I just started on the Anglo-Saxon piece

It is going great!
I interpreted a piece of concept art my own way, and I saw it as a run-down African poacher’s shack. My story is that this building is in the middle of the African bush where there is little water, which is why there is a well near the shack. The well has water pressure canister (for convenience), but if that were to break down, there is also a manual pump.
The building is made of scrap metal, and the awnings are a mixture of tarp and canvas. These materials were scavenged by the poacher, who put them to good use. He has been busy working, which is why there are hides and tusks by the building.
This was a lot of fun to do, man I love 3D.

Taylor Pelto Environment Demo Reel 2011 from Taylor Pelto on Vimeo.

I’m still at school and close to demo reel completion! I have to finish within the next 3 weeks, because I’m moving back to the states. I should be done by then. My game scene only has a day or so left of work on it, and my high poly environment the same (NOT including render times, which will take a good while)

I’ve been working on a higher-poly environment, kind of a fun cartoon one. Here is the concept, done by Fydbac.deviantart.com, who was some lovely and clean-lined environment concepts. I decided to do a film-resolution scene for the hell of it, really! I love all of 3D, not just the gaming aspect.  After this, though, I will do another game piece to round off my game-focused demo reel.

And here is my current work in progress!

Still WIP, I need a bit longer to complete a few things

I decided to light it like a night scene because I like the way the fire light draws your eyes to the focal point of my scene.

I finally learned a bit about particles in Unreal so I could make a little fire, and it took me a while to grasp because I have never actually tried particles in any software.  They ended up looking pretty nice for my first try.

I’m having a bit of an issue with some of my plants – form a distance some of them start to turn white1 You can kind of see it in the pics below, I’m trying to figure out why. Also, some of my plant alphas seem to flicker a little when I pull back, a little white around the edges.

I am going to add more plant life to the emptier spaces, and add a root system to the big leaning tree by the nose of the plane (like the tree got pushed over or something and its roots pulled out a little)

I am open to any critiques!

UDK is actually a fairly easy program, it is user-friendly for sure! Which I appreciate because I am basically trying to teach myself as I go. I am struggling to learn lighting technicalities and shadow settings at the moment, then I really want to do a few cool effects to my scene to make it shine like add some small animations to my plant life to make them move and sway a little. The lighting is probably going to be early evening or morning and I want to add a fire and have that flickering firelight really light up the side of my airplane.

Below is step 1, no plant life.

Below is step 2, a few plants and a better terrain

I’ll keep working on composition and do different lighting,and polish polish polish!

Below is the base mesh (which was not yet sliced into modular pieces when I took the pic), the high poly zbrush sculpt, and the game resolution version in the Unreal engine.

I’ve decided that XNormal is my favorite program to bake my Normal and Ambient occlusion maps,as it is easy to use, accurate, and powerful. I used to use XSI but I think XNormal suits me better.

I have learned a TON through the process of creating this plane. I’ve learned Zbrush when I added damage detail, I learned how to best bake my normals, AOs, and other maps, I learned a lot of work-flow stuff through my texturing process, adn I have also learned the basics of UDK, which this environment will be running in. I know I am going to be a lot faster for my next environment!