At the turn of the new year we decided we wanted to research making the jump from VRay to real-time visualization, and our first step into that territory was with UE4. There were many new things to learn about lighting and optimization, which are reshaping our pipeline. The speed of creating iterations on materials, lighting, and animation, are so gratifying for an artist. Previously, I would have to render an animation over night or even over a weekend, only to discover I needed to make further changes. With the UE4 Sequencer, I can make dozens of iterations in a few hours. After this research, we feel confident that with more time we can get a closer visual parity to VRay, and we're very excited to try out the real time ray tracing features as they become available. Real-time workflow is hard to turn away from! 

All assets were modeled and unwraped in Max, texture in Substance or Quixel Mixer, and assembled and rendered in UE4.

Starting out in 2019, we decided it was time to test how our architectural visualization pipeline could work if we jumped ship to real-time with Unreal Engine 4. On top of that, we also wanted to do some R&D on creating expansive outdoor environments, should we need to create them for future clients.

This is still a work in progress, but after doing a retrospective 2 weeks into development, we are feeling confident that our clients would be happy with kind of results we can get out of UE4. There will always be caveats when it comes to not being able to raytrace reflections, shadows, and refration, however making this move now makes a lot of sense for us because we know that eventually real time ray tracing will be fully integrated into UE4, and we’ll be ready!

For this client (NDG Student Housing) we really wanted to move into more interesting lifestyle perspectives, which the client was a big fan of. I had to learn a lot more about being a photographer, and creating nice depth of field in VRay. We plan to accentuate these lifestyle shot with animations in 2019, to make them even less static and tell micro narratives.

This was a fun project we (uforisVR) worked on with the student housing client Domus. It was a great project for texturing and lighting, where I really pushed the volumetric fog effects that I learned about for this project to give the apartments a really comforting feel,

This is some early done work for CLS, who build student housing units for universities. We were contracted to help visualize these spaces in VR, to give students previews of what their yet to be built housing will look like.

Here is the same CLS room from the reverse angle.

Here one of three spherical panoramas of the CLS 2 Bedroom suite. I modelled most of these assets, but we outsourced some of the assets from VizPeople.

This scene was feature in a VR presentation.

With the recent release of Unreal Studio and Datasmith, we decided to test out how quickly we could transfer our VRay scene to UE4. It took two days.

Here is an armchair I modelled, texture, and rendered using 3DS Max Hair and Fur world space modifier for an architectural project.

This was a chesterfield study I did to practice some new techniques with Zbrush. This chesterfield happens to be in our office, so reference was close at hand.

Here is a corroded corrugated steal substance I made for a project at uForis.

This is a pool table I modelled and textured for a project. The velvet material was challenging to find a good PBR solution for.

This is a detail shot of the kitchen sink from the CLS scene.

This is a banquette sofa I for a project.

This is a feature wall I made for another project. The wall is made up of 8 plank modules, which I made a substance for to create infinite randomizations of the 8 plank modules.

This is a render of one of infinite possible modules. The texture set was made entirely in Substance Designer. Rendered in IRay

3D View can be seen here!

This is the culmination of work Thomas Petijean, Krishna Sriram, Yang Zhang, Marco Cermusoni, and myself put into for our Projects 1 course at the CDM. Find our more about it here.

This is a project detailing creating a graph template for the quick and easy texturing of sci-fi spacecraft assets for games in Substance Designer 5. I followed the wonderful guidance of Victor Kam, in his tremendous tutorial on Substance Designer available and Pluralsight. This process involved creating custom utilities to be able to quickly apply normal map details, to make use of multi-tri-planar mapping to eliminate UVW seams, and to customize generative effects in Substance Designer 5. The project involved using Position, World Space Normal, Curvature and Ambient Occlusion nodes to be used in the process of creating generative effects that have infinite variations. By setting up detailed and efficient utilities in a master graph in Substance Designer, you can quickly drop in any unwrapped mesh and apply the generative effects, speeding up the texturing process from hours to minutes. The textures created in this project are ready for PBR pipelines, but can easily be generated for legacy pipelines or for mobile as well. The power of Substance is in its flexibility!
You can find out more about this project on my blog here.

Here's the first of several lantern props for the Izakaya scene. It took me a while to figure out a good way of achieve the emissive scattering effect that occurs when light hits paper. I went with a blended emissive map, blending the red paper material with an underlying yellowish halogen light, as a kind of a shortcut. I have not yet explored the capabilities of transmissive maps in Physically Based Shaders. In the real world, paper is a very thin material, which can be troublesome to deal with when you're working with low polygon objects.

I modeled the asset in 3DS Max and textured it in both Substance Painter and Substance Designer.

You can find more information and images of this asset on my blog here.

After having spent two years living and teaching in Japan, I developed a love for Tokyo. The streets are so alive with light and color. No more is this more apparent than in the photography of Masashi Wakui.

I have decided to try to recreate one of his wonderful photographs in 3D. This is my work in progress on the scene so far, which I continue to work on daily.

You can find more information about this project and additional images here.

This project involved creating a realistic game-ready hero prop of a MK2 Grenade. The grenade was modeled and UVW Unwrapped in 3DSMax, and textured for Physically Based engines in Substance Painter 2, such as Unreal Engine 4. The detail in the texture was all created by using Substance Painter's powerful non-destructive workflow. Many of the effects, such as the edge wear on the painted steel, the rust on the clip and ring, and the paint color applied to on top of the steel, can all be randomized in minutes to create infinite variations. 

You can find more information about this project here.

This project involved getting intimate with sculpting high polygon objects in Zbrush. In this project I blocked in basic shapes in 3DSMax and exported them to Zbrush to be sculpted. I created many of my own custom brushes in Zbrush to be able achieve a stylized look on the stones. I also explored modular assets in this project, using duplicates of the same asset in multiple locations. This speeds things up a lot and with careful placement and rotation, it is very hard to notice which objects were duplicated. I decimated the high polygon sculpts and exported them to Marmoset Toolbag 2 for rendering.

Detail shot. 

I decided to add the Stark House sigil for to some of the assets for fun!

 

This project involved taking a pre-modeled scene from a tutorial series and familiarizing myself with VRay rendering for architectural productions. I learned a lot bout how to get the most out of VRay's anti-aliasing filters and optimizing the render by paying close attention to the Sample Rate rendering pass, the Global Illumination Brute Force Samples, and the material, lighting and camera subdivisions, to troubleshoot the speed of rendering in VRay. 

You can find more information about this procedural texture on my blog here.

More information about my new material scanning rig and process are available in my blog here.

More information about this material scan can be found on my blog here.

You can find out more about this procedural texture on my blog here.

You can find out more about this Victorian ceiling study I did here

I have been working a lot in 3DS Max and Vray, getting into creating shading networks from scratch. In order to make these shaders presentable, I decided to make myself a renderball, a simple asset with my logo on it to test and present my work. 

I'm finding there to be a lot of cross over application between Vray and Substance, especially when it comes to using Substance to generate great procedural noise patterns to be used in Vray shaders with custom Fresnel curves. 3DS Max's procedural library is very limited compared to what Substance can achieve. On the flip side, getting a better understanding of creating an entire shader from scratch is also a help with furthering my understanding of Physically Based workflows.

Going forward, I will attempt to capture this level or detail and realism in Substance Designer as well. These two painted metallic materials are each multi layered with custom reflectance values to capture the subtleties of materials that have several layers of metallics such as steal, and dielectric materials such as paint. 

I was inspired by someone awesome to take a closer look at bottle dash stucco recently, so I decided to do so and have a pass at creating a graph. The limitations of the Substance rendering engine at the moment kind of prevent me from getting into rendering real glass like materials. Right now the IRAY renderer is kind of inoperable, as you cannot edit the height subdivisions, so these OPENGL renders will have to do for now.

This is the first texture I've used the 'Tile Sampler' node on, which can accommodate multiple inputs and scatter them all around with one another randomly. So with this in mind, I created a bottle shard generator and scattered dozens of variations of the bottle shards around using the tile sampler. Quite an effective approach, and speedy.

Next time I will put a bit more work into masks to ensure none of the shards overlap in an unrealistic way.

Recently one of my students here in Japan caught me starring at the floor. This is happening more and more these days. My students often laugh at me for what looks to day dreaming. In fact, I'm working hard to unravel the mysterious ways in which light interacts with surfaces, for projects like this. To remember this strange relationship with my students, I decided to take my awe and amazement of lamented wood tiles of the school's classrooms to the test in Substance Designer! 

I learned a lot from the fabulous entries put forward into the Procedural Material Contest a few months back. Many of the very talented substance community members graciously shared their expertise. This meager texture wouldn't have been possible without this community.

I tried to hone in on what I wanted to do specifically for this texture. I think my previous mistakes have been trying to do too much in one texture, especially when I'm still learning a lot, so focusing in on a specific pattern, in this case Basket Weave, really helped me concentrate on the finer details.

As such I'm certain I could refine this even more with more experience under my belt, and I look forward to going at wood tiles again as it was a ton of fun to create. There aren't many exposed parameters, but the few options I included allow for some decent customization.

Here are a few variations on what these exposed parameters can do:

More information about this substance can be found here.
The texture is available on the Substance Share website here.

This procedural texture was completed with the guidance of Naughty Dog's Roguelio Olguin's  tutorial series, who is one of real time graphics leaders in the quality and quantity of procedural textures. 

It was incredibly insightful as to learn how he organizes his workflow, which allowed a few concepts to crystallize in my mind about the way to build procedural texture graphs from start to finish. Before learning from his approach I was a bit all over the place with how I build a substance graph, but now I've got a much stronger feel for the way to go about organizing the many steps of creating PBR textures. 

This project involved the general workflow of authoring first the Height pass, from which many of the details important to the Normal, Roughness, Metallic and Ambient Occlusion maps can be derived.

More information and images of this texture can be found here.

One of the great procedural texture artists I look up to a lot is Käy Vriend. His tremendous effort in the discipline and his generosity in sharing his work has really bolstered the Substance Designer community for a long while. Recently, he released a really interesting node, which he has called the "Refine Node."  It is quite a remarkable node, that can generate a very clean height map from any reference image you feed into it. To test it out, I scavenged around on the internet and in the real world to collect and create some texture photographs. Depicted above are the results, which I think are quite extraordinary. The control and quality of the height map generated through the node is fantastic. It really speeds up the process of creating a production ready material from reference photography. I can see myself using this a lot in the future and feel indebted to Käy for his tremendous efforts.

More information about this can be read here on my blog.

More information about this can be read here on my blog.

More information about this can be read here on my blog.

Here's the completed 100% procedural texture that I submitted to Allegorithmic's procedural texture contest. It was really challenging to create and figure how to put together all of the pieces and layers of this graph, but I'm really satisfied with these results. It is a PBR game-ready texture.

I learned so much on this project. The completed graph has exposed parameters giving the user the ability to control the pattern of concrete tiles, vision impaired tiles, the level of damage and wear on the tiles, coins, cigarette butts, moss, and several other effects. 
More information about this project can be seen on my blog here.
The texture is available on the Substance Share website here.

For this texture, I consulted my reference photos of Portuguese tiles that I took in Macau. The references were invaluable to figure out what basic shapes I should start out with and how to begin creating the wavy pattern the tiles are laid out in. It was pretty challenging to figure out to to create this wavy pattern from scratch, and even harder to make it tile properly. However once that was achieved, I progressed by using a tile generator to quickly layout out a lot of tiles, and added a ton of layers of various on top of them. 

With this project I learned a lot more about using gradients to manipulate the shapes and colors you want with ease to some very satisfying results. Perhaps the most fun, was creating the cigarette butts scattered around the tiles. It was a feature in my reference photo that I had to fit into the final piece.

During my trip to Hong Kong and Macau I took a lot of texture photographs. This is an experiment I made in Bitmap 2 Material 3, another part of Allegorithmic's tremendous software suite. B2M3 specializes in converting an images directly into engine ready materials.

This texture was taken of the beautiful imported Portuguese ceramic tiles that pave a lot of the walk ways in Macau. Their color and shape is quite striking compared to the generic concrete seen in most of Hong Kong and China. 

The results are promising and were achieved incredibly quickly, I'm talking minutes. B2M3 sets a remarkable benchmark for speed and quality that will be a challenge to match going through the procedural route from scratch in Substance Designer, which I plan to do next.

Fine out more here.

In honor of the incredible images of Pluto recently captured by the New Horizon's spacecraft, I decided to reach out, way out, to bring you my version of the dwarf planet. This is a completely procedural terrain modeled after our littlest planet, because to me, Pluto is still our 9th planet! It took a couple of hours to put together, and while the outcome is lacking some of the geological features that make Pluto so distinctive, I'm still quite pleased with it. 

Creating procedural wood seems like it's all the rage these days in the procedural art community, so I thought I would have a crack at it. Once again, I consulted Kay Vriend's tremendous body of freebies for some guidelines, and decided to add some additional worn paint details.  He is truly one of the masters of procedural textures in PBR, and his work is a tremendous inspiration to me. My work on the worn paint was really eye opening in terms of how quickly you can add something decent looking to an existing graph. I don't think it looks exactly how I would like it to. I would like it to have a flakier feel than it does now, however for the time being this will have to do. Sometimes you just have to know when to stop working to step back, and I'm really happy with the render at this stage.

For this texture, I followed along Hugo Beyer's tremendous tutorial on how to create procedural leather in Substance Designer 5. A relatively simple graph can produce some pretty compelling results. I learned a lot about utilizing slope blurs and warps to create convincing patterns and controlling them with gradients. 

Here's another work done entirely in Substance Designer 5, which was inspired and guided along to completion by Allegorithmic's monthly drop. I used a basic tiling stone pattern and layered in many layers of variation through procedural cell, crystal and grunge generators. Variation is key to producing realistic and satisfying results, and it is a lot of fun to mess around with the many different kinds of generators. For stones, blending jagged crystals shapes with organic cell shapes produces some great results. The grunge layers add some additional wear and tear to the surface of the stones. I think I could spend a little bit more time fine tuning the grout in between the stones, and might add some moss or mold to give the stones even more variation.

This is a procedural camouflage fabric created in Substance Designer 5. Inspired and completed with the help of Kay Vriend's excellent work on his website.

This is a render of the result of the procedural graph I created in Substance Designer 5. I'm pretty happy with it but I definitely think the puddles need some extra distortion and variation around where they contact the rocks. I learned a ton from this process and I am very excited to get back into Substance Designer to see what else it can do!

This is the graph I created as part of Allegorithmic's official tutorial series on creating photorealistic procedural textures in Substance Designer 5. I am really excited by the result. Keeping track of where thing's are in these graphs can be very intense, so I did my best to keep things organized with frames and comments.

I'll be working on a weekly texture series to see how my skills with Substance Designer progess.