While a dead end due to technical limitations amongst other things, I enjoyed exploring the visual style of what I cam to call 'Lumen'

Here are some of the explorations

Found some brilliant tools for simulating lens flares in AfterEffects, works surprisingly well, It's not physically accurate or anything like Maxwell render but It's can recreate a lot of the cool effects with added bonus of tons and tons of manual control.

It's called Optical Flares and is quite quite good

:-)

Link: www.videocopilot.net --- opticalflares

Sadly again this helps me little (not at all) in making actual textures or art for lumen, but is cool still.

My R&D into Splitting Light / Dispersion/ Chromatic Aberration using Vray and Maxwell render

These are tests done in Photoshop:








These in Maxwell and Vray:

Could be animated and used for weapon sprites

Gear doodad I made as an initial visual concept test and to test the procedure for normal map creation:


Making of below:











One half with normal map one half without showing how many polygons it really is


Doesn't look too bad now from far away, It's screwed up in the middle due to crappy uvmap and crappy alignment between low and high res mesh.

Versus this without normal map:



With edge breaks and phone smoothing... something I should be able to simulate by disconnecting the polygons but cinema doesn't seem to have a way to do that!!! so instead it looks like below with no angle limit or breaks:





With some specular, does show more issues then. Also I have some dents going on most of the outside prongs due to me being a idiot I think


PLus some ambient occlusion

























Put some bright orange in instead? aswell?
Color themes for maps, green, blue, red etc, possible to change color by code or over time

Nexus Work: