Visions From The Mind

Another little side project. This time I did a kind of sci-fi “Plasma Cannon”.

As the last one, this mini-project was done for practice and to have a small break from The Wanderer Project. 

As I didn’t have a specific idea to start with I just improvised the design as I was working on it. This approach allowed me more freedom, however it led me to some extra work as I had to re-do some of the UV mapping and textures several times, as I was experimenting with some design decisions.

Here is a turn around animation of the base model from Blender, rendered in Marmoset Toolbag 3:

Another thing to note is that I only did the low poly model and then, once I had a good base complete in Blender, I UV mapped it in 3D Coat and imported the model intro Quixel Suite 2 NDO. Once there, I used the awesome normals painting features it has to add the details, this way I was able to avoid having to do a high-poly variation of the model. That said, I was aiming for a stylized look, so I’m not sure if it would work the same way for a more realistic approach.

This one is the final model with the normal maps from the Quixel Suite:

This is the first pass of the texturing phase:

And the turn around for the final version with further detail:

When I was done with this piece I figured I would have a bit more fun trying to design what and how this thing would shoot. For that, I quickly mocked up the effect geometry in Blender, hand-painted the emissive maps and alpha masks in photoshop. Again, all these were rendered in Toolbag 3. 

Alright that’s it for this project.

Now, regarding The Wanderer Project - I’ve stopped doing the Summary Work In Progress Diaries for now, as had the opportunity to turn the project into something bigger, more complex (tease! xD .. I will talk more about this topic in a more appropriate post). So, because of this and client work, I’ve been focusing more in getting things done for a first version and then when that’s done I’ll do another pass, making more assets/props and perfecting things.

For now I’ve been working on a couple more shaders that I needed for the terrain and I have now created a fresh new scene in Unreal Engine 4 to finally start putting things together and work on Level Design.

If you don’t yet follow me on Twitter or Facebook and you want to be more frequently updated, make sure to do so as I usually update there with work in progress screen shots and other stuff more often.