A lot has happened since my last post two weeks ago. I managed to get sick but fought on with the environment, lighting and most importantly the texturing. I promoted the main space marine in the scene to a lieutenant. Mainly because I liked the color scheme of the helmet for that rank.

There's been some back and forth with the lighting, sky and smoke effects but I'm starting to feel happy with the overall look. I want it to look nice but still don't spend too much time on it since I should be focusing on the characters. Just a few things left now...

Don't want to spoil too much yet but here's a few progress pics:

Haven't had a lot of time to work on this since my last post but I did spend around two days on the environment and started texturing some assets. I was inspired by the work by Karl Kopinski and wanted to create a desert planet with volcanic gas leaking from the ground. The star is supposed to be at the end of its lifespan and not light everything up too much. Dark and moody with lots of fog and smoke. The space marines will have a blue theme to them so I'm hoping it will be a nice color mix, being complementary colors and all.

I've used Megascans sandstone collection for the environment while I've made the large sand dunes and various smoke assets myself. I'm still experimenting with the composition and lighting so I can show off the characters properly. I need to create an epic sky too. Lots to do still...

Progress pics:

Instead of starting on the textures in Substance Painter I decided to test all the poses I wanted to use to see if there's any problems with intersections. It worked surprisingly well considering how bulky they are so I finished them up so I hopefully don't have to do much more work with that later on. I've taken inspiration from all the amazing official Warhammer 40k 2D art I've found. The idea is to make a small squad battling in a minimalistic desert environment.  I plan to use megascan assets for the environment to speed things up.

I've also been playing around with Unreal a bit to get familiar with the material editor. I really like it so far!

Progress pics:

This year I want to get better at showing progress of my work, something I've been hesitant to do in the past. I mainly want to show how I go about doing things for those interested but also so I can receive feedback on the way.

My main goal with this project is to create a character for games and present it in Unreal. Most of my old characters has been aimed towards the vfx industry. I like to do both but it has been a while since I used Unreal and I feel I need to brush up my skills in that area.

So this is where I'm at right now. The lowpoly has been pretty much completed and I've baked down the details from my highpoly. Some of the minor details in the armor I want to add as stamps in Substance Painter.

Some progress pics: