture pass for trees in an upcoming project.

Brief Update

Hey folks,

While things have been quiet for a few days, I have been hard at work setting up a new project. Here is a quick Gif preview of some tessellation friendly dynamic snow :)

Daily Environment Studies #155

Just a little bit abstract here. Going to be calming down a bit as I ramp up a separate project.

Daily Environment Studies: Some sketches

Making an environment at the moment. These sketches represent some really rough ideas for a center piece of technology. Mostly playing with shapes at the moment.

Daily Environment Studies #154

Daily Environment Studies #153

Daily Environment Studies #152

Daily Environment Studies #151

Daily Environment Studies #150

Daily Environment Studies #149

Daily Environment Studies #148

Daily Environment Studies #146

Daily Environment Studies #145 and some notes

Just wanted to mention I plan on switching my daily environment paintings to be general environment studies. That may mean quick 3D shape studies like today, but there will more than likely be paintings too.

Digital Paintings #135

Daily Paintings #134

More color studies. Some from photos, others from paintings, some are my own.

Daily Paintings #133

Some late night tin foil lookdev

Wanted to try and see what kind of tin foil material I could make from scratch. Rendered in Marmoset 2.0

Daily Paintings #132

Daily Paintings #131

Some color studies from concepts I like. nothing fancy.

Daily Paintings #130

Daily Painting #129

Starting to go super bold with color to get myself out of the comfort zone

Daily Painting #128

A quick rockstyle R&D render

Playing around with some interesting colors for a quick speed sculpt presentation. Each Render moving down is a bit of a progressive playing to try and get some values and colors that I really liked while still retaining detail.