VR Project: Vine Proxies and Cave fixes

Late submission, but for last week I was tasked with making some vines for the cave. At first I attempted to make them in Houdini using a generator, but at the end of the day I made them manually in Maya. It was a relatively simple process, especially since these are proxies, and the most complex part would be making the foliage since it requires a mash node, but then again this is also not too complicated. 

I look forward to taking all these items into their high res versions and begin texturing, as that is where the meat of this project will be. 

Starfish Organic Character (3D Art Week 4)

 

The bake went better than expected! There were some problem areas but it was easy enough to fix them with some tricks I'd picked up while doing the Nerf gun. The character's textures also worked very well to cover up any problematic areas, so overall I'd say this worked out better than it had any right to. 

Here are some shots of the starfish in UE4 with all the fancy lighting and effects we can slap on it. 

Starfish Organic Character (3D Art Week 3)

 

I added some texture to the starfish's skin thanks to Orb's brushes and Nitin's sucker brush. I reworked the leather hat and made it more stylized, adding bigger slashes and seams, and then gave her some wrinkles around her joint areas. I think this high poly is done for now, so I'll be moving on to generating a game res piece and baking. 

Here is my game res! It took a really long time to get it down to 15k tris, and I wanted to have decent edge flow as well so I was making things harder on myself. I didn't exactly succeed at having good topology, but the deadline has come and it's time to turn something in. UVing is going to be a lot of fun to figure out, so here's hoping the bake goes well!

Starfish Organic Character (3D Art Week 2)

 

Starfish Organic Character (3D Art Week 1)

 For this week's assignment I was tasked with creating an organic character model. I'm primarily an environmental modeler, but I've done busts in Maya before and found them pretty fun. Faces are great to model! However, this would be my first foray into sculpting a fully fleshed character with Zbrush, so it'll be interesting for sure. 

This is the character concept I was given, a pirate starfish drawn by the talented Daniela Diaz-Rivera. I'm not wonderful at making feminine, smooth characters and have more success making grotesques, so this was a welcome challenge!

In fact, it was interesting enough to fashion a pirate hat for her. It was surprisingly easy and looked decent enough to take into ZBrush! The method I used was box modeling, although taking shapes and dynameshing them would've been a much faster method. However, the benefit of box modeling a character out is that, depending on how crazy I get with the sculpt, I'll have the beginning of a game res mesh when I come back with the hi res geometry.

Here's how I got the curved look on her tentacles. I simply made a straight tentacle and used lattices to bend them whichever way I wanted. 

And here's the dynameshed character! All I did was merge a couple components and set up polygroups, like you see down below. This is so that texturing becomes infinitely easier and I don't have to paint around the seams or have sloppy coloring. However, before that happens, I have to finish sculpting. I've got some details planned out, like a mottled skin texture and some protrusions along her shoulders, as well as a series of suckers on her back to finish off that starfish look.

VR Project: Advanced Proxies

 For my VR project I was tasked with making a cave from the movie Grave of the Fireflies. Here is the finished proxy model:

There is a rockslide further in the cave that blocks movement and sight

Maveric Nerf Gun (3D Art Week 4)

 

REFERENCE:

For this texture I decided to go with something crazy and out of my comfort zone, like the above reference image. The checkerboard pattern seemed fun to try and tackle, but what really ended up being the biggest challenge was the weathering and handpainted look of the rest of the body. It still needs a lot of tweaking and work but I'm happy where this piece ended up. Thank you for following my progress through these past four weeks!