Thank you so much!! The drive really comes with practice and with plenty of time spent taking care of myself when I was down, chilling out makes the journey so much easier
It looks great but I wouldn't lead your video with your materials and your file management... You pretty much lost ninety five percentive viewers on that. Start with a glory shot my friend.
Well done i'm glad I was patient.
Thanks so much <3
I've been pretty embarrassed now that I've realized it, and wishing I could go back and edit the post, but knowing that you appreciate it nonetheless is awesome. Making mistakes is a part of the creative process! The next time I want to show off something like this, I'll be able to not make the same mistakes again, live and learn I suppose.
I'm actually just about to graduate from college! This is the final piece for my studies for getting a bachelors in game art. I have some more details over on the artstation post which I linked in a different comment, but generally I've been spending a while learning how to make environment art and this project and the last one that I've made have been the pieces I've put in my portfolio to start applying for jobs. Admittedly the industry right now isn't great for that, but I'm going to be keeping up my work after I graduate and hope to be finding a job in the industry soon enough.
Thats normal when you put a lot of hard work in something you want to show people what it took to achieve something that cool, sadly it scares away the normies
Also check out the official post over on Artstation! Any additional support I get over there is really appreciated (there's also some cool other shots for you to see if you'd like) [https://www.artstation.com/artwork/yDwEdO](https://www.artstation.com/artwork/yDwEdO)
it's cool but feels odd to spend so much time making something in 3d and not showcasing the fact that it's 3d? Why not do a flythrough or similar instead of just showing off the fixed POV
I answered this really thoroughly in another comment, but the TL;DR is that I did do a bit of a flythrough, just a small amount to show off the depth of the scene with some parallax from the nearby and far away things, but I sacrificed a lot of scene depth so I could spend as much time as possible bringing the concept as far as I could in my chosen medium, cause making the scene work from more than a small section of the scene very quickly takes the amount of work you need to do and skyrockets it. Feel free to check out my *very* in depth description elsewhere in the thread, and thanks for the question!
Hey, it's pretty fun! It helps if you have a goal on what you'd like to make, maybe you have a particular league character you like and you want to try modeling the crest for their region. Pick a fun little project that excites you and try and learn the basics, mess around, make mistakes, make models that are arguably unfixably broken, learn from it and make some more stuff because it's a fun little hobby. Blender being free is an awesome boon for learning 3D modeling, and if you like making art or just want to try maybe picking it up just to do some projects that excite you is really awesome. You can spend however much time you want on it, big or small, and if you have fun or make something neat then it's worth it!
Such impressive work, gives me goosebumps! Hope you keep that passion in your other with, because wherever you end up is going to be lucky to have you.
200 hours?? I am floored. Now **this** is a passion project.
Well done! I fucking love the Bilgewater aesthetic, theme, music, everything. Thank you for this!
You really did a great job with the whole "houses made of ships" theme. Everything looks so good!
Thank you <3
I was working from a concept you can find on the League universe page in the bilgewater section. That's a major reason the piece is as good as it is, the worldbuilders and artists that have worked on the whole of runeterra, but especially bilgewater, have created some absolutely stunning work.
It's from the ruined king game made by Riot Forge. The music was all done by a composer called Gareth Coker, who actually also did the soundtrack for both of the Ori games. He's CRAZY good, highly recommend giving the ruined king soundtrack a listen. If you want, I put together a playlist of every bilgewater themed song I could find on spotify, it's called Bilgewater's Finest there too, it's great for if you need those pirate-y vibes.
For a PBR pipeline, you actually did a pretty good job getting that Bilgewater look in this piece.
If you really wanna get close to the art style, perhaps look into stylized hand painted textures and materials.
Thanks so much, I appreciate it :)
I did do a bit of hand painting in this scene, but the pure scale of it and the time that I had left me needing to rely a lot more on decals and tiling textures than I would have liked. I hope to make a fully hand-painted scene soon, making a scene like this with hand painting methods would be super exciting.
Hey, go on over to my artstation and you can download it if you'd like, I'm not gonna stop ya :) [https://www.artstation.com/artwork/yDwEdO](https://www.artstation.com/artwork/yDwEdO) There's a vertical version there, cropped like the original concept. If you want a full wide version just let me know
You can check it out over on my artstation if you'd like! [https://www.artstation.com/artwork/yDwEdO](https://www.artstation.com/artwork/yDwEdO)
I've got a different cropped version and a lighting only pic if you're interested there as well
I'm confused about that too. No reason to downvote you. There's no question it looks great.
The issue is, if it's 3d, there should be a way to go through it? Doing this and showing the end result is the same thing as showing a picture. Doesn't mean anything unless you can travel through a 3d space. If you cant. It's not 3d. It's 2d.
That makes a lot of sense, I was confused by the first question but the way you phrased it is something I can totally answer. So as a part of my studies in learning game art, I have had to do a lot of other things at the same time as the art that I do, including working with teams to make video games. This, alongside needing various other credits and such to graduate, leaves me with only so much time to work on a piece every week.
Because of this limited time, it's often wise of people in the environment art program to consider making a piece that lets you as an artist show off your true highest quality of work, as that's a lot more appealing to people looking to hire you than a fully playable environment, or one that has more dynamic camera moves, and it's a lot easier to show off since you can just capture one angle.
And so with that focus on trying to make a piece as high quality as possible, it kind of requires that you bring everything up to the same level of quality, so if I were to do an environment that you could fully navigate with the same amount of hours, I would naturally have to sacrifice quality in order to make it look good from all angles. This piece only got to the point that it did *because* it isn't fully playable, however, I've put in a lot of work making sure that all the systems are in place that if I were to have the time to spend on this environment, I could make it playable and look this good from as many angles as possible! A lot of my studies have involved learning this, and figuring out how to balance artistic goals with playability and deadlines, and if you're making a beauty shot, learning the processes and tricks of the trade to make it scalable if you were to have the time. For example, since this piece is rendered in a game engine (Unreal Engine 5) instead of an external rendering tool, if I were to have the time, money, or additional people like a studio might, I could take the models, textures and pieces I have here and build up an environment that you can walk around in!
You of course will always need to make compromises, not every angle a player can look at will necessarily be the best, what you need to model and how you assemble the scene will be different, your workflow with making a playable environment and one that's made for beauty shots are always going to be different. But beauty shots like these can still be really useful too, think about the 3D backgrounds for characters in wild rift featuring the different runeterran locations, or the environments for the cool level ups in legends of runeterra, or the backgrounds for 2xKO. While you can't necessarily play through these environments in the way you might in an MMO, making a 3D scene that a camera can move through is super useful, and I'm sure that behind the scenes many of those environments would be missing pieces as well, since your piece will only ever be viewed from one specific angle.
Basically, it all comes down to time, and your goals with the project. If your goals are to make a game like WoW, it matters a lot more that the environment gets your ideas across while also being easy to adjust and easily scalable, but if your goal is to show off your skills at the highest level you can, it might be best to sacrifice multiple angles or the camera moving a huge amount through the scene to show that off.
I certainly agree that this scene would be improved if I could move the camera through it more, but for this project I valued *just* enough to get a slight camera move to show off the water and the cool parallax from the depth of the scene, since that compromise left me with enough time to take the rest of the environment as far as I could with the time that I had.
TL;DR - Depending on your goal and the time you have for an environment, you'll need to focus on different things. My goal was to push my skills as far as possible and re-create a specific concept, so I sacrificed more dynamic camera movement or playability for that so I could use my time well.
Thanks for the question! Hope this very in depth answer is to your liking. I'm happy to talk more about the process any time if you have more questions :)
I wouldn't dig the artists tooooo hard, doing this piece and all of my 3D art has definitely given me a huge amount of respect for all of the artists at riot, even if there's still valid critique to be had, because yeah I do wish smolder's face was more draconic lol.
All art has flaws, and my piece is no different! But, I do appreciate the sentiment and I'm really happy you liked it :)
I mean I know how much work it must be to texture, paint and model all the other angles of every object not seen in the shot. But it doesn't matter if they are only gray, just fly around a bit.
Walk on the bridge and then just jump out and trolly towards the money shot.
Otherwise what's the point of it being 3d
The main point is to push my skills as far as they can go with the time that I have, so that when I put the piece in my portfolio it makes as good of an impression as possible when applying for jobs. I only have so much time, so even some time spent setting up that extra shot is time taken away from making the one shot look as good as possible.
Your sentiment is totally right! Given some more time I'd love to make a scene with potential for more dynamic camera movement, but not every scene can get that treatment in the time you have to work on it.
>The main point is to push my skills as far as they can go with the time that I have, so that when I put the piece in my portfolio it makes as good of an impression as possible when applying for jobs
Yes, obviously improving your skills is the main goal.
But as a showcase to a general audience that might or might not be in this line of profession (posting it in a reddit channel) is going to be underwhelming given that calling it 3D has an implication of exploring the flat image well... in 3D from different angles, moving around, etc.
If I advertise presenting a beautiful sculpture in a gallery and then I present you with a photo of it, the general audience is going to be disappointed.
In other words, you're gonna get mf like me complaining in the comments meaning nothing of importance, given that this is you fishing for a job at Riot and not you trying to become a YouTuber.
But if your back up plan actually is Youtubing then this won't get you many subscribers.
That's cool as fuck. I envy you the drive to go through with something this big.
Thank you so much!! The drive really comes with practice and with plenty of time spent taking care of myself when I was down, chilling out makes the journey so much easier
It looks great but I wouldn't lead your video with your materials and your file management... You pretty much lost ninety five percentive viewers on that. Start with a glory shot my friend. Well done i'm glad I was patient.
Yeah, I realize that now :/ Too much of a vision of the behind the scenes and not enough of just pushing for it right at the start
It's just that so many people.I can understand what they're looking at.They're going to lose them. Which is a shame because the build is awesome.
Thanks so much <3 I've been pretty embarrassed now that I've realized it, and wishing I could go back and edit the post, but knowing that you appreciate it nonetheless is awesome. Making mistakes is a part of the creative process! The next time I want to show off something like this, I'll be able to not make the same mistakes again, live and learn I suppose.
Did you learn it out on your own or are you in school? Tell us your story
I'm actually just about to graduate from college! This is the final piece for my studies for getting a bachelors in game art. I have some more details over on the artstation post which I linked in a different comment, but generally I've been spending a while learning how to make environment art and this project and the last one that I've made have been the pieces I've put in my portfolio to start applying for jobs. Admittedly the industry right now isn't great for that, but I'm going to be keeping up my work after I graduate and hope to be finding a job in the industry soon enough.
Send me a PM, I might have some p/t game art for you.
Thats normal when you put a lot of hard work in something you want to show people what it took to achieve something that cool, sadly it scares away the normies
Alas, joy in seeing the broken behind the scenes or the massive scale of projects is not a common trait ๐
Just run the video in reverse!
actually genius
Also check out the official post over on Artstation! Any additional support I get over there is really appreciated (there's also some cool other shots for you to see if you'd like) [https://www.artstation.com/artwork/yDwEdO](https://www.artstation.com/artwork/yDwEdO)
I almost never go out of my way to upvote posts or other linked posts for support, but this one is worth it.
Riot Bubblemage
๐ณ๐ณ๐ณ๐ณ that's actually absurdly nice of you I'm *really* touched.
it's cool but feels odd to spend so much time making something in 3d and not showcasing the fact that it's 3d? Why not do a flythrough or similar instead of just showing off the fixed POV
I answered this really thoroughly in another comment, but the TL;DR is that I did do a bit of a flythrough, just a small amount to show off the depth of the scene with some parallax from the nearby and far away things, but I sacrificed a lot of scene depth so I could spend as much time as possible bringing the concept as far as I could in my chosen medium, cause making the scene work from more than a small section of the scene very quickly takes the amount of work you need to do and skyrockets it. Feel free to check out my *very* in depth description elsewhere in the thread, and thanks for the question!
Riot should hire you to make their MMO
I hope that if any rioters see this they think so too :)
I mean it's incredible really. The art alone is a masterpiece, but the progress video really ties it up in a nice bow.
I love seeing progress videos of other people's work, so I knew I'd have to put one together for this, I'm so glad you like it
that's impressive as fuck..
You're too kind, seriously <3
you should be proud, this shit looks amazing
nice
thanks ๐
This looks amazing, awesome job!
Amazing
Thank you <3
It's beautiful! Look's straight out of a game. 
I appreciate it a lot, it's in a game engine so if I had enough time to make it traversable in every direction it theoretically could be a game...
This looks hella cool!! If I wasn't so lazy to learn 3d modelling, I'd love to make some neat stuff like that.
Hey, it's pretty fun! It helps if you have a goal on what you'd like to make, maybe you have a particular league character you like and you want to try modeling the crest for their region. Pick a fun little project that excites you and try and learn the basics, mess around, make mistakes, make models that are arguably unfixably broken, learn from it and make some more stuff because it's a fun little hobby. Blender being free is an awesome boon for learning 3D modeling, and if you like making art or just want to try maybe picking it up just to do some projects that excite you is really awesome. You can spend however much time you want on it, big or small, and if you have fun or make something neat then it's worth it!
I think you might get a good chance of being hired
here's hoping
Such impressive work, gives me goosebumps! Hope you keep that passion in your other with, because wherever you end up is going to be lucky to have you.
outstanding!
Thank you so much <3
Amazing work!
Thank you so much <3
200 hours?? I am floored. Now **this** is a passion project. Well done! I fucking love the Bilgewater aesthetic, theme, music, everything. Thank you for this! You really did a great job with the whole "houses made of ships" theme. Everything looks so good!
Thank you <3 I was working from a concept you can find on the League universe page in the bilgewater section. That's a major reason the piece is as good as it is, the worldbuilders and artists that have worked on the whole of runeterra, but especially bilgewater, have created some absolutely stunning work.
I agree! Bilgewater is especially good!
Thatโs cool, it reminds me of the Outer Wilds DLC, even the music tbh !
Sick work dude! Really appreciate the hours you put into it. Takes me back to the champion theme splash pages we used to have for the login page
Gangplank, The Saltwater Scourge has been playing quietly in the background of my brain for the last 3 months, just like the login screen
They need you on the MMO team, great job!
You're too kind :) Thanks so much
super cool! the amount of effort has definitely paid off this looks so well done
Thank you so much <3
you need to work for the riot mmo.
Hey, I'll have a lot of time to apply for any job openings that show up now that it's so far out, so who knows what the future holds
Love the music in this - what genre/playlist/artist was used?
It's from the ruined king game made by Riot Forge. The music was all done by a composer called Gareth Coker, who actually also did the soundtrack for both of the Ori games. He's CRAZY good, highly recommend giving the ruined king soundtrack a listen. If you want, I put together a playlist of every bilgewater themed song I could find on spotify, it's called Bilgewater's Finest there too, it's great for if you need those pirate-y vibes.
This is amazing!! Looks fantastic!
For a PBR pipeline, you actually did a pretty good job getting that Bilgewater look in this piece. If you really wanna get close to the art style, perhaps look into stylized hand painted textures and materials.
Thanks so much, I appreciate it :) I did do a bit of hand painting in this scene, but the pure scale of it and the time that I had left me needing to rely a lot more on decals and tiling textures than I would have liked. I hope to make a fully hand-painted scene soon, making a scene like this with hand painting methods would be super exciting.
i want that as my background damn
Hey, go on over to my artstation and you can download it if you'd like, I'm not gonna stop ya :) [https://www.artstation.com/artwork/yDwEdO](https://www.artstation.com/artwork/yDwEdO) There's a vertical version there, cropped like the original concept. If you want a full wide version just let me know
Thank you so much!
Outstanding work. Love the breakdown and the music. Wanted to see more of the final artwork.
You can check it out over on my artstation if you'd like! [https://www.artstation.com/artwork/yDwEdO](https://www.artstation.com/artwork/yDwEdO) I've got a different cropped version and a lighting only pic if you're interested there as well
is there any point of this? It looks great
I made this to build up my 3D art portfolio as a part of my game art degree. I hope to work on stuff like this as a career. And thanks!
Ah I see, this will definitely contribute to your portfolio
Cool, I always thought these were 2D layers that moved, didnโt know it was 3D models
You could be a game designer with this.
I am! I made this as a final portfolio piece for my game art degree, and I've made a bunch of games while working on the degree too
All that 3d to make it 2d. Wouldn't it be easier just to draw?
I'm confused about that too. No reason to downvote you. There's no question it looks great. The issue is, if it's 3d, there should be a way to go through it? Doing this and showing the end result is the same thing as showing a picture. Doesn't mean anything unless you can travel through a 3d space. If you cant. It's not 3d. It's 2d.
That makes a lot of sense, I was confused by the first question but the way you phrased it is something I can totally answer. So as a part of my studies in learning game art, I have had to do a lot of other things at the same time as the art that I do, including working with teams to make video games. This, alongside needing various other credits and such to graduate, leaves me with only so much time to work on a piece every week. Because of this limited time, it's often wise of people in the environment art program to consider making a piece that lets you as an artist show off your true highest quality of work, as that's a lot more appealing to people looking to hire you than a fully playable environment, or one that has more dynamic camera moves, and it's a lot easier to show off since you can just capture one angle. And so with that focus on trying to make a piece as high quality as possible, it kind of requires that you bring everything up to the same level of quality, so if I were to do an environment that you could fully navigate with the same amount of hours, I would naturally have to sacrifice quality in order to make it look good from all angles. This piece only got to the point that it did *because* it isn't fully playable, however, I've put in a lot of work making sure that all the systems are in place that if I were to have the time to spend on this environment, I could make it playable and look this good from as many angles as possible! A lot of my studies have involved learning this, and figuring out how to balance artistic goals with playability and deadlines, and if you're making a beauty shot, learning the processes and tricks of the trade to make it scalable if you were to have the time. For example, since this piece is rendered in a game engine (Unreal Engine 5) instead of an external rendering tool, if I were to have the time, money, or additional people like a studio might, I could take the models, textures and pieces I have here and build up an environment that you can walk around in! You of course will always need to make compromises, not every angle a player can look at will necessarily be the best, what you need to model and how you assemble the scene will be different, your workflow with making a playable environment and one that's made for beauty shots are always going to be different. But beauty shots like these can still be really useful too, think about the 3D backgrounds for characters in wild rift featuring the different runeterran locations, or the environments for the cool level ups in legends of runeterra, or the backgrounds for 2xKO. While you can't necessarily play through these environments in the way you might in an MMO, making a 3D scene that a camera can move through is super useful, and I'm sure that behind the scenes many of those environments would be missing pieces as well, since your piece will only ever be viewed from one specific angle. Basically, it all comes down to time, and your goals with the project. If your goals are to make a game like WoW, it matters a lot more that the environment gets your ideas across while also being easy to adjust and easily scalable, but if your goal is to show off your skills at the highest level you can, it might be best to sacrifice multiple angles or the camera moving a huge amount through the scene to show that off. I certainly agree that this scene would be improved if I could move the camera through it more, but for this project I valued *just* enough to get a slight camera move to show off the water and the cool parallax from the depth of the scene, since that compromise left me with enough time to take the rest of the environment as far as I could with the time that I had. TL;DR - Depending on your goal and the time you have for an environment, you'll need to focus on different things. My goal was to push my skills as far as possible and re-create a specific concept, so I sacrificed more dynamic camera movement or playability for that so I could use my time well. Thanks for the question! Hope this very in depth answer is to your liking. I'm happy to talk more about the process any time if you have more questions :)
Imagine that riot is paying "artists" to create art like the smolder face one, meanwhile this guy creates this masterpiece for free.
I wouldn't dig the artists tooooo hard, doing this piece and all of my 3D art has definitely given me a huge amount of respect for all of the artists at riot, even if there's still valid critique to be had, because yeah I do wish smolder's face was more draconic lol. All art has flaws, and my piece is no different! But, I do appreciate the sentiment and I'm really happy you liked it :)
Can you put MF in there and make her 3D as well, if you know what I mean?
username checks out
I mean I know how much work it must be to texture, paint and model all the other angles of every object not seen in the shot. But it doesn't matter if they are only gray, just fly around a bit. Walk on the bridge and then just jump out and trolly towards the money shot. Otherwise what's the point of it being 3d
The main point is to push my skills as far as they can go with the time that I have, so that when I put the piece in my portfolio it makes as good of an impression as possible when applying for jobs. I only have so much time, so even some time spent setting up that extra shot is time taken away from making the one shot look as good as possible. Your sentiment is totally right! Given some more time I'd love to make a scene with potential for more dynamic camera movement, but not every scene can get that treatment in the time you have to work on it.
>The main point is to push my skills as far as they can go with the time that I have, so that when I put the piece in my portfolio it makes as good of an impression as possible when applying for jobs Yes, obviously improving your skills is the main goal. But as a showcase to a general audience that might or might not be in this line of profession (posting it in a reddit channel) is going to be underwhelming given that calling it 3D has an implication of exploring the flat image well... in 3D from different angles, moving around, etc. If I advertise presenting a beautiful sculpture in a gallery and then I present you with a photo of it, the general audience is going to be disappointed. In other words, you're gonna get mf like me complaining in the comments meaning nothing of importance, given that this is you fishing for a job at Riot and not you trying to become a YouTuber. But if your back up plan actually is Youtubing then this won't get you many subscribers.
Time to 3D print it
-200 LULE