The title of this post is — in multiple ways — literal.  Firstly, I had to move recently, and of course needed a truck for that.  I swear each time I move it gets closer and closer to just flattening me.

Second, I occasionally watch livestreams by Yogscast member Sips, over on his Twitch stream.  Sips was playing a great deal of Euro Truck Simulator 2 awhile back.  Since I already owned the game, I played it for a bit too (and made some trailer art, which is not the first Yogart I’ve done).  It’s kind of a relaxing, zen thing, though I’d probably find it more enjoyable with a wheel controller rather than gamepad or mouse+keyboard.  But since I’m trying to save up for a few things of greater priority right now, as well as fill in the financial holes in my life, I haven’t plonked down the cash to buy such a wheel. Yet.

As I mentioned in my earlier post, there were five major elements to the The Old Republic’s lighting model: gradient rim light, gradient illumination, depth of field, sky specular, and camera-relative lighting direction.

The attached image shows my test map with an ordinary UE4 depth of field post process effect.  More importantly, it features the Owen model with the added sky specular effect.  Owen and the two material spheres are all using the same gradient; the sphere on the right has z-clamped it.  (Note: There is one difference between them in the screenshot — the gradient on Owen and on the rightmost sphere erroneously doesn’t use the same lighting vector as the other spheres, they are essentially lit from directly above instead of at an angle.  That’s already been fixed.)

I was certainly not expecting the news we got today.  Epic has eliminated the $19 subscription fee for UE4.  Nice.

One of my art goals for the Cryptid project is that it will be cinematic without being overly cartoonish.  I’m shooting for characters that have roughly the level of realism of those on the back cover of the first edition book, maybe a bit higher.

Some time ago, I came across Tom Looman’s UE4 implementation of a gradient fresnel effect, which is based on the “stylized realism” used by Bioware for Star Wars: The Old Republic. This struck my fancy because the effect it emulates from SWTOR’s concept art reminds me a lot of the lighting style I’ve used in some of my own work, especially digital paintings.

For this second installment of my series of posts about my Cryptid project (first post here), I’m going to go over my activity over the last three weeks or so since I began (bear in mind that I work two jobs, which cuts into how much time I have to spend on this).  Mostly this work involves some preliminary design, and hopefully illustrates the considerations that go into something like this.  I am the Amateur Architect referred to by the title, as may become clear in this post.

In May, I posted about the release of Unreal Engine 4 distracting me from working on Star Citizen ships.  I subscribed, did some fiddling and learning, and basically fell in love with the engine.

Shortly thereafter, it became impossible to work on anything that stressed my system more than a little because the motherboard problems that I mentioned in that post degraded stability to the point that the machine would blue screen if you looked at it funny.  I couldn’t scrape together the funds to replace the motherboard until late in the year.

So, my tentative plans to work on Star Citizen ships (as described in my previous post) got completely derailed by something else that I had already been meaning to tinker with:

Unreal Engine 4

Now, I’ve been tinkering with video game engines for a long, long time now (almost as long as I’ve been doing 3D modeling).  I first got a taste of this sort of content creation with id software’s Quake (using Yahn Bernier’s BSP editor) and I’ve looked at video games as tool kits ever since (a mindset that fed upon and back into my other longtime hobby, tabletop roleplaying).  Many of my friends and family know that I buy 3d games at least as much to tinker with their engines as to actually play the packaged content.