While trying to get some ornament patterns with mathematical functions (I still didn't achieved any acceptible progress anyway), I get into creating some wicker pattern with Substance Designer. I wanted to use this material on new bottles and wanted to create a basket with it. Wickers has very common use on these areas. So, why not?

Material design took almost 1 day. But it was really great to have this material. I know, it is done by too many artists already (click here to see), but I didn't get into any tutorials or artists' projects because of to create a unique one. By judging to my final result I can say that it is unique but not the best. Regarding to one of my favorite Substance Designer users, Peter Sekula had created the ultimate one, I suppose :)

Luckily my version has a paint feature as it is a first on this material. This video shows the parameter changes and effects of the material.

Hope you like it. See you soon!

Some screenshots, and low sampled test renders...

Hello again. Here are some additional bottles I created. One is for water and others are alchemy related bottles.

Creating water drops, some custom crystal shapes, cracks and dust over the bottles are the most exciting thing I do with refractive materials for a long time. Result is convincing for a start.

As I mentioned before, I want this project to stretch my regular workflows. So I want to model or design things by extraordinary, educative ways for me. So my next update may take a while. Because next, I want to create ornament shapes by math driven functions, at least I will give it a 2 days of try. If I get acceptible results I will share them without waiting :) Thanks for reading.

I suppose bottles are the mostly used accessories on still life setups. But they have more special meaning for FRP games: Wines, Potions and Elixirs of course.

I completed one of the bottle approach for holding wine, by modeling a bottle and wrap it with twine. Twine and sacks are creating very old and mediaval sense to me. So for the sake of making this project more like r&d to my workflows, I decided to create twine material as a procedural substance.

After applying the texture, I created fur material to make the twine more realistic for close-up shots.

Both modeling bottle and designing twine material timelapses can be found on this video:

And of course here is the low sample test renders of the created assets.

Next step will be varying this bottle more by color and size changes and do more glass work for potions and tubes. Good bye!

Next part was to create realistic SSS and candle flame effects. Well, SSS was easy to handle with my textures but flame was the hardest part. Finally I find a way by multiplying and mixing bunch of falloff nodes in Octane Render. And result was pretty convincing for me.

Especially I love the feeling when soft light of candles fell on the gold coins. 

So candle creation is determined like this. After all items done, I will consider the setup of the scene and decide that what kind of candle, candlestick or candlestand is ideal for the scene.

I created a huge list of objects I wanted to be on the scene. First item of the list is the coins. I wanted to create a gold coin for this project. 

References:

An engraving of Uriel Septim VII (Pocket Guide to the Empire, 3rd Edition)

After some 2D tweaks, I managed to create some Height Maps from these images (using Paint Shop Pro btw).

Modeling and UV process didn't took so long with Modo. You can see my coin modeling timelapse video below.

By using these height maps, I created a material with Substance Designer. Micro Details feature is amazing by the way. It reads your height map painting data and creates adjustible dirt on it. So I created an old looking gold material.

Realtime model

Finally I ran some physics simulation on Modo and rendered the coins with Octane Render. Result is not bad at all.

Let me write about this game of Bethesda for the people who didn't have a chance to meet with in 90's. 

Daggerfall is the second sequel of the Elder Scrolls series which is really much like to the Ultima series except 1st person play style. Also this game is the predecessor of the mostly known follow up named Skyrim.

When it is released on 1996, we couldn't able to play it for a while because even starting a game by creating a character was very hard including us learning English as a start those days (well I'm still learning English :). Also when you create your character, you start to a game in a dungeon which looks more like a maze. We were on a mission for Emperor and our ship is wrecked by a storm, and we end up in a dungeon.

But after playing for at least 2 hours in this dungeon and when my hope dropped to ground on this game as a bad first person shooter, suddenly I found the exit and go outside. Well, this was the rare moment when a PC game amazed me that much. It was snowing outside, my footsteps are creating sqeezed snow sounds, and most amazing thing is I can go anywhere I want. 

After discovering map screen, It was obvious that there was a whole world of Tamriel was open for us. So the adventure began. Game has huge features for 22 years back. Very entertaining, most of all leaves the imagination work to you. So the scenerio is how you play and connect the dots (pixels) here. 

I decided to create a still life scene by using this very old game's conceptual approaches. I know following games (Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim) have more clean 3d designs and realizable concepts than this 320 x 240 pixels game but I purposely decided to create all objects and spirit of my project by getting minimal data from a game and show how I realize the world of Daggerfall both 22 years before and now.

I also want to dumb some more data about the game:

• For more screenshots you can visit my Google Photo Album of Daggerfall:
  https://photos.app.goo.gl/ZQV9D0hxt2lZ0en02
• Daggerfall's musics were in MIDI format and feels like 8 bit musics nowadays, but people recreating these musics in a artistic way. Here are 2 great sources:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLd5uIAHUP4&list=PL242E38DC2C3DA1B7 (this ones are the best)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRjHhsUwsuY&list=PLe4GPzW9S9fMuiTijElp5adpU4dYqwVP0
  http://xlengine.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=16
• Professionally created Wiki Page of the Elder Scrolls Universe:
  http://en.uesp.net/
• This game is recreated in Unity for a while. All the magic is here:
  http://www.dfworkshop.net/
• There is a discontinued project named DaggerXL for modernizing this game. You can find more details of DaggerXL here:
  http://xlengine.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=8&sid=bb7cae0895bdda9440cf03eada4c44e8
• There were great artistic works have been done there. Like this one:
  http://xlengine.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=4

See you soon with scene and model creation processes. Farewell!