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Sunday, June 27, 2021

Bamboo Temple (3D Art Week 02)

 We're a little behind this week but compared to the last project it's not as dire. All that meticulous planning pays off, kids, so stay in school and plan your stuff out. This week I completed proxies of everything and went farther ahead with some pieces as I experimented with modularity, but before I get ahead of myself I want to explain what I did at the very beginning of the week. Previously, I'd thought that I'd have to sculpt an entirely unique centerpiece for the skull to rest on, which meant that I'd have to not only sculpt the skull but also the giant trunk and all the tongues of palm fronds hanging from it. 

Definitely not an enticing prospect. 

Instead, Nick gave me some advice and told me to make each individual frond and set dress it that way. However, since we're not dummies here I made one of each variant frond I saw and then imported them into Ue4 with the intent to duplicate them: essentially giving myself a "build your own massive bamboo trunk" lego kit. Of course, this process was a bit time consuming, but ultimately it'll be super worth it as all I have to do from now on is change one texture and they all update the new changes.

Another area where we stumbled a bit and sapped a good amount of time was setting up the project in Unreal. Of course, this is something you do at the very beginning of the piece, so I was glad to get it out of the way. By overlaying Pureref with my viewport and messing with the cinematic camera's settings, I was able to get a very close replication of the concept art's perspective and focal length, which allowed me to easily set dress the scene. 

Now, I should warn you that I'll be updating this post as we speak because while the assets are made, they aren't placed. It doesn't look impressive right now but it will soon!

Friday, June 25, 2021

Sprint 3 Delivery (VR Project)

 We had a pretty busy 3rd sprint this time, and some reprioritizing of assets and effort. This week I was supposed to get the mosquito netting and some vertex painting done, but we had a more pressing issue come up: Our hill was looking like it came from the ps1 era, and since we didn't intend for that to happen, we'd need to fix it. As I was looking at the hill, I realized that I was missing quite a lot of good stuff from the reference art. Here is the shot from the film that I was basing my cave on:


So first off, there are three posts there, not two. The planks are around chest level for the Seita character, and the diagonal support strut is a separate piece from the vertical beam. I realized I'd made a mistake with the proxies up until that point, so I resolved to fix this and get a more accurate look within the cave so that we'd have the least amount of continuity errors as possible. 

When I moved over to the hill, I saw there was an interesting little buildup between the floor of the cave and the planks, kind of like sediment making a tiny pile across the length. I was able to soft select the hill topology to fake this effect, and resolved with my project lead to vertex paint that sucker later once we had all the assets done. 

With that, allow me to present what other things I finished this sprint: 

The cave is more or less finished barring a couple tweaks, but tonight I'll get a big one knocked out real quick: redoing the hill UVs, as smoothing it messed up the texture it has. I was able to use soft select to give it a far more organic shape to what it was before. Below I'll post the before and after so you guys can judge for yourself. 

Despite looking softer and more organic, the texture is all scuffed right at the support beams. I intend to fix this shortly, and after this is done we should be good to go for the vertex painting and slapping some color on our foliage to finish up this piece. 

Here are some shots of our tracking so you can see where we are:

As of now, there were a couple changes to the deadline structure I proposed on discord: 1. There is no wooden trim sheet; instead we used a smart material on uniquely sculpted pieces since generating a trim sheet would've actually been more work and wouldn't have given us a great result, at least not with my current skills (I'd leave some seams and in a VR game that would be too noticeable). 2. The Mosquito Net will be done by tonight since I was stuck on what would be cheaper: transparency so the cloth looks like gossamer, or opacity so it would have actual holes like a mesh would. 3. The Vertex Painting will be postponed to next week since I was fixing the hill instead and making it look better. We plan on vertex painting everything at once to be able to art direct it effectively.

Other than that, we're up to date and en route to finishing! I hope that with some polish and touching up we'll be looking good! Here are some shots of what the level looks like right now:




Sunday, June 20, 2021

Bamboo Temple (3D Art Week 01)

 It's your boy again with yet another stylized environment (pls hire me Blizzard), this time concepted by the fantastic Frédéric Simon who I actually got in contact with prior to beginning this project. We had a nice chat and he revealed a good amount about his intentions with the piece, but first I should explain my own! 

Last time the point was to make an environment as close as possible to the concept, and while that wasn't entirely completed I now know exactly how much it takes to get up to that level of quality. Another important lesson is to have a constant avenue of communication with the dude that made your concept- because of course why wouldn't you? Reaching out to others and getting help from as many sources as possible is paramount to success because no artist is an island. But other than these basics, I think I would like to pursue something else with this piece. 

In my last piece I was able to get away with very simple vegetation as it was all highly stylized and the main focus was a building, but this piece is entirely verdant. I would like to explore methods for making vegetation and foliage, and see how to go about making some of these modular, because who's actually going to model eleven million bamboo shoots??

Here is a thought exercise I underwent before even opening up Maya. Breaking down the piece and getting into the meat of it, organizing each piece and figuring out what the game plan is was something I skimped on last time. I resolved that I'd need one material and several instances, and could cut corners and man-hours by duplicating assets such as rocks, bushes, leaf clusters, and the aforementioned bamboo shoots. It's not an incredibly complex environment when you break it down like that, but the temple part itself will be a heavy ask and I'm already feeling how tough it'll be to crank out. 

One technique I intend on using is making only one trunk for the palm trees. Once it is baked and textured, it will be easy to modify duplicates in Maya with curve deformers and lattices to get the right shape for the individual asset, and export it out to be placed. In doing this, I intend to save UV space, material space, and the headache of having to texture 10 slightly different things back to back. 

I think my schedule for this month will follow a similar one as last month:


Week 01 

-Break down assets and see where to cut corners

- Proxy out basic shapes and block out in Unreal

-Plan out materials


Week 02 

- Finish blocking out shapes

-Create materials + instances and get basic lighting

-Organize proxy geo so it can be converted to high res


Week 03 

-Sculpt all pieces

-Generate foliage sheet

-Start baking process


Week 04 

- Texture all pieces

-Refine lighting

- Presentation


At the end of every week I plan on sending Fred an email with my progress and seeing what he thinks. I would like to have this project done at a much farther place than the previous one, which is why I am considering my schedule carefully and organizing from the very start so no time is wasted. This is certainly a massive project and I intend on giving you all a good show, so I hope you like it!

Sunday, June 13, 2021

The Silk Road: City Block (3D Art Week 04)

 I have to have that this time we really upheld the tradition of starting late and finishing strong. There are still a ton of things I would love to do to this piece but for now I'm happy with the progress I've made. I think it really hit me just how well designed the concept art I chose was halfway through the foliage placement process, where every splash of green added a new burst of joy to the smooth stone background. I hope I was able to capture that popping of colors and the simple vibrancy of the piece, but like I said before, I'll definitely be working on this some more later to push it further.

This blogpost is going to have to be a bit gratuitous since I don't have time to properly explain my entire process and all the pitfalls and mistakes I ran into, so once this piece is done (for real this time), I'll upload that as it's own post. 

Hope you enjoy!




 

Sunday, June 6, 2021

The Silk Road: City Block (3D Art Week 03)

 In keeping with the tradition of starting late and finishing strong, ya boy has met his deadlines for this week (somewhat). The proxy and game res model being done last week, all that was left was to slap this on zbrush and sculpt all the lovely building details my building would need to be. It was a pretty relaxing process but there was a lot of it, and honestly the biggest time sink was renaming and organizing stuff for the bake. I'm in the process of baking at the moment so we're slightly ahead of schedule in that respect, but we made some definite progress in terms of the building's silhouette. 


Look at this lovely outliner. It keeps going for a couple more assets, but you get the point. When I import this into Unreal, it'll all be one nice chunk minus the moveable objects (like the clothes and vines, etc) which I'll attach a wind node to and make it all fancy. 

I have yet to make the foliage sheet, but I don't expect that to take too long. The grand majority of the building is done and only needs texturing, which I have a plan for as well. I'm looking forward to finishing this building and presenting it to you all!


So this is what I have on Zbrush at the moment. It's missing a lot of stuff, like the floor. The reason for this is because I don't need baking information for certain things, and I can just duplicate others if I need to. For example, the staircase tiles, or the wooden door, or the windows up top. Same with the little wooden log pieces on the rooftop, there's no need to make 20 when I can just sculpt one, UV one, and replicate it and flip it around to fool the viewer and save space. Once I'm done baking all this, hopefully I'll have a decent sized texture to plug into Unreal!






Tuesday, June 1, 2021

The Silk Road: City Block (3D Art Week 02)

 

Turn in day is here, and I believe I have a confession to make. I definitely underestimated the amount of work this project is taking, and didn't allot the sufficient time to the right tasks. For example, in my schedule I only gave myself a week to block out this piece, but it's taken me two along with assessing how to texture it. If this piece is going to be as close as possible to the reference, I can't mess up the proportions of the building nor the placement of things. A neat trick I used was overlaying my geometry with the concept art and fiddling around with the focal length until an approximate focal length was achieved. Of course, since this is just concept art there is no way for it to be perfectly geometric and there were some disparities. Nevertheless, I had to go back and fix plenty of geometry that had been haphazardly placed. 




This process taught me how to accurately match a concept and use intuition to fill in the gaps wherever needed, but this lesson cost me a good amount of days that I needed to be spending generating high poly geometry. Due to this, I'm going to adjust my schedule and see how I can complete this piece on time and with a good semblance of quality. 

I also ran into an issue when setting up my scene in Unreal so I could begin exploring materials options. Whenever I import in my building, I'd get this error: Failed to Triangulate Mesh; Import Failed. I'm currently researching how to beat this because otherwise I won't be able to have a real time asset!

A positive of the process I went through is that, by being meticulous about my proxy shapes, I was easily able to turn them into game res geo. Some assets, like the vines and clothes, will have to be retopologized. But I've definitely worked ahead in some respects so the week isn't as bad a loss as it could've been.

This will be my schedule for the remainder of the month:


Week 01 (5-23-2021)

- Proxy out basic shapes and block out in Unreal

-Begin planning out the texturing process


Week 02 (5-30-2021)

- Finished blocking out shapes

-Generated some game res geometry


Week 03 (6-06-2021)

-Sculpt all pieces

-Generate foliage sheet


Week 04 (6-13-2021)

- Generate materials and texture

- Presentation




Saint Anatoles Cathedral (3D Art Week 03)