Andrew Dowell

Just a quick post about my wargaming scenery collection. By day I'm usually painting in Substance painter or modeling in Maya, but night I'm getting my hands dirty, covered in glue, spray paint and grass flocking. In an effort to really think about the things I enjoy doing, and how I can build this into a career, I've been going back to my roots. Drawing, painting, model making and scenery. I've been building this scenery for a few weeks but actually don't have a game to play it with. I can probably use it with 'Dust' and at some point pick up the new Games Workshop 40k. Foam core buildings with broken cork pieces: Fimo polymer clay sand bags: Foam core small building generators: Small wooden pallets: Fence soft cover: Modular tower units: Cardboard and foam core Cargo crates: Foam core, fimo polymer clay bunker: Landing platform: Wooden balsa wood crates: Ancient monument: It's been great fun building these and hopefully will add some more in t

Documenting work is a good habit for any R&D team. I recently looked into using Cell shading for a project but had a few issues with the implementation and the final result. We started with our realistic looking underwater environment. Applied a cell shaded post process effect that clamped colors within ranges. But it looks terrible. I then remade all the materials and added back the normal maps for each asset. This looks a lot better but isn't the desired 'hand drawn' effect. The Unreal marketplace has a wonderful free Stylized Rendering project. I decided to take a deep look at what could be learnt from here. A post process for adding a black outline will always be useful Once applied in my scene it's finally moving in the right direction but the asset materials now need more work. Time to hit Substance painter. 1. No normal map. (Far left) 2. Normal map with block colour 3-5 Substance painted textures with different brush textures. Only 1 and 2 look fairly good,