Welcome to The Empire Monthly Challenge!
You are all welcome to stretch your artist legs. Get out of your comfort zone or artist block, and unleash your full potential!
There are no winners or prizes, it's all about challenging yourself. The deadline is purely to indicate the start of the next challenge, if you need more time to finish up that's okay.
Modifiers are optional rules for the challenge that allow you to push your skills even further!
Environment Challenge - Nature Focus
Secluded Park Benches
This months challenge takes us back to warmer times (at least for Europeans) when plants were green and you could go outside without a jacket.
In this challenge you are asked to recreate this secluded park bench area. Quite a challenging task where you get to work with a lot of different vegetation along with rocks, tiles and a lot of varied ground clutter. Take extra note of how the different plants alter in color, where some plants have a brighter tone of green as if more recently sprouted leaves. Also pay extra attention to how the dead leaves on the ground gather along the tiles that are a bit lower.
Prop Challenge - Organic Focus
The Strange World of Cacti
Staying with the warm theme and nature oriented topic this months prop challenge focuses on the intricate and sometimes strange shapes found in nature. This time in different breeds of cacti. Recreate a cacti of your choosing! Take extra note of the different values of roughness along them, variations in color and the different shapes they can take.
Substance Challenge - Material Focus
Park Pathway
Not far from the secluded benches lies an old and worn down pathway made out of wood. These planks have been well worn through the years as both people and nature has left their marks. Recreate these old planks and pay extra close attention to how whey have been worn down and smoothed out over time. Also note how tiny specs of dry leaves and dirt gather in the grooves.
Substance Challenge - Special
Nodeception
In homage to Nodevember, you are asked to bring out your very best Substance skills and create a procedural material of nodes. Now you might ask yourself "But isn't all procedural material "of nodes". In this case we want the visual output of the material to be a substance node and/or a substance node network. Yes you read that right, using nodes to create nodes - Nodeception!
