Labels

Sunday, July 11, 2021

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!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Saint Anatoles Cathedral (3D Art Week 03)