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!