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