Pine Wood Garage

In this Mentee Showcase David Bullock talks about his experience taking the Environment Art Mentorship with the The Mentor Coalition, discusses the “Pine Wood Garage” project and sheds some light on the impact the Mentorship have had on him as an artist.

Introduction

Hi! My name is David Bullock, I am from the United Kingdom and currently living in Finland looking for an opportunity to get into the games Industry. I’ve been 3D modelling for over 7 years - from when I started a games course in college.

Tell Us About Yourself How did you hear about The Mentor Coalition?

I’ve been following Josh Lynch’s content for many years, so I've seen the rise of the Mentor Coalition. The idea of a mentorship has always appealed to me, I’ve just never known when the best time to take one was. So when I decided I wanted to go through with a mentorship, it was a pretty easy choice to go with the Mentor Coalition.

How was the Mentorship experience for you?

I was in a really bad place with my personal work, I had been working on two separate projects which were not making much progress and I just seemed to be just stuck. I decided it was time to do a mentorship to see if that would help.

The mentorship was really beneficial. Mainly I found it really helped me with my confidence. It was really reassuring to have an industry vetran to confirm my own knowledge and compliment my work - I feel like a month of a mentorship was more helpful to me than my time at university.

Mentorship overview

When I first started my mentorship, Billy helped me to smarten and unify my portfolio to help create a standard for when people looked at it. After that he taught me about the Blend Mask workflow they used at Ubisoft, on titles such as Far Cry 5.

Blend Mask Breakdown

Firstly it required me to create a range of versatile tiling materials, such as plastic, wood, painted metal, etc. that I wanted to use in my scene.

When it comes to modeling the assets, I didn’t use baked normal maps and so to give the mesh smooth edges I used chamfers with Face Weighted normals. 

I also used 2 UV channels, the 1st sets the Texel Density of the asset for the tiling materials and the 2nd for lightmaps and creating unique blend masks inside Substance Painter.

To create the unique blend mask in Substance Painter, I first duplicated the mesh and then with the duplicate moved the 2nd UVs into the 1st UV slot. Creating the mask is pretty simple in Painter, you just need to make a use channel per mask - When it comes to exporting make sure you export the 3 channels in 1 map.

For extra details that would be normally done through unique texturing, so things like welding marks, nails, knurling etc. I used trim sheets assigned to mesh decals, which I also used for additional details such as logos. They have a separate material ID’s for when they go in the engine.

The material setup in UE4 isn’t too complicated, it’s basically blending one material layer into a second with the Blend Material Attributes node and then using the RGB Mask from Substance to mask out the separate materials.

Learning the Blend Mask workflow has definitely improved my environment creation process. Being able to change and tweak materials on the fly really does increase the iteration process - I found that it was the most effective for the architecture, fixtures and larger props.

Conclusion

In conclusion I would recommend a Mentorship to anyone, but I feel you have to be doing it for the right reason (they can't guarantee you a job afterwards!). It's all down to you as a person, the more effort you put in the more you will get out of it. You and your Mentor will set tasks for you to complete throughout the week and if you don't finish them that's on you.

I found the Mentorship really beneficial. It helped me push myself as an artist and I don't think I would have finished my Pine Wood Garage environment without the help of Billly and the Mentors and Mentees of the Mentorship Coalition. I would definitely look into taking another mentorship in the future to expand my knowledge and to help me become a more rounded artist.

It's been about 3 months since my mentorship and I recently finished the project I started with Billy. I’m really happy with how the environment turned out. I got some really nice compliments about my work online which was a nice way to finish off the project.

I’m currently looking for my first job in the games industry. I would be very happy to discuss my work further or any potential career opportunities, if you would like to get in touch you can contact me via email or message me on ArtStation.