There is a small hiccup with the way decals are exported from Bridge to Blender since Megascans only send decal material to Blender, but not a mesh. Megascans library is a huge time saver for a concept artist, it allows to just import and place decals, materials, and whole models in your scene. I also draw some inspiration from Gleb Alexandrov's work.Īnother thing to point out is that I made this scene look like a diorama, and some walls are missing from the final shot, but while I was baking light, I was placing temporary walls to get correct light bounces in the scene. Other references were a photo pack featuring abandoned, broken buildings. One of the levels of the game features a similar lighting setup, bright white light is coming from the window into the basement. One of the main ones was Half-Life 2, the game itself. That was the time when I added important details, such as dynamic cable, electricity discharges, and a character.

Initially, it was supposed to be an example scene, but while I was building it, I began to like it more and more. I started working on this scene just two weeks prior to its release on Artstation. The deadline for this scene was very tight since I wanted to show it in the upcoming lesson. I decided to make a Half-Life Inspired Scene to showcase the power of Megascans to my students. The main goal of those lessons is to showcase how a concept artist can use 3D and Blender, in particular, in the workflow. I was invited to conduct several lessons for beginner concept artists. It’s a bit unusual how I started working on this scene. I’ve been working in this company for the past two years and I was a part of several projects, for example, “Lost Sanctuary” and “Station Zarya Last Frontier”. Anvio is a developer studio that focuses on making full-body virtual reality game experiences. Upon graduating from this course, I got a job offer from a game studio “Anvio”. This course was designed with Maya in mind as it is an industry-standard, but I stayed true to Blender and was using it as my DCC package way before it became cool with the release of Blender 2.8. Only there I learned Unreal Engine, ZBrush, learned about modeling principles for production and found out for the first time about such basic things as baking. I applied for a 2-year course called “Computer graphics for video games”.

I was inspired by this first success so I continued digging it during my 4 years at college.Īfter four years of online courses and Youtube tutorials, I had some experience with 3D, but my knowledge was fractured, so I decided to apply to a computer arts school in Moscow.

I've done this presentation, and I did it well, thanks to Blender. It was an Apple-style presentation about gadgets. I had a task to make a presentation and wanted it to stand out from the rest and decided to utilize 3D graphics and make some animated slides. I found out about Blender in 2012 during my first year at college. This was my first exposure to 3D graphics. I literally started out with 3D because I was messing with Hammer Editor and wanted to make custom models for Half-Life 2. I like video games and I’m a big fan of the Half-Life series. Hi, my name is Ivan Novikov, I’m 26 years old, born and raised in Lyubertsy, a city near Moscow.

Half life 1 animated textures