Hey everyone! This is a random tutorial but it's something i've wanted to do a video on for a while. This is a process that I've found valuable in multiple scenarios. Whether it's baking down LODs to reduce draw calls, making world models from view models assets that have multiple UV sets to combining a load of assets into a single UV Set. The amount of materials you can bake down with this method is really up to you.

This is a super easy way leveraging Marmoset Toolbags incredibly fast baker!  If you want to bake down the AO map from the original to the new mesh, all you have to do is apply the AO map into the albedo slot and enable the normal Albedo output map in the map configurator. Make sure to rename the suffix to something like "_ao".

Originally, I created a twitter thread about the process but it's just a bunch of pictures, hence the new video on the subject. 

You can see how well it works here when done on a lower lod mesh. The original had about 5 materials with the LOD 3 only having 1, saving on quite a few draw calls.

Anyway, I hope this is helpful in some way! I know it's saved my butt a fair few times. Peace! 

I've been working on a new sight for my AK47 that i redid last year my plan is to make a variety, at least 2 sights and 2 foregrips for it. 1 real sight (picture) and 1 makeshift. The same goes for the foregrip. Here's some progress of the texture work on the red dot sight.

I've even got a futuristic parallax effect working in both marmoset and blender! (video below is before the images above)

The first being blender and the 2nd being Marmoset toolbag. 

I've been streaming the entire process over on twitch and it's great to have real-time feedback and to also help others as I do my thing. Feel free to check the stream out when I'm on! It's a pretty chill vibe or so i've been told.

That being said, These WIP blogs are quite new to me as i regularly post the most recent updates vids and pics on it in my discord. Feel free, also, to check that out - we're growing! You are more than welcome to join me and many others! (psst, we're also running a challenge!)

I'll most likely keep it up to date on here because it's good to find a place to gather all the progress before submitting a post! Take care. 

Hello everyone!

It's been awhile - I've somewhat recovered from recently having a baby and have found some time to do some more mini-tutorials. Here are some of my latest!

When starting these tutorials i didn't want to focus primarily on making a huge series on one particular asset, as a complete tutorial - I felt that my live streams and my time-lapse videos sort of cover that already because I use a lot of techniques that I've shown in the videos below frequently. So i wanted these to be super short and super-to-the-point. So you don't have to go through an hour or so long video to get to the part you like. 

I actually really enjoy making these short tutorials and I've got some more planned to come in the very near future. That being said, i'm really open to suggestions - so if you'd like me to make a short mini tutorial, then by all means hit me up with a message with your suggestion!

Hope these are somewhat helpful. Peace out! 
 

I've been getting quite a few questions as to how i make welds in zbrush AND blender...again haha. Mostly when i'm texturing or after the fact. So here are a couple 1 minute tutorials as to how i achieve them without any plugins or paying for anything extra or special brushes.

Hope you enjoy it! If you'd like any more short tuts like this just give me a shout and i'll see what i can do! 

Time-lapses 

When I started streaming content for Rust I knew that there would be periods of time where I wouldn't be able to stream for quite awhile because there are just some things we want to keep a secret until we don't, which you all who are devs here can understand. So the only solution to this was for me to make time-lapses of that content that I didn't want you all to miss out on, it also has many benefits which as you can see I'm all for...

...recording the process of making assets prevents a lot of procrastination - yes i could stop recording and play a game, read a book or focus more on the movie i'm watching but I've found that it actually discourages those distractions, it has the opposite effect and is beneficial to my workflow. Ben Bolton (twitter) mentioned this in a tweet adding that "...makes practice more effective, exactly like using a timer while shooting. Beyond that, you can share the video, which helps both others and you.". I couldn't agree more my dude. Perhaps it might be a good thing for others reading this to do too? Have you tried it?

I recently uploaded the lengthy time-lapse of the speargun for Rust and had a load of fun creating the intros in Blender and filming and editing the outro outside of the actual content you want to see xD  You can check it out below. 

It's a long one. But I've created chapters within the video timeline so that you can easily skip to the parts you may find most interesting. I'll link them below so that you can skip right to them. 

0:00 Intro 

0:29 Building the Base Mesh in Blender 

31:40 Sculpting Details in Zbrush 

56:57 Creating the Low Poly in Topogun 

1:20:29 UV'ing in Blender and then Baking in Toolbag 4 

1:29:27 Texturing in Adobe Substance Painter 

1:50:53 End Result in Toolbag 4 and a Thank You!

I think in the future, i'll create it into seperate videos so it's a bit more maneageable. Would that be preferable for those who watch these kind of time-lapses? Or would the chapters be enough? I am working on another video of an asset that i have no idea when it will be in-game that I'm narrating and is broken down into individual videos. I'm quite looking forward to that little mini-series!

Anyway, bit of a short post but I thought I'd just notify of the timelapse via a blog here. Hope you all enjoy it! If you have any feedback or would like to see some other videos, just drop me a message! 

 Youtube / Twitch / Twitter

Hey everyone. Just wanted to give a short blog update. 

My experience with twitch streaming has been crazy. Since starting to stream early Feb, I've gained just over 3000 followers which is insane. I want to give something back to those who have done so and who have been crazy enough to sub to the stream (honestly, thank you!). 

On our Discord (which you are more than welcome to join) we've had a lot of people post their work, ask for help, advice and share tips and tricks with each other. It's incredible and something I didn't foresee happening with this twitch adventure. So I had an idea, why not dedicate an evening to review and give feedback on people's poetfolios/selected artworks? 

So that's what I'm going to do. Tonight. 9pm GMT live over on my twitch channel: www.twitch.tv/art_of_pilgrim I won't be alone but I'll be joined by some amazing artists; Taylor Reynolds (character artist at Facepunch studios), Matt Isaac (3D Artist at Faceounch studios), and Tom Darroch (Lead Environment Artist at Stainless Games). 

I know it's kind of late notifying you all. But I'll be making improvements with this in the future. 

GIVEAWAYS

Another way I'd like to give back to the community that has been so kind to me and to help others is to do giveaways based on the relevant software I use in my workflow during the streams. Already I have given away UV Packmaster 2 (blender addon) to one of my subscribers and tomorrow at 12pm midday, just before I go on my lunch break I'll be giving away a full licence for Fluent, another incredible Blender addon. CGTHOUGHTS who is the creator behind it was very kind enough to supply the me with the coupon code to redeem over at blendermarket.com. I really can't wait to do this! 

I also have another much, much bigger giveaway to do in the near future. But I'm waiting for that to go through with Marmoset. I'll announce that closer to the time. 

I'm really glad I've been able to show my process in such detail. Not that it's anything special but from the feedback I've been getting it's seemingly incredible helpful to quite a few people. I would love it if you were there too! 

Feel free to join my discord too where I announce these things more frequently and I am a lot more available. 

Thanks everyone and God bless.

Tom.

Hey everyone!

I just wanted to say that i am so thankful to everyone who has followed my Artstation over the years and provided encouragements in the ways that you do. You're all awesome. 

Over 5k followers?! Honestly, it's blown my mind and I haven't really had time to think about it until now. I deeply appreciate every kind word that is made towards each piece I upload and for the comments I see online outside of Artstation too. I read every comment and every message that I get but i'm sorry if at the time i'm unable to respond. But nevertheless, here's a massive..

Improvised Weapon Tutorial and Twitch Stream

So in my last blog post I decided to start a new Twitch Channel where I stream artwork and honestly, it's been one of the best things i've done. Mentally, it's encouraged and strengthened me considering i can't really go anywhere and socialise so I want to say with great sincerity how much I appreciate the love everyone has shown to me throughout the stream - I really did think that i would have been flooded with unban requests from Rust and server issues that have nothing to do with me but i've encountered anything but that. I feel like a real awesome, chill and productive community is growing from it and it's amazing! I've really appreciated the genuine conversations that have been formed there. 

If you feel like dropping by to lurk or chat to me, ask questions or chat with other artists that have stumbled across the stream then by all means do so! By clicking this lonnnnggggggggggg link. 

And as a result of these two things - surpassing 5k followers on here and having such a wonderful time over at twitch streaming art, chatting, giving advice and tips as i work and do personal stuff, i've decided to release the Improvised Weapon tutorial for free on YouTube as a way to say that I am genuinely thankful to everyone here, twitch and everywhere else for being so kind, supportive and encouraging over the years.

I've dropped the first 6 videos on my Youtube channel which is about 5 hours worth of content. And more is on the way. I stream most of the progress so if you want to interact as I create it then by all means drop in over at twitch!

Thanks everyone.
Tom.

Hey everyone, so one of my friends at work (Matt Isaac) started streaming some of his artwork and it sort of inspired me to do the same after he gave me the nudge. So if you fancy watching some modelling/texturing/game dev work in progress then feel free to drop in and say hello!

Art_of_Pilgrim - Twitch 

There's the link to my channel. I wont always be on but when I am I'll be streaming most of the day. At the moment I'm making a submarine!  Feel free to ask questions etc too. Let's see if i can help anyone at the same time too :) 

If you stream artwork too, drop it here so I can follow and watch you too! 

Bye and hopefully see and talk to you on the stream! 

Hey everyone!

It's so close to Christmas now and I'm starting to feel the festive spirit of Christmas creep upon me as each day draws anew. I thought I'd write a little something here as I've taken some steps outside of Artstation that i thought may be worth posting here.

Social

I love Artstation but i don't tend to browse the amazing artworks that are daily being posted by all of you until i'm actually sat at my pc. Usually, i'm on my phone on instagram or viewing posts to the artstation facebook group (which strangely enough has had a lot of weird spammy requests of old accounts) or the marmoset toolbag user group. 

And it's on instagram where i have found myself spending most of my time outside of Artstation itself oogling at nice and inspiring artwork. So i decided to use it myself to post tidbits of my work here and there. I'm really treating it as a semi-small blog update whereby you can catch snippets of a new artstation post and even for stuff i wouldn't consider posting on here like timelapses. Timelapses like this one of a picatinny rail.

For stuff like this, i really don't think it's worthy of a blog post on here and instagram is a nice way to bridge that sort of mini blog update.

So if you're on Instagram and you post art stuff, I'd love to follow you. My instagram link is here. Feel free to follow and lets fill our feeds of each others work.

This also reminds me, i've renamed my artstation and instagram to have some level of cohesion, from "FGSLW" to "Art of Pilgrim". The latter is easier to remember (it also points to one of my favourite books called A Pilgrims Progress with former being a biblical passage. I wonder if you can figure that one out?) and I seemingly have too many social account names across the various art forums. I just wanted some clean up and unification.

Tutorial/Walkthrough

This one i've wanted to do for a long time, but i just haven't had the time to do it. I've had a lot of questions over the years and i've attempted to answer some of them in a previous blog post and in private messages but as time goes on workflows and pipelines change and some of that info is outdated for myself. So i've decided to create a FULL walkthrough of making an impromptu home-made weapon with my current workflow. I think, from writing this, i'm at around the 5 hour mark in recording the tutorial. But the whole process will follow this structure for game development, or at least the one i use.

1. Model the base mesh and/or high res meshes 

2. sculpt details 

3. create the low poly 

4. UV

5. Creating a bakescene in TB4 and baking out the low poly

6. Texturing the asset in Substance Painter 

The walkthrough will contain many common aspects of impromptu weapon creation, like the creation of tape (see vid below for a brief timelapse of my recording). And boolean operations in zbrush and in blender to get some nice threads and complex geo to sculpting welding (which process has been simplified greatly since my last art tut blogpost). And i'm thinking of even doing variations of the same aspect of the model if you don't have zbrush or marvelous designer.

It isn't aimed at beginners, i don't want you to have to sit through a bunch of videos that explain basic stuff you already know about. It's more about the process and way of achieving something. I want it to be useful. 

I'm even considering extending this tutorial to other aspects of impromptu art

As you lot know based on my art uploads on here, it isn't just weapons i do but a whole bunch of different types of home-made, impromptu assets and i think it'll be worth doing at least another one after this to do something cool like that. But I don't yet know what i could make.

The question I've had floating in my mind is that would anyone find this useful? If anything, even if one person finds this useful then it'll be worth it for me - also, i've really enjoyed doing this process, and it's an aspect of the artworld that has really intrigued me.

Ideally, in terms of release, i want to have it finished before Christmas, so all of you who would be interested in this can do it in their Christmas break.  

So yeah, that's about it. I just wanted to let you all know what i'm doing, and what to expect besides my usual Rust art uploads. If i've missed anything that has either confused you or has left you with a question, drop a comment below and let me know. 

Peace! 

I felt like the title was appropriate. I've worked in 3ds Max for so long now that I really needed a change of scenery. But what does that even mean when it comes to modelling and creating art? Am I just jumping ship because a bunch of other industry professionals are or is there some substance to the switch? Well, the answer to both of those questions is yes.

You see i’ve worked with 3ds max since the very beginning of my career, which isn’t that long in comparison to others. Nearly 8 years. But I’ve used 3ds max for everything since then. Weapons, vehicles, props, characters you name it. I’ve loved it. But over time it’s got a bit monotonous and flat. Why? Well, i don't feel like there’s been any substantial updates to 3ds max that innovate on tools that game devs really want and thus i’ve been using the same tools for a very long time. I’ve remedied this by incorporating plugins and addons over time that speed up workflows and make the whole asset process a bit more intuitive, responsive and accessible because let’s face it, there’s a lot of good tools in 3ds max but they’re at times hidden and drowned in the convoluted ui. 

To note, one of the best addons I've used for 3ds max is RappaTools. It’s seriously good stuff and worth the purchase, It’s a comprehensive toolset that makes a lot of processes easily accessible. However, the addons’ only really mitigate the underlying issues for me. It’s become a bit boring to model assets in max and i don’t see it getting that much better soon. I don’t really know how else to put it. There’s some really cool stuff coming to 3ds max though, like machine learning uv’ing and the addition of 3D booleans which I can only imagine means something like HardOps/Boxcutter for Blender, which is pretty incredible. But I can't help but think it's too little too late, y'know? Maybe I'm being too dramatic? Maybe I'm just wanting to mix things up a bit in my workflow to refresh things?

Plugins and Addons!

It’s actually this that drew my attention to Blender the most. HardOps/Boxcutter is incredible. There is a difference between Blender and 3ds Max when it comes to plugins and addons. Now you can see it in two ways; cost and then functionality. Cost-wise it makes total sense to switch to Blender, 3ds max is expensive (like nearly £2,000 for just 1 years access or £5,000 for 3 years!) plus the worthwhile plugins/addons on top of that, well it’s not realistic, is it? This is of course under the assumption that you don’t pirate the software...Blender however is free. It’s free and updates to the application are free too, there’s no premium version, no lite version. It’s all free. What makes Blender great isn’t that it’s necessarily free but the plugin/addon library available at places like BlenderMarket is heavily stocked and documented. The only money that goes towards Blender are the addons that would make it such an effective piece of software for modelling which has only cost me - what, nearly £100? Cost-wise it’s a no-brainer. Duh, of course you’d take the time to learn Blender! Especially if you’re a business. However, that’s not really why I now use and call Blender my home. It’s the addons and what comes with that. 

Blender is a pretty decent modelling application in its vanilla state however as others have said, the power of Blender comes by the utilization of addons & plugins. And because of these additions modelling has become fun again. It’s really, really fun. And quick, which is pretty important when you have to iterate a model based on feedback. This isn’t a promotion of anything, and if it is then it’s Blender itself but here’s a list of the plugins i use if you’re thinking of jumping ship:

1. HardOps/Boxcutter Ultimate Bundle ($27.50 as of writing this)

2. UVPackmaster2 ($29)

3. UV Toolkit ($19)

4. Poly Source ($0.99)

5. Textools (free)

6. F2 (free, already in Blender and needs activating)

7. LoopTools (free, already in Blender and needs activating)

And that’s it. 

HardOps and Boxcutter is incredibly well documented and I use these for boolean/chamfer modelling as opposed to my old 3ds max workflow of subd modelling. It massively reduces the time to model complex geo.

UVPackmaster 2 is awesome. It uses clever algorithms to sort and pack your uv for you. I’ve tried a lot of these addons/plugins/apps but this is hands down the best uv packer out there. It’s pretty essential to my workflow now. 

UV Toolkit is neat, it helps me sort and organise my uvs before packing them properly and it’s super easy to align islands if i need to offset some. Not essential but useful nevertheless. 

Poly Source just tells me info about the mesh; NGones, quads and triangles and allows me to select them for quick editing. 

Textools is pretty well known but i really only use it for the checkerboard mapping to check for distortions in the uv - i used this extensively in 3ds Max for unwrapping - namely for the texel ratio tools. 

F2 extends the native functionality of creating faces. It allows you to create a face from a single vertex selection or a single edge selection, while retaining all the built-in functionality. 

LoopTools, amongst other things, allows me to do some nice functions like circularise an edge loop or relax a section of edges. 

This is all I use and you can see how inexpensive it is to have Blender as a perfectly acceptable modelling application in comparison to the very expensive 3ds Max. It’s incredibly functional for artists. Native Blender + these tools have made modelling great again. I recently made this water gun for Rust. 

I was able to model this in less than half the time than it usually would. The speed at which I can iterate models now based on feedback is ridiculous. Before I got to this point I made around 2-3 other variations, the first done within a couple of days. All thanks to my new workflow. My usual workflow would to be to model the base mesh of an asset and then model some boolean shapes if the model is too complex to subd model it in, bring that into zbrush and use the boolean operations there to add or subtract shapes - but that's a destructive workflow and it means me having to use another piece of software when it shouldn't be necessary. This means that I can stay in Blender and boolean all day long!

Transparency + Support

This was a big thing for me. Transparency. Every week I'm able to read dev notes on what's going on in Blender development and it's so encouraging. And it's not like there's a really cool feature they've got going like a cloth simulation sculpting brush (which is AMAZING!) and we're having to wait a year or two before it's released. These new features are usually accessible to us in beta releases of the software which are freely accessible to all. 3ds Max however, like with the AI machine learning UV tool, we're having to wait a very long time before anything is released to the public, and even then will it be worth it? Will it work? Mmmmmmm well I'll leave that one for you to decide. 

I feel like i have a lot of confidence with the Blender developers. I always have something to look forward to and they seem to really take on user feedback and the way it's going it seems they are incredibly focused on game development tools, whereas with Autodesk, it seems they've got so comfortable being the industry standard that they've perhaps slacked a little over the years? Not only this but everything is so well documented for native Blender and also the addons listed. It really is extensive. Anything and everything that I've initially struggled with in Blender I've found a quick solution to. Not only this but 'how-to...?' videos are abundant on YouTube and there are some that are dedicated to switching from 3ds max or maya to blender. Which is really important. One thing that helped the switch was the use of industry keymap which makes it easier for 3ds max or maya users to work with Blender. The only downside to this that every Blender tutorial is using native Blender keymaps so you're going to have to do some interpreting there.

All this combined makes it a clear and obvious choice to switch to. Modelling in Blender is fun and fast (check this short timelapse of some dude detailing a  corridor section), it's substantially well supported not only by the devs but by the community with the extensive addons/plugins available. I almost feel like by using it I'm contributing to the development of better art tools. And not only this but it's encouraged me to explore other areas of game development that I've always wanted to try, like weapon animation (video below doesn't have audio for some reason so click the link!).

Conclusion

For me, it was so worth transitioning over to Blender. Modelling is fun again and it's incredibly quick. Was it necessary? Depends on how you look at it but i feel like it was. I've only ever seen a benefit from doing so. Would I write 3ds Max off entirely now? No, and I never would unless they decided not to improve the toolset for artists and bring something new to the table. 3ds max is really good and it's really good at what it does but Blender just makes so much sense now as an artist, and it's a modelling application that i would recommend to everyone to try. I'm constantly bombarding my works 3d art chat channel with blender updates and i think the evangelism is working. 

I moved over to Blender slowly. Deadlines for work was one hurdle - preventing me from getting in there and working things out (but in the end I just went all in on a bigger asset to really get to grips with it), and as you can imagine, I am very comfortable in 3ds Max. However, I dabbled in Blender in my spare time, figuring out if i could transition certain workflows to Blender to make sure it was a good and worthwhile switch. The biggest hurdle really for me were springs. Blender creates them differently and it's the only process that takes longer than it does in 3ds Max, but it's no biggie. And if you're considering the switch I'd advise you to do the same, make sure your workflows - y'know the way you like to make assets can be easily transferred over. There's no point if the whole process takes longer, right? I started off by making smaller assets first, like the fireworks in Rust and then gradually I changed to it completely.

The thing is if you're reading this and are wondering if whether or not to switch the only thing I can say at this point is that why not just try it? It's not like you have to pay for Blender, and if you do it's not even $100. There are a lot of devs that are switching to using Blender for development like Ubisoft and i believe I read some Naughty Dog devs are using it too? But there is also big industry backing behind Blenders development. Companies are joining the development fund assuring it is progressing well, because what they are doing is being noticed throughout the industry, big time. 

I don't think I'm just jumping ship because I've heard other have done the same but because, well, Blender is actually awesome, man. Try it. 

There's more I could write, I did have an earlier version of this where I detailed a few things wrong with 3ds max but i dont think that's entirely helpful but I would love to know your experiences with 3ds max and Blender. If you have any questions also, I'd love to help. I hope this was somewhat articulate and helpful to whomever reads this. 

Peace out, and God bless dudes and dudettes.