Bob Carlos Clarke photographed Marco during his ‘glory’ years while he was training Gordon and other famous chefs in his Kitchen in his restaurant Harvey’s. Marco allowed him into his kitchen to document his work, and the photographs illustrated his book White Heat. Some say that Marco was the first ‘celebrity’ chef and his bust ups in the kitchen are legendary, his book was a mixture of a recipe book/ expose and this set of images inspired a young generation of boys to pursue a career in the kitchen.
These photographs are really interesting for me because they are not a standard portraits that you would normally see of a chef for press and they capture a real story and the mood of this infamous kitchen.
I am now trying to personify the artist for my album cover and image is something that I need to consider when casting someone. Marco’s look is what I think of when I picture a young chef in my mind, and if I decide upon using single male as my artist then I will cast someone similar looking to him.
Projects: ‘All Night New York’ and ‘Music Diary;
I think the second project would be great for the inside of the little cover booklet, with a bit of writing on it, maybe some lyrics.
First project I like because of the intensity, especially with that couple, it shows young people having fun. this is my first idea of showing rock/metal subculture.
Here are the final renders of my hero prop, the sci-fi coffee machine.
360 Turntable view -
March 12, 2026
After a long process, I’m finally in the last stage of my hero prop creation. I’ve just completed the final texture for my sci-fi coffee machine in Substance Painter, and I’m really happy with how it turned out.
The texturing process wasn’t completely smooth. I ran into a few issues while trying to achieve the stylized look I wanted, and at one point I even lost some files due to system problems. That definitely slowed things down and I had to redo a few parts of my work.
Despite those setbacks, I managed to push through and finish the final texture. Seeing everything come together in Substance Painter was really satisfying, and I’m pleased with the overall result. It feels great to finally reach this stage and see the prop looking the way I imagined.
For the final presentation of my hero prop, Eden suggested using the Virtual Photography Studio in Unreal Engine as a base to build a small scene. Starting with that setup made it much easier to quickly create a clean environment for showcasing the asset.
By tweaking a few parameters such as lighting and camera settings, I was able to get the scene running the way I wanted. So far, I’ve rendered a few still images, and I’m currently preparing a 360° turntable render of the hero prop to better showcase it from all angles.
Through this project I learned a lot about the full workflow of prop creation, especially the process of moving from high-poly to low-poly models. It helped me understand how to refine a low-poly version and optimize it to reach a polygon count that is suitable for games while still maintaining the important details. Along the way I also developed new skills in both modelling and texturing.
Overall, this project really pushed me to think more deeply about how props are designed and built, and also what decisions need to be made during the process. It was definitely a journey, but reaching an output that matches the vision I had at the beginning makes it completely worth it. This ended up being a really fun and valuable project for me.
March 11, 2026
Currently, I am working on the texturing stage of my Hero asset. While setting up the textures, I initially ran into a few issues when baking the high-poly details onto the low-poly model.
Even though both the high-poly and low-poly versions had the same structure, the bake was still producing some unexpected problems. I first tried rebaking the mesh and also redid the UV unwrapping to see if that would resolve the issue, but the problem still remained. Because of this, I decided to slightly adjust the design in that area, as it was affecting the mesh structure during the baking process. After modifying the structure a little bit, the issue was resolved.
Once the mesh problem was fixed, I was able to successfully bake the details and continue with the texturing process.
At the moment, this is the initial result of the textures that I have worked on so far. It is still in the early stages, but it gives a good idea of how the asset is starting to come together.
March 10, 2026
Previously, I mentioned that I was planning to use two separate materials for my hero asset. So, during the UV unwrapping phase, I created the UVs for the entire model and decided to pack them into a single UV Island while still keeping the two separate materials for the asset.
This approach helped me organize the UV space more efficiently while still maintaining better control over different parts of the model during the texturing stage. After arranging and packing the UVs, this is how the final layout turned out.
March 09, 2026
For the next step in creating my hero asset was UV unwrapping and texturing. I decided to work with two separate materials, mainly to make the texturing process easier for areas that are harder to see or reach, such as the inner parts of the model.
In the original reference, the sci-fi coffee machine had a red color theme. While it looks great, I wanted to create something a little different. While looking through more concepts, I came across another design from the same creators that had a grey-toned theme, which I really liked.
We’re super happy to drop another fresh piece!
This time it’s a 2D concept for a Portable Reconnaissance System (PRS) that includes a hand-
Because of that, I decided to base my final texture colours on this grey palette instead. I think it will give the coffee machine a more subtle and industrial sci-fi look.
March 08, 2026
Previously, I was working on a sci-fi coffee machine for my live brief project. I had already finished the hard surface model, which came to around 197,775 polygons. From that, I created a low-poly version that was roughly 48,401 polygons.
When I showed it to Eden for feedback, he pointed out that 48k was still too high for a low-poly asset. He suggested aiming for a much lower limit of around 10k polygons.
So, I reworked on the asset. At first it was quite challenging to bring the polygon count down that much while still keeping the overall form and details intact. It took a bit of experimentation and optimization, but eventually I managed to reduce the model to 10,264 polygons.
This is the current version of the asset and how it looks so far. The process was a good exercise in learning how to simplify geometry while preserving the important visual features of the model.
I have also created a low-poly version of my hero asset. I was able to reduce the polygon count from around 197,775 to about 48,401. This helped make the model more optimized while still keeping the main details of the design. This is how the low-poly version turned out.
March 04, 2026
I’ve made some solid progress in development of my hero asset. I’m now almost finished with the high-poly model of my sci-fi coffee machine. This is the final version of the high-poly asset, and it currently sits at around 197,775 polygons. Overall, I’m quite happy with how the design has turned out and how the different components have come together.
March 01, 2026
In my last interaction with Eden, he advised me to improve the topology of my hero asset and focus on creating smaller details in Substance Painter rather than modelling them directly into the geometry.
Following his feedback, I refined the topology of my asset and created new geometry where needed. I removed the physical indentations from the mesh and instead built a clean, smooth surface overall.
Also, I am nearly finished with the right section of my hero asset, and this is my progress so far.
After updating my initial blockout, I created a new version of my hero asset by adding a few more components and adjusting some of the existing shapes. I started refining the model further and began working on the elements to make them high poly. At this point, I focused on adding more surface details, especially on the outer panels of the coffee machine.
While doing this, I used Boolean modifier to create indentations directly into the mesh. Later, while showing my progress to Eden and asking for feedback, he suggested a different approach. Instead of modelling every indentation into the geometry, he recommended using Substance Painter to create those details through texturing. That way, I could reduce my poly count and avoid unnecessary mesh complications. It would also save time during the modelling process.
He also pointed out some mesh issues I was facing and gave me advice on how to better control my surface edges and clean up the topology so the forms would look more locked in and structured.
This is where my asset stands at the moment, and I’m starting to rethink my workflow to make it more efficient moving forward.
February 26, 2026
After creating the 3D block-in of my hero asset, I realized I didn’t want to just replicate the concept exactly as it was. Instead of making a one-to-one copy, I wanted to mix details from different concepts so the final design would reflect my own interpretation rather than just replicating a reference.
So, I found another sci-fi coffee machine example on ArtStation, and I liked a few elements of that machine. I decided to use those in my existing concept. For example, I really liked the base stand from this reference image, I’m going to use this as inspiration and incorporate it into my machine. I also picked a few smaller details from this reference to fit my overall design.
Hello everyone!
Game-Ready Sci-Fi coffee machine.
This project took me 5 days from start until the moment of publication.
I based it on a
February 25, 2026
After finalizing the sci-fi coffee machine concept, I decided to create a basic blockout of my hero asset to get a better understanding of how my asset will fit in the environment. So using basic geometry, I built a rough version of the machine using Blender, and this is how it looks so far.
February 24, 2026
Concept Change
After discussing my polearm weapon concept with Eden, he liked the idea. However, as we talked more in depth about it and I explained my direction with the concept, he suggested that I should consider creating an asset that is more related to environment art rather than focusing only on weapons.
Since I’m aiming to become an environment artist, he advised that shifting towards an environment-based asset would be more beneficial for me. So, I started researching new concept art focused on environment assets instead. I spent some time exploring different options and thinking about what kind of prop would both fit into an environment naturally and still be interesting to create.
After searching for a while, I decided to create a sci-fi coffee machine that could easily fit into different types of environments. I thought this would be a good opportunity to push myself and learn something new. Prior to this, I’ve mainly created realistic assets, but this time I wanted to challenge myself by going for a stylized approach instead
This will be my first experience creating a fully stylized model, so I’m looking forward to learning different workflows and techniques to create stylized assets.
This is concept art I’ve chosen for this project.
The artwork is created by AstroBakers Studios
Happy to share a new in-house studio work - stylized sci-fi coffee machine!
Our talented artists completed the full production pipeline fro
For my live brief, I chose to create a hero prop as my assignment. Initially, I decided to create a polearm weapon based on a concept art reference I found. However, after examining it for a while, I felt that the design was too simple and lacked visual appeal.
So, I decided to gather additional references of various weapons and combine selected elements into a single design.
After collecting a few references that matched the direction I wanted, I created a quick visualization in Photoshop, blending different parts from multiple reference images.
This acts as a rough concept to guide the overall look and structure of the weapon. I started making the basic blockout of the weapon using blender and this is what it looks like so far.
This is the finished animation for life brief. It looks very decent. Although might be a bit hard to understand at some points. I start to think that I might have overcomplicated the idea behind it as well as my execution of this idea. However it is too late to change, so I have to hope that it looks interesting.
It was very hard to draw food items and in some places the frames look a bit empty. I decided not to overcrowd the view of the person watching with lots of details. The plot must be in the front and I think I managed to do exactly that
The last scene is depicting family hugging together. I decided to show them blurred because main focus of this ballad was talking about love with help of food comparisons, so I decided to do exactly that. Only places we saw a bit detailed human parts were hands that were cooking. But all the other scenes only showing blurred shadows of people.
Before that I was thinking about maybe blurring food in the end and showing the family detailed. However I decided against it since the humans are too hard to render in this style.
