Mike's Stuff

Quick texture render test in Blender Eevee. Max in PJ's.😀 Hair is much more detailed with strands. Eyes are Unreal built in shader like previous games, so had to dodgy up a blender shader with mask.  Model comes with full head shape keys.

 Not quite halloween :) They are in costume! Done in Blender.

Finally has some time the animate and render a longer version in Blender eevee. Tried out the new mantaflow sim for the steam.. worked well but is fiddly to get what you want. Youtube link: https://youtu.be/1nbLfH_BlKw LiS - Valentine Diner

Nice little boat tutorial by @derrkdotcom on youtube.  Covers some advanced topics but easy to follow.  Added the newly rigged hotdog man cause why not..

Wanted to try out IK (Inverse Kinematics) rigging in Blender, watched some youtube tutorials from @JayAnAmGames short, informative and to the point.  Of course i picked hotdog man to practice on... 

Happy new year 🎉.. traditionally late as i needed a few days to recover!:) Wanted to add some animated fireworks on a older static piece i did 2 years ago. Started off well and finished quickly.. then i started animating the characters and got carried away. All done in Blender using Eevee. Post in Premier. Higher rez video below  Some issues: Subsurf modifier makes the render speeds jump up astronomically. Went from 5 sec per frame.. to 30 sec per frame. Transparency modes other then clipped shows up in volumes. Odd reflection issues.

Another camera pass showing the procedural rain texture in Blender Eeevee.

Wip test render.. trying out volume lighting in Blender eevee. This took seconds to render and the quality of the lights are amazing, in cycles my pc would take hours and if it did complete the render it would be a pixel mess even with denoising. I wish there was a ray visibility option like in cycles tho.

Quick camera pass showing the whole scene of the last piece i did. Usually don't animate stuff, as they take to long to render out but wanted to test how fast it rendered in blender Eevee. It took about 10 sec per frame to render in eevee..  so that a huge time saver for the quality i got.

Was just meant to be Chloe and Rachel alone.. That went out the window :) Rendered in Blender Eevee.

Quick test render of a WiP using DoF in eevee.  The instant results of adjusting DoF is so nice.   Went a bit overboard to obscure the background as the final work inst ready yet. 

Tried out Blenders new hair shader.. that meant diving back into particle hair system. Actually found working with particles hair easier when i last used it, quickly created this style, recognize it? One hair node gives amazing results and cuts down on work creating a shader to match. Cant lock down blonde tho.., says it should be around .25 melanin. Tried a few different values. :)

Just a quick animation, testing camera blur in Blender Eevee Also animated Daniel and mushroom, im not much for animating, but will use the motion to capture movement blur.

Lyla Park.. Did you call her? Was to be a quick textures/shader test.. got carried away.:) Most of the textures from the game will plug straight into Blenders principal shader. Diffuse, Normal, Spec, Gloss no problems. But in LiS2 and Captain Spirit they now include some new textures, like SSS ( Subsurface scattering), Highlights, Flow, Wrinkle, Blush, Cloth and some more. SSS is fine, the principal shader has a node for that and works fine with some tweeks like a math node to alter the strength. HL texure seems to work plugged into the anisotropic node but not 100% sure. Flow maps will be direction i think? Cloth map is maybe a sheen value?  I'm trying to get away with just using the one principal shader and not combine any others if i can avoid it. Need to read up on Unreal 4 shaders and see how best Blender can use them.

Has both a flying and standing pose-able model. Uploaded to Deviantart

Long journey down a forest road. Enjoyed making this, used a ref photo to guide me. All done in Blender, assets (models, textures) grabbed from the LiS games myself, and the numerous texture sites around the web. Deviantart has a nice collection of LiS models that can be imported or opened directly with Blender. Road and ground: Started with the road, used bezier curves (similar to photoshop pen tool) to get the shape of the road first, very hilly wave shape. Converted the curve to vertex and extruded along axis to make the road plane, then duplicated to make the grass and tree planes. Road surface texture from http://texturelib.com which has great seamless textures. The LiS road texture repeated to often and didn't look nice. Used noise texture with roughness to get the wet/dry look of the road. The road lines are done with array modifier repeating on one axis, then shrink wrapped onto the road.. worked very well but very straight.. added some slight curves and ...

All tasks competed, truck ready and packed.. one last song. The junkyard scene is big in both size and resources.. took a few times to render as i kept running out of video ram. In the end i used Blenders new cpu+gpu render option, and had no issues. Other then the lens flares everything was done in Blender. Sun beams just a plane/cube object with volumetric light. Blue haze/fog in the distance with Mist pass and colored. Using LiS skydome object and sky texture. HDRI lights used. Using Blenders new cpu+gpu render helped a lot.

Well done @ DONTNOD_Ent won me over with # CaptainSpirit .. emotional, fun little game that looks gorgeous.. cant wait for # LifeIsStrange2 . Strongly urge anyone to play this and best of all its free!  On a technical note : The models used in Captain Spirit are far more mesh dense then the past games (LiS, BtS) and have a lot more armature points not just for the body but clothes as well. The face armatures especially allow you to control a lot more of the facial features. On the face it seems they are using some add-on for the eyes like they did in BtS. This allows them to control eye type, iris size etc. But there is no texture for the eyes that i can find. The textures follow a metelness flow and are easy to hook up to Blenders principal shader or any PBR shader. There is also texture masks for Subsurface scattering.

Rachel's room for Blender. Grab it over at Deviantart  Principal shader used.. So grab the latest Blender version. Added some basic emissions to lamps, torch etc.  Most objects are separated, some are still linked like the posters on wall, etc. Emergency kit objects added as was not part of the mesh. All original dds textures included, only normals converted. (Reason file is so big) It go's without saying this is DONTNOD and DECK NINES's work. I just extracted the mesh, separated and added textures.

Amazing games and graphics announced in E3. No question i'm a graphics fan in any shape for form from the simple FTL pixel stye to the stunning Death Stranding.. Last of us 2 looks incredible, fallout 76 likewise. Then Capatin Spirit is shown and my heart melts, So inspiring did these quick renders. Points if you can guess what game they are based on :) Deviantart for full version.