Friday's Work

I started the day off thinking I was headed into work.  At the moment I work part time at Target.  Due to a ton of snow, I couldn't make it in and got to work on art instead.

At the moment, I'm quite overwhelmed with my workload.  There are so many projects that need to be finished and I have trouble focusing my efforts on one single project so as a result things never get completed.  I'm trying to change that so I'm concentrating on finishing the Batflower scene in UDK. Heres a speed paint/concept for the scene I did a day ago.

It seems like everytime I open up a texture, normal map, or UDK material, I go and try to make it look better.  I'm constantly revisiting files as I go along and try to make them better.  It feels like I make little progress.

Today's goal was: Create, texture, and set dress a cave environment in UDK.

What I did:
-Logged into cgtextures.com and downloaded a rock texture.

Photoshop- Took two dirt texture photos I took in Savannah and composited them, offset the image, and clone brushed it to make a tile-able texture.  I also created a tile-able texture for the rock.

UDK -Wasted time trying to find package files so all my props and textures loaded when I opened the cave map.  Imported the two textures, made materials for them, created TerrainMaterial nodes and configured them, created TerrainLayerSetup node and linked in the TerrainMaterials, created a Terrain and set up the tesselation levels, plugged in the TerrainLayerSetup node, deleted it and tried again since it didnt work, spent an hour trying to get the paint Terrain to work so I could paint in rocks or dirt where it was needed, UDK crashed.

-I gave up.  I think I remembered the right way to do it after it crashed which I will try tomorrow.

-During the day, I watched FZD school's YouTube channel. The instructor is a really talented painter and very informed about professional practices.  Great videos.

Yesterday, I watched took a snap shot from the new-ish Terminator movie and did a little color selecting exercise for myself.  I wanted to see if I could choose the right colors or get close enough to match the frame from the movie.  This is what I came up with.

 

I was pleased with the results.  I did cheat some since I outlined the major shapes.  My main concern was only to match the value and color with my eye, thats it..

Thats all for now.