Introduction

Hey there! My name is Jonathan Holmes. I’ve been a 3D artist since 2002. I work for Quixel, performing community management, product support, and helping run development and features for Quixel Suite. The people I work with at Quixel are insanely talented. These guys have an unbridled passion for creating texturing tools and scanning techniques. It’s a very humbling experience to be surrounded by people who are so purpose-driven that a large part of their life is dedicated to excellence.



My primary role at Quixel is support, which encompasses community management as well. I’m very active in the Quixel Tools Group – either posting personal work I do in my downtime or observing what others are up to as they work with the tools we develop. This entire project was done during my downtime. My personal passion has been in developing environments, but I work on vehicles too. In this breakdown, I’ll show a mix of both vehicular modeling/texturing and environment work.

I spent about a year working on this project. It’s meant to be a showcase to demonstrate the power of Quixel Megascans in real-time applications. Unreal was a natural choice for this so I developed everything using the engine. In order to get to the point where the Megascans asset library would be useable, I needed to develop the models that would be put into the environment.

Railroad Component Breakdown

I started work on the EMD SD40-2 locomotive in 2011. It was a project I started after graduating college that I never finished – one of many projects I started and abandoned after finding something else to work on.

One of the biggest challenges I face as an artist is staying focused. It’s very easy for me to find something to be distracted with – another model, reading the news, playing games, etc. I’m fighting that distraction even now as I write this breakdown – the endless lure of the Internet makes it very hard to focus sometimes!

The locomotive itself eventually got put together and textured using Quixel Suite 2 in early 2016 after being completely rebuilt. The original geometry from 2011 wasn’t entirely reference-accurate, so I made the decision to rebuild it to save time and get it right. If you’re interested in how I textured it, I wrote up two tutorials on ArtStation on how I used both NDO and DDO to develop the look you see here.