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.