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Monday, April 5, 2021

Pirate Ship Interior (3D Art Week 01)

 This week I got excellent news, we're finally doing environments! Nick structured this like a group project, so we divided up the work and ourselves in teams. We've had to not only plan out an environment and work with each other, but since Nick gave us an art style and proxies, we've also had to adapt our art on the fly. It's great experience for sure as this is pretty much how it'll work in the real world. 

Here is a shot of what the proxied out interior looked like in Unreal. 


Nick gave us the option of the lamps, barrels, the crates in the back, a staircase, a chandelier, or the walls and floors themselves. Since I wanted to challenge myself with trim sheets and understand that workflow, I picked the walls and floors to see how they would go. 

My first thought was to grab this screenshot and paint over it in Photoshop. Nick had given us some references with the intent to follow Michael Vicente's (Orb) art style, as seen below. 


Armed with these references, I came up with some architecture that would use trim sheeting effectively. Columns and support beams to hide seams, and some wooden paneling to add visual interest and break up a repetitive texture were added, as well as some metal pieces scattered around. My drawings are all super sketchy and dirty, so it may be hard to tell exactly where these features are that I'm talking about!


The next step was less fun but definitely more important, since it lays the groundwork for what's coming. I had to list out each unique piece I was thinking of using, and allocate space on the trim sheet for it to be textured. In my case, I had 5 pieces (so far!): support beams, wooden paneling, metal trimming for the window cell assets, metal beams, and the main wooden plank texture that we needed in the first place.


The size of a UV udim is 512 by 512, or some iteration of this. I took a square with these dimensions and went into Maya to see where I would need to cut my UVs to lay them out on the trim. It's a bit of an abstract process and I still need to verify that I'm doing it correctly, but essentially you want to make sure that your trim sheet is laid out in a way that your object's UVs can accept it. Here are some fantastic videos that I watched while researching how to do this process. I highly recommend the Polygon Academy one as Tim Simpson is one of the most informative artists I've seen on Youtube: his process for 3d modeling is clean, efficient, and easy to understand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEMjgqD9wvo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DipfrjCgYW8

This is how my Maya proxies ended up looking. I didn't need to plan out the trim before finishing these, but it helped me understand what I could add and what I needed to figure out. For example, the columns flanking my walls can't possibly fit on my trim sheet, so I'll just make them a unique texture set, and add plenty of detail and sculpting information since I'm using a whole udim either way. 


And here are the proxies in Unreal! Hopefully that gives everyone a good understanding of what I'm going for, but it's understandable that at this stage it'll be hard to see what the end result will be like. This upcoming week I'm going to focus on fleshing out these proxies, making the trim sheet functional, and running tests to make sure it all works together in a functional pipeline. 




Hopefully soon I can show you guys the end result!









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