Due to work and Sekiro (almost 100% that game now) I haven't been able to post anything lately. I'm supposed to do a bunch of foliage work on the environment and start meshing out the background, but I felt I wanted to model something today. So I started blocking out something fun. Just getting the major shapes in there. Still stuff missing stuff and some parts are not aligned but I'll do that in the highpoly. Frankly there was so many cuts I could have it done it in Moi and retopo it inside of Blender or MODO instead. The grip need some work too.  I'll start sub-d'ing later in the week between Sekiro grinds.

Been busy the last few days, but I managed to model some flowers 'n stuff before bed time. Some baking and designer work and then I'll throw them in the scene too.

Like yesterday I only had a small amount of time to work on the scene, so I threw out some mountain heights for the background. I didn't clean anything up or spend a lot of time with it, I just wanted a height and maybe some splat masks. The erosion is pretty crazy now but that was intentional since I wanted to see what kind of cavitys I'd get when including the atmospheric fog. The colormap is just one of the masks I ran threw a gradient, so naturally not something I'll use in the end.  I wasn't all too happy with the silhoutte so I squished it a bit. Next time I'll probably slope it towards the scene too so I can get some of that epic scale back. I might throw in a few more heights too just to see what fits the scene so I can at least have a variety of backgrounds.

Only had like an hour free tonight so I started blocking out some stuff that should be in the barracks. Nothing special, nor pretty. Just a bunch of cubes jammed together. Creating a high poly from this one could be fun, but I still have a lot of blocking out to do before.

Spent a couple of hours blocking out the base structure. Also put in a quick landscape with a placeholder material. I'll replace it once I'm done with my heightmap from houdini. Next time I'll probably start replacing each module with a Trim UV'd variant. 

Didn't have a lot of time today, so I spent an hour or so UV'ing and putting some textures on the one low tree for testing fidelity. I also removed the roots on the tree, I'll probably end up making a seperate mesh for the roots and jam it between the roots and terrain later on instead. Haven't got any proper SSS or proper baking. Gonna flatten most textures since most saturation will come from the CLUT in the end, it'll prob just be a hassle with saturated textures. I also tried over dimensioning the leaves on the tree to see If it had a "alien" like effect, but it ended up just looking weird.

Spent a couple of hours creating some trees and bushes inside of Blender too. Needed to have a bit more viney and twirly feel to them, since it's supposed to be alien'ish. I'll be sure to sculpt some knots on the silhouette before I add a tiling texture. I also made a few "trees" that has aggressive shapes for the look of the environment, gonna be a whole mess of vines tangled in them together with some leaves. The roots look like garbage since I just threw them in there. The leaf is a placeholder mesh I created for the particle distribution based on painted weight. I'm going to create a set of leaves inside of Substance Designer tomorrow. 

Tried to do my own take on a tutorial I followed. Still some jank with a few  scatter points (third picture) but I'm pretty sure I can remedy that with some adjustments. If all goes well I'll start replacing a the detailed branches with a few baked planes soon. 

Spent my evening building a shader that should support most of the stuff I need. I duped the rocks around and put some placeholder moss textures from UT4. The blend is using the vector from the normals. I can also layer several materials on top of each other based on a packed custom mask. Part from that all the basic stuff I might need is in there: Custom normal details, dithering, tints, rough and AO controls etcetc, mostly run through switches. Gonna put in the camera distance stuff too since many of these rocks might not be super close to the player.

Quick dirt render of a quick rock I sculpted and textured after work. Gonna a do a couple more based on the same setup then throw them into Unreal.  The normals from the projected textures ain't too hot. The directionality of the sediments are off but it'll be fine once the shader is up'n'workin'. If not, I'll just remove them and use it as  detail normal instead. that's probably smarter since I'm going to rotate them all over the place. After that I need to do a moss shader and some vegitation on the top blend.