Portfolio Update
I updated the portfolio website (https://abdoubouam.artstation.com/) and gave it a more modern and clean look.
While doing so, I unpublished some projects that were either irrelevant or their quality wasn’t good enough, and made small adjustments here and there.
I redid the lighting of the Tunic fanart scene, to make it brighter and match the mood of the game better.
And I revisited this old artwork from 2021 as well.
The lighting and idea are decent, but not as good anymore. I was going to delete it, but I thought I’d try to at least relight it and make minor adjustments to see if it could be salvaged. Turns out the answer is yes. I made 3 different light scenarios, two with the flashlight as the main source, and the third resembling the old render, but more threatening. It’s not in Unreal, and there’s a lot to improve, but it gets to stay in the portfolio as a good lighting example.
Samson from Titanfall2/Apex Legends
So I wanted to make a scifi/industrial gun design, and I started looking for good examples I liked. And after a while I found the perfect one : this concept art of a heavy military truck…which is *not* a gun… oh well.
I started with the blockout of the major shapes first, to get it right. I had the concept art to work from, and reference pictures and diagrams of existing trucks and suspension. I did not want to rely too much on other interpretations and the in-game model that is found in Apex/Tintanfall2, I wanted to treat it like a realistic task in a studio, like I’m the one making it for Titanfall2. I ran into the same issue the in-game model has, which is a very flat looking front end, it looked nearly identical despite me not using it as a reference, so I think it’s one of those cases where the concept doesn’t translate well into 3D. So I took some Artistic Liberty™ and rounded the front end a little bit more, to make it *feel* more like the concept art, even though it’s technically different. The latest WIPs are below.
Main Menu UI
I finally did a task I was putting aside for too long, the hardest of them all : the settings menu!
I bought a ready made menu system that looked simple enough and fit the vibe i was going for. However, it wasn’t a straightforward task, as I had to port a lot of the code and adjust it because it had a lot of code in the Third Person and Game Instance, and I heavily modified those in my game.
So after cleanup, replacing references, porting code…etc. I found out that it didn’t even work properly out of the box in some areas (input reassignment) and had some very questionable decisions (eg. hard-coded screen resolution list). There was a lot of head-scratching, and I think I ended up adjusting maybe 50% of the code to simplify it or make it work better.
Overall, it still saved me a lot of time, but it wasn’t straightforward, and I can’t recommend it, especially for beginners.
While I was at it, I finally made the decision to render at 50% resolution with dithering. Previously it was 100% resolution and 50% resolution dither. This has the benefit of making it easier to run at native 60FPS on the steam deck and lower end hardware.
Yesterday I spent the entire day trying to fix an issue Unreal and Visual Studio (the project failed to launch/compile), and it turns out the issue is VS enabling distributed compilation a while ago and I didn’t notice. My laptop was connected to the same network and has Visual Studio installed, but it was missing some components. It somehow caused the build to fail on my workstation? I disabled WiFi, and the project compiled without issue. I’m so done with technology.
That’s all for this time. Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you again next time!