Saint Anatoles Cathedral (3D Art Week 02)

 So after taking an extended look at the cathedral and messing around in Maya, I've come up with a gameplan that will hopefully work out in the end. This week I don't have much to show, but I will walk you through my thought process and see how I've been making the cathedral modular. 

The nave walls are complete, and they're in game res as well. The pillars can be reduced further but that's something for later. I have yet to make the triforium (2nd floor) and fill out the vaulting in the clerestory (3rd floor), but those are a bit more complex and right now I just wanted to get the right dimensions and have everything looking good for the next step: the vaulting. 

The complex parts about Gothic cathedrals isn't their arches or their pillars, but the vaulted ceilings they employ to alleviate stress and weight from the top and spread it out to the piers (pillars) below. They have a weird pattern to them as they have to not only match the arching next to them, but fit seamlessly and have an apex point connecting the structure. Another consideration is that they have to tile seamlessly and match. It all sounds pretty complex but if you turn your brain off and use curves+revolve in Maya, it's not that hard. However, there are three types of vaults in this cathedral. I've been able to complete the first floor and get it to you in engine, but I'll be doing the other two and fill out the parts I mentioned earlier, the clerestory and triforium, as soon as I finish this post. Once those are done and in engine, it should be easy to then make the altar since it's just a bunch of boxes... in theory. 

The point is that most of the big shapes are there, and the architecture is pretty solid. Next week I'll finish up what little is left and then begin generating trim sheets. I decided that I would make two, one for masonry and wood, and the other for the altar and its intricate detail. The fourth week will be spent texturing the trim sheets, cleaning up the scene, and making the unique pieces like the confessional and the balcony both on the side. 

I'm not gonna lie, it's definitely not going to be finished by the time this semester ends; I chose a project that was very big and since I'm always slow to start, it took a little longer to get in the rhythm of things. I doubt it'll take an exaggerated amount of time to finish, perhaps a week and a half, but I do want to forewarn that it won't be at the level of my previous pieces (which are also unfinished in their own ways).

Final Sprint Delivery (VR)

 We've reached the end of our sprints, and from here on out we're polishing and fixing up stuff. For this sprint I did a good amount to make up for some stuff I was behind on, and completed a couple other extra things. For this sprint I handled foliage almost exclusively- in the screenshots below you can see all the plant life that was added to fill up the play space. I positioned it so that it was more recognizable and closer to the movie, and then I messed around with the materials to get a good color going. Once that was done, I was getting some extra shadow information I didn't want, so I decided to "paint" with lighting- a couple very low intensity lights set in a channel analogous to the bushes kept them illuminated and looking healthy while the rest of the scene went untouched by those lights.

Since I was already messing with lighting, I decided to tweak the values and positions of a couple of our lights to bring out the color saturation of the scene a bit more. I also adjusted the skybox so the light coming from it made the sky resemble the last vestiges of a sunset, and tuned down the moonlight to get rid of overly shiny/washed out surfaces. I also turned up the firelight so that it was warmer and reached farther, making the scene feel a bit cozier and more intimate. 

The last changes I had to do were to add flowers and cattails, the last of the vegetation I needed to get through. I gave them a wind node and played around with some colors, but made them small and placed them sparsely to avoid overpopulating the scene. I have a mind to make some color variants for the flowers, but that can come later. 

And that's it! Hope you've liked seeing our project evolve into what it is now!

Saint Anatoles Cathedral (3D Art Week 01)

 Alright kids, the time has come for my last project in existence. After this, I'll retire and go raise crickets or something. I decided to do something very complex and realistic to boot, so future David will be very disappointed and salty with me. For now, though, that's future me's problem so who cares? I want to further delve into the power of trim sheets and understand what it takes to completely deconstruct an environment, and then make it in as short a time as possible with modular and duplicated assets. I'll be using as many tricks as possible this time to aid me since... this really is a big boy. 

This is a piece by the wildly talented Will Burns, who is now working for Blue Mammoth. This cathedral was supposed to be a location in the now cancelled World of Darkness MMO. I contacted him and made sure to get permission for its usage, and since it's part of a cancelled game and it's been quite some time since the piece was posted, we got the green light to go ahead. This is a super demanding piece so I'm very much looking forward to seeing what I can do to impress Mr Burns!

My preproduction process has been refined since the last project. This time I started with some blockouts to understand how many unique pieces there are in the scene. Oftentimes you'll be able to get away with a ton of duplication and repetition, so recognizing these patterns helps you save time and effort, but also produce fewer assets with which to make your piece. Once this blockout was done, I sketched up a quick trim sheet layout and thought about what materials I would like to replicate a ton. Some materials are worth putting on a trim sheet and some aren't. For example, the sculpted parts of the altar could technically be a trim sheet, but it would be awkward and janky and it's just easier to do it uniquely and get it over with for time constrains. 

I decided on these materials to represent in my trimsheet: 

1. Brick pattern for walls

2. Big, flat bricks for arches

3. Dark border trimming to split wall regions

4. Sculpted relief borders to top pillars

5. Big rounded bricks for pillars

6. Pew Wood

Most of the materials on this trim sheet are for stone and the masonry on the walls, etc. By making an opening for the pew's wood, I can reduce the amount of effort I put into those pews. They're actually pretty excellent in terms of trim sheet usage since they're a solid slab of wood, straight planks slapped horizontally with simplicity as their driving theme. Sure, I might need to uniquely sculpt some of the weird siding and whatever footrest mechanism they might have (did they have those in medieval times, or were they just a solid block?), but that's completely worth it. Imagine having to uniquely sculpt what, 6 different surfaces and make it look like fine wood grain. Gross, and I love sculpting wood lmao. 

My last bit of notes was this jumbled garbage. It's my attempt to understand how the unique pieces of this cathedral work in their spatial relationships with each other, and compositionally. For example, the balcony booth thingy on the left side of the reference (highlighted red on my blockout) can be broken down into a series of duplicated panels, hides, and a top and bottom part. Definitely better than modeling the whole thing and trying to make it work. Instead, I've made it modular and can do it in a shorter amount of time. 

The altar is another beast altogether. It's massive, full of fine sculpted detail, and complex to boot in a structural sense. I decided to break it down into blocks and see how to make it modular, and I was successful to a degree. Obviously I'm going to have a ton of little pieces even if I can duplicate them, so my next idea to reduce the amount of work was to slap a trim sheet on this sucker. 

Now, I know, I know. I just said this was a waste of time earlier. What I mean though, is the bordering and the flat parts of the altar. That whole center tower can be helped a lot by a marble and golden trim sheet, and then modeling some hides and unique pieces like the cross and the giant conical roof on top. There's no helping the statues nor the disgusting amount of relief sculpture in here, but hopefully by having a second trim sheet I can alleviate myself a lot of the pains of uniquely modeling this whole thing. 

Lastly, there was a lot of research that went into this whole thing. This was actually the first thing I truly did because even though I loved art history and really enjoyed gothic architecture, that class doesn't prepare you for building one of these suckers. I gathered material on how pews look, confessionals, candelabra and chandeliers, and even the fanned vaulting that's so prominent in this piece. It's quite a marvelous pattern and I'm looking forward to cracking this puzzle open. It's a wondrous piece of architecture, really. 

The idea is that by the end, I should be able to take a camera inside this building and get it relatively close to the altar, the confessional, the pews, etc and have it look good. With that in mind, this will be the first environment I make that will be both extremely complex but also able to be seen from multiple angles (since I used a lot of trickery to get my Bamboo Temple operational)

I hope you all are as excited to see the end of this project as I am! 

Bamboo Temple (3D Art Week 04)

 Another week, another post by yours truly. Today I come to you guys with a humble offering: My as of yet unfinished 2nd project: The Bamboo Temple of Great Mystery and Fantastic Treasure. I admit the unfinished state is due to dumb mistakes like taking too much time handpainting the skull and fiddling with texture settings, but I assure you- this attempt on my grade may have left me scarred and deformed, but my resolve has never been stronger! As such, have some images of my current progress. As always, there is much to do and more to polish, but I admit I'm quite happy with how this turned out even if it isn't anywhere close to finished.

I mentioned this before, but handpainting the skull was definitely the more time consuming part this time. Not even the sculpting process took as much time, and that's mostly because I wanted to make sure it was all perfect and matching the concept art. In the future, I will be sure to take a break and place the unfinished texture in engine to get some perspective. Some details I pored over aren't even visible, much to my chagrin, and so I'll take this lesson as it comes.

The plant matter was supremely easy to make and texture. In fact, I textured both of these in twenty minutes. Once the proxy shape was established and the assets were designed for modularity, there was no more complication to consider and the rest was a breeze. This is what they mean with hero assets being so time consuming vs the rest; the player won't be looking at each leaf, so do it quickly and tune later if needed. In this particular case, a simple mix of a base color and a multicolored Camo UCP filter gave me the texture you see. 

Lastly, I neglected to show this a week and a half ago when I made it. My foliage material has a couple interesting components that are completely tweakable. Of course, these are extremely basic functions but they allowed me to personalize the scene much more than I otherwise would've been able to. The first is a color override on the base color. I knew that the concept art had multicolored foliage, so it made more sense to make one set of foliage and recolor it here in engine instead of uploading multiple maps. The second is a very simple wind effect, which is hooked up to the World Position Offset node. I found that this method worked better for me at least in this scenario over the SimpleGrassWind node, but feel free to use either!

With that, I have to release this project and move on to the next one but I'm happy to say that it was a challenge I enjoyed entirely. This project taught me a lot and it gave me appreciation for natural and organic assets that wasn't previously there. I look forward to the next project, and to making far more vegetation and stylized environments for you to see!

Sprint Delivery 4 (VR Project) + Lighting Assignment

 For this week we were tasked with lighting another team's VR level, and my team was picked to light team 4's map. They're making an experience based on the movie Labyrinth, so I chose the throne room they'd made as I figured I could use the many candles lying around the place. I wanted to go for a much brighter ambiance than they had, with a focus on the warmer colors of the candlefire. I didn't want these lights to blow out any textures or seem too powerful, so after so messing around I managed to get a happy balance. A white spotlight resting on the throne cut across the shadows messing with it and resigning it to the gloom, and hopefully finish up this piece and assign it an object of interest for the player to focus on. 

For reference, this was the image I based my lighting on:

Also, for this sprint we managed to get plenty of things done. Our environment is mostly finished, the only places that need touching up are the foliage and some parts of the cave. The hill was textured and the seam was healed, so we were able to resolve that issue and move forward with polishing the cave. After talking to faculty, we determined that the best way to make the puddles and refuse around the edges of the cave structure was to make decals. I'm tasked with this going forward; it'll be the last polishing we do for the cave.

I textured the mosquito netting and the roots hanging from the cave walls as well, baking the latter down to cards so that they're cheaper. The mosquito netting was done with a simple alpha and is going to be edited in the upcoming days since the final look is definitely not fantastic; it merely does the job for now. 

Here are some pictures of the assets:

Bamboo Temple (3D Art Week 03)

 This week was intensely productive (not to pat myself in the back or anything), but we did fall short a couple ways. The foliage sheet was completed, all materials were slapped on our assets, and the entire scene was assembled! All that's left for me to do this week is get final textures out of the gate, fix up the lighting and positioning of assets, and submit for review so we can get a final polish pass on it. 

I'll take you through it bit by bit. The first step in this operation was to generate the foliage sheet. I've learned over the course of this project and the last that this is my favorite part of the process, so I did it early to make sure I could begin and keep going. Placing foliage and assets is such a brilliant feeling, it's like playing with Legos,  except you make them yourself too!

I made the foliage sheet in ZBrush, mainly. Basic shapes came from Maya, were sculpted in ZBrush, and then got baked and textured in Painter to the bits you see here. I received some feedback from an artist in the industry that you should aim to have as little empty space as possible on your foliage cards, so I tried to cut the foliage pieces out as close as I could without increasing the polycount. Deforming and bending them to resemble organic shapes was a pretty rewarding process as well. Did I mention I like foliage?

The next step was assembling the bits together, placing foliage, and getting the whole scene and ready for the final textures. This involved quick modeling a bunch of assets and baking them to get the basic textures down, and placing them in engine. Everything you see in the GIF below has been sculpted and is in game-res form except for the skull, which I'll talk about next.

You'll notice that my final frame retains the original proxy skull. That's because I was saving the worst for last, but once again this environment has surprised me. I had previously thought I was going to hate sculpting the skull and it'd be annoying; to a certain extent that was true, but I also can't deny that I enjoyed it immensely. It's been a pretty gratifying project so far and I haven't run into any snags that have sapped my willpower or anything, so I'd say it was a resounding success in terms of challenging myself. 

Anyways, this is my skull sculpt. I haven't generated a game res for it yet, but that will happen this week as well as the aforementioned final textures and lighting. 

Finally, this is what the most up to date environment looks like. I fully intend on making this look as close as possible to the reference next week in terms of values and lighting, so hang in there! We're only a couple days away from the end, so I hope you all like what I've got ready for you!