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!