BA3a - Week 6 Summary

BA3a - Week 6 Summary

Task 3

The Loot Chest

For this task we received the assignment of creating a loot chest! This was what the task stated:

'Create a Loot chest with a maximum triangle count of 5K Triangles and a texture resolution of 2048x2048. The model will need to be rendered in Unreal Engine. Design(s) must explore an alternate art style to that in which you normally work, i.e. realism > stylised, and vice-versa.'

Since I usually work with a realistic art style this was a great task to finally practise my hand painted skills and get to learn a new workflow! Like the sword I created for task 2 I will not be creating my own concept but base my model on a concept like we would be provided one in the industry. I spent a long time looking for the right chest and eventually found this concept created by Mikael Bombete 'Artstation'

Concept I will be using as a reference for my loot chest, created by Mikael Bombete

My workflow for this asset will be to first create a high poly which I will later bring into Zbrush to sculpt the details in to create the 'Hand painted' feel to it, and then use a mix between 3D Coat and Photoshop to apply the colour.

Since the shapes are rather simple the high poly was easy to create, i did notice however that the concept on some parts were impossible to re-create in 3D due to angles etc being non logical so I did have to do some slight modifications but that is normal when it comes to following reference.

With the high poly base finished It was time to sculpt in Zbrush. To help me achieve the hand painted look I used a brush pack for stylized asset found on polycount created by the user 'lordsarum' and can be downloaded here: http://polycount.com/discussion/108970/stylized-zbrush-costom-brushes

By using a few of these brushes (Cracks and Slash especially) and a mix of already existing brushes in zbrush such as trim dynamic etc I managed to achieve this.

For being my first time creating something like this I am pleased with the result and very excited to texture this piece! That's all for this week tho!

Creative Practice

This week we had to present what we had achieved so far with our creative practice projects. I created a short video to display my work which can be seen here:

As you might have seen I have further expanded the cave by adding another room, the idea at first was to only use the first room as a testing environment but figured I could build on it instead since I was please with how it turned out! 

Another change I have done is adding fog to the environment. I will show you a comparison show now with and without the fog to show how much it improved the scene.

Without fog

With fog

The difference might not be as clear in photos but in engine it made a drastic difference to the look and feel of the dungeon. 

After following the tutorial of substance designer to create the cobblestone material I created a sand material to use underneath the water in the cave. Here is a render of it in Marmoset.

And here is another picture when I apply it in the scene.

And here are images of the new room that I have started to build, it's still very much in blockout stages and will change a lot.The palm tree is a stock one from Speed tree, I am planning on recreating it with my own textures but for now that will have to do. Also I got critique that it doesn't really make sense to have a palm tree in a cave like that without any sort of light coming in so I will create a hole in the roof where sunlight will hit that spot to add to the believably.

Research Report

This week we also had to submit out 1000 word draft of the research report which after discussions with Sharon to come up with the right idea, it's now about "Modularity in Environment Art for Video Games" (Placeholder title). It will cover as you might get from the title, the subject of modularity within environment art for video games. Where I will research and analyse various techniques and workflows regarding how modularity can be used in modern AAA titles and what the games industry does to combat the repetition that can appear while dealing with modularity.

BA3a - Week 5 Summary

BA3a - Week 5 Summary

Task 2

This week I finished our second task and I am very pleased with how it turned out! Since I last week finished the low poly and baking this week I could focus on the texturing. To do this I used Substance Painter with a PBR workflow. While texturing this weapon I tried to keep specific details in mind, such as where blood would drip on the hand guard if you were to slash something with the blade, had the wielder punched someone if so where would the metal bend and so forth. I think this greatly benefited the result and added more story telling to the texture. 

And finally here are some renders of the finished piece.

I am super happy with how it turned out and I think it's definitely one of the best textures I have created so far. It's my first post apocalyptic themed asset ever and it was a blast to create! When I had finished it I thought that it would fit super well into the Fallout 4 universe and since I have previous experience with modding in weapons in the Engine it uses I thought I would give it a go!

Video demonstrating my sword in Fallout 4.

Creative Practice

This week I imported my rocks I created last week in to Unreal Engine 4 to start building a test scene, here was the result.

I'm really pleased with how modular they turned out to be, it was very easy to build with them by using the various range of placement tool available such as rotate, scale etc. However, i didn't like how generic grey they were. It looked too much like a skyrim dungeon rather than a dungeon set in the Caribbean so I went into substance painter and did a complete texture overhaul while looking at lots of reference of what the colours rocks in the Caribbean had in caves.

As you might noticed I also managed to get some water in there! After doing some research after what approach to take the water I found that Epic Games (Developers of Unreal Engine 4) have a free package of water planes that you could download and use in any project. This was a rather basic kit but it's a great start for me to later modify to my needs. 

It was now time to create some vegetation, just to get that tropical feeling to it. To start off with I created a mood board of various tropical plants that would fit inside a pirate cove.

I then created two plants using Maya and the textures are photos of plants I found online. I also created a few smaller stones which I could use to fill out the environment with.

Using those assets changed the scene a lot, I also used the plant to the furthest right on the image above to sort of build vines with. It really impressed me how much of a change just these few plants did to the environment. I will build more vegetation as i progress with the pirate cave.

Texture Practice

Since I will use Substance Designer for this project to create tileable textures for the environment I figured i would follow a tutorial to refresh my memory of how the software works. To do this I followed the awesome cobblestone tutorial created by Rogelio Olguin who works as an environment artist at Naughty Dog. 

Instead of just copying his cobblestone texture precisely I figured i would go with a more wet sort of version where my goal was to achieve the look that it had just been raining. Following this tutorial was amazing and learnt me tons of new tips and tricks within the software.

My substance created by following the above tutorial

And here are some renders of the final result in Marmoset Toolbag 2.

Vegetation of the Caribbean

The Caribbean are known for its diverse and varied vegetation. Because of the volcanic past the soil is very rich and as a result all kinds of flora thrives on the many islands. Some island are covered of what is known as ‘Cloud forests’ which contains a cluster of trees that consist of the same height. The high moisture levels in those forests promotes a rich biomass and diversity of flora, plants such as Orchids, Rebellions, Lichens, mosses. This combined with a massive number of ferns and flooring plants, results in the very rich and dense tropical forests of the Caribbean. Cloud forests are very rare, they only make up for one percent of the worlds woodlands and can only be found in the tropics. In the Caribbean alone there are 272 Cloud forests, the appearance of these forests depend on a range of different things, these can be altitude, temperature, cloud cover, soil conditions and lastly the exposure of wind the forests have.

Images of various cloud forests in the Caribbean

The average tree at some of these tropical forests are 35 meters tall, while some parts even reach 45 meters. Meanwhile, in the taller mountains of the Caribbean the vegetation is shorter and the moss coverage increased. The reason for this is because clouds often surround these mountains which result in a lower amount of light provided for the vegetation. Another effect this has is that tree trunks become very crooked and their branches form dense and compact crowns. The palm trees get replaced by bamboo as the undergrowth species.

Image of a bamboo covered area

All the cloud forests serve an important role in maintaining the water quality of the area while also containing the natural flow of the streams and rivers. They do this by collecting the water from the clouds and by the help of their tree trunks be able to spread the water to the area. If these forests were to be removed the amount of water provided to the streams and rivers would decline considerably and break the natural order since many of the plants in these areas are dependent on a high amount of water and moisture.

Epiphyte’s are also spread across these tropical forests. These are a type of plant that grows on top of other types of vegetation. They also play a big part in the matter of supplying water to the forests, they make up for about a quarter of the cloud forest species and they gather their water directly from fog and clouds. It has been calculated that at least half of the total input of important nitrates and other irons/neutrons comes from the help of Epiphyte’s.

Image of various Epiphyte's growing on a tree

The Caribbean forests, because of its rich bio diversity provides an area where many of the worlds threatened species of plants can thrive. Some of the plants found on these islands can be found nowhere else in the world.

Cloud Forests also contains many variants of crops species such as Tomatoes, Avocado and Coffee. It also contains many variants of medical plants, herbs and of course a wide range of different fruits.

Photograph of a coffee plant in the Caribbean.

The iconic coconut palm is a relatively new plant in the Caribbean, the originally come from south Asia and arrived in the Caribbean five thousand years ago. Each palm tree can have up to 4000 roots which makes them the ultimate tree to deal with the many tropical storms that hit these islands. The hurricanes are what allowed these trees to spread so rapidly throughout the Caribbean. The strong winds caught the coconuts which the by strong currents in the sea spread out to the different islands to then start growing on that island. It took around 500 years for the coconut tree to spread to every single island in the Caribbean.

Image showing a coconut floating on shore.

Sources: 
Natural Wonders of the Caribbean 2 (2012) - Cloud Forests
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYEilIbX6OQ
http://lifeofplant.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/caribbean-flora.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caribbean

BA3a - Week 4 Summary

BA3a - Week 4 Summary

For this week I decided to merge the Task and the Creative Practice post into one page because my progress on the task this week wasn't as much to cover as last week. 

Task 2

This week I focused on creating the low poly version and doing the bake. I have covered this process many times on this blog so I decided not to go too in depth on my process and mostly show finished results instead. Here are a few pictures showing off the low poly without any baked information yet. I was not satisfied at all with the poly-count, unfortunately due to time pressure I didn't have time to optimise it more so had to leave it for now. 

Polycount: 16 515

UV Map

With the low poly done and the uv's layed out it was time to do the baking, this was rather straight forward process. I did an exploded bake on this one since there were overlapping objects and it gave the best result. The following images are the result after bake.

Normal Map and AO

Next week I will be texturing it using a mix of Photoshop and Substance Painter.

Creative Practice

This week I did two things with my Creative Practice, first I started to look into the workflow of creating rocks and see what the best approach for my project would be. Second I did further research on the Caribbean.

Rocks

By looking up various techniques that can be used to create rocks the first one I decided to try out is the following used in this tutorial: http://angelitoon.deviantart.com/art/making-rocks-process-186044779

Here the process is to first create a simple blockout in any 3d package (Maya in my case) to later bring it in for sculpting in Zbrush and create alpha maps to add the "Rock" detailing to it.

Showing my process from blockout to final sculpt

I then used decimation master tool in Zbrush to create a low poly version of it and also make various LOD's.

I created another rock using the same method as above but with a different style to it. I am more pleased with it since I didn't use as much alpha detailing on it.

I then brought both rocks into Substance Painter for baking and texturing. Here is how they both turned out.

Since as you can see the rock alpha detailing barely made it into the texture I decided to skip that part for my next couple of rocks. I also found this great image of modular rocks created for the game Uncharted 4: A thief's End so decided to try to make something similar.

Modular rocks created by Andres Rodriguez for the title Uncharted 4: A Thief's End

After inspecting how he created these rocks I made my own using a similar approach.

Zbrush Sculpt

Textured version

With these 4 modular rocks done I decided to try to make a test environment in Marmoset Toolbag 2 just to see how these rocks could be used to create a scene.

Next week I will be implementing these rocks into Unreal Engine 4 and start experimenting with a scene. I will also take a look into solutions to the water in the environment since it will be a very large part of the scene I will make sure that it looks good.

Caribbean Research

It is famous for endless blue sky and sunshine. And beaches of pristine white sand, palm trees and torques seas. But what many don’t know is that the Caribbean is created by volcanic forces and also are the target of some of the worst storms on earth. It’s tropical environment is thriving with wild life both on land and at sea. 

The Caribbean Sea contains over 7000 islands and reefs, these can be from just a few meters to many kilometres wide, every island is different. Many of these various islands even have their own unique wildlife. 

Legends of hidden treasures have for a long time attracted travellers to these islands.

There are 17 active volcanos throughout the Caribbean islands, this is the largest number of volcanoes in such a small area in the world. All the ash spread out of these volcanoes are the main reason why the soil has become extremely fertile, resulting in the incredible dense vegetation since just about anything can take root on these islands.

The Caribbean’s volcanic past have caused the mountains to be pushed up which makes them so tall so they can create their own weather. As moist air from the sea rises it forms clouds above the rich forests and provides them fresh water by the help of rain, this makes the Caribbean full of rainforests. 

Nearly all of the Caribbean islands have coral reefs of their shores, some of these because of the Caribbean’s volcanic past, have been pushed up to 300 meters above the sea level which have caused massive networks of limestone caves to appear. These caves act as homes to millions of bats, some islands can inhabit up to 70 different species of bats. 

Moodboards of the Caribbean Environment

The Story of my Environment

This week I also managed to finish the small story I wrote for my environment. I decided to split it up in two parts since my focus on the assets and implementation of the storytelling aspect to the environment will be in BA3b. This story was more just to get an overall idea of the theme I want to go with my cove to keep it in mind while building it.

Part 1

The ‘Slackjaws’… once known as the most respected privateers in the Spanish main were now labelled as criminals, low breeds… Pirates. A loud roar of anger followed by what sounded like a table being flipped came from the captains quarter. The doors slammed open… With a letter in one hand and an almost empty bottle of rum in the other, captain ‘Yorick’ shouts ‘Is this what is to become of the kings men?!’ he gives a loud snort while walking up to the top deck where his crew is waiting. ‘Listen up!’ shouts Yorik and sees his crew, well that is the ones not already staring at him that is, now turns their attention to the captain. ‘As you all may know this letter in my hand, this letter of marque… has now paid its due. As the Spaniards and English have called a truce they have decided that men like us are not needed anymore.’ 

As the captain begins to tore the letter asunder swashbuckler ‘Derrek’ asks ‘So… what happens now captain? We cannot return to port or we’ll be attacked on sight, half our crew have either been killed or abandoned us. What is your plan captain?’ sighs can be heard among the crew as they loose hope. The captain struggles not to share their feelings but if anyone on this ship needs to be alert it’s him. What they need now is a miracle… 

‘I know of a place….’ the crew and it’s captain turns their head to see who spoke those words and there stands an old man who no one have ever seen before. He wears rugged clothes and has eyes that are cloudy as a stormy sky and he doesn’t seem to have much in him left. Captain Yorik shouts to the man ‘Who are you old man and how did you get on board of my ship?!’. The old man smiles and says ‘Who I am doesn’t matter, what matters is that you and your crew needs a location to port and I happen to know of such a place.’ as the old man says this he pulls out a map and gives off a giggle followed by a strong cough. 

‘Would you like to have a peek?’ he says as he rolls open the map on top of a crate. The captain gives off a grunt, but in a lack of better alternatives he walks over to the map to look at the map. ‘Isla de cráneo?’ the captain says while pointing at what seems to be an island with weird symbols around resembling skulls. As he speaks those words some members of the crew gives a gasp of fear. He rises an eye brow while turning to his crew ‘I suppose, you have heard of this island before?’ one of the mean slowly walks forward ‘Y…yes captain’ while nodding in a rapid manner. ‘There are rumours of this island… People say that there is a curse resting upon it’s shores, men that have entered the island have never been seen again. The ships that sail by never dare to even go close to the island.’

The Captain turns to the old man with a questionable look, the man says ‘ And that’s the reason why this is the perfect place for you and your crew! Look at me! I have been to the island and can you see anything wrong with me?!’ the man giggles ‘You are a criminal now, and no man even dear to even go close to the island!’

The captain takes a step back, he mutters for himself while stroking his beard. ‘Crew!’ he shouts. ‘If we were to follow this mans advice we would have a place that we could call our own. I don’t know about you but with the withdrawal of that letter I lost everything I once had. With nothing to loose I say we at least journey to this ‘Isla de cráneo’ in the hope of building a new home. If you do not wish to join me then feel free to leave my ship but know this, we are now wanted men. The next time you enter port you will get either shot or hung’. 

The men look as each other, one nodding after another. ‘Aye!’ one man roars ‘I’m with you Captain!’ another. ‘That’s settled then!’ the captain shouts as he unsheathes his sword and put it against the throat of the old man ‘You are coming with us, and if you are wrong about all of this I will feed you to the sharks’. 

And so, the Slackjaw’s set off to what would end up as their new home, but little did they know of what secrets they would uncover…

Isla de Cranéo = Skull Island