BA3a - Week 8 Summary

BA3a - Week 8 Summary

Task 3

This was the final week to work on Task 3 and I am rather pleased with my result! I do believe that more can be done on the texture i had more time but for being my first asset ever created in this way I think it turned out pretty good! My texture process was a combination of using 3D Coat and Photoshop. Since I had never used 3D coat before this was a new software I had to learn so I followed the awesome tutorial created by ex Blizzard employee Marc Brunet where he goes trough step by step how he creates a hand painted character.

It was super helpful and made me get a basic grasp over how 3D Coat works. However I think I ended up using Photoshop a bit too much but I suspected as much since I have a lot more experience in it. 

To create the base paint material I followed the same example as in the tutorial. First grab the green channel information from the baked normal map, then mix a generated curvature map made in Crazybump with the baked one. By combining these 4 maps + the AO bake the result will be a good base to start the painting and all the information from the zbrush sculpting will be there.

The result of combining all the various maps into one base paint map

Low Poly chest with above texture applied

It was now time to add the paint to it. 3d Coat is a fantastic tool that allows you to paint directly on to the 3d model just like photoshop does with 2d surfaces! 

Finished Texture in 3D Coat

Final render in Marmoset Toolbag 2

Final Texture

In the end I was rather pleased with my result, I do feel however that more time could be spent on the painted texture but due to lack of time it will have to do for now! For my first try with this workflow I have to say it turned out rather well! It was a nice break from making realistic assets and I can definitely see myself creating hand painted assets in the future and hopefully improve my painting skills.

Creative Practice

This week I expanded the cave with another room. After watching the latest Disney title 'Moana' I got really inspired to create a room similar to one of the scenes in the film where there was a waterfall that sort of acted like one of the 'walls' in the cave. It was difficult to find an image of the scene since the film is yet to come out in stores but this is in the same scene.

Cave Scene from Disney's Moana

I started off by creating a rough blockout of the room to then polish and add further detail to it. Here is a early picture of the room.

I definitely noticed right away that I can't continue working on this room until I get the waterfalls more proper looking. So to start off with I again did some further research into how to make waterfalls for video games. To my surprise there aren't a lot out there about this subject. I however managed to gather some knowledge of how other have solved the issue, like this video for instance.

With this in mind I ended up creating my own solution where I created two noise alphas that when in movement will replicate the white shape the water turns into when it's a waterfall.

The following two images are the alphas I will use to replicate above effect.

After creating two materials with these above alphas and applying a panner effect this was the result:

It's a huge improvement since the previous waterfall but still not 100% there. I will improve it further as I progress with the environment. 

Since I lack a object to use as a light source in the cave except putting random scattered lights around I figured I would create a torch model. I tried using a placeholder stick but it ruined most screenshots so created a proper torch model instead. 

High Poly created in Maya

Low Poly with texture created in Substance Painter

As you can tell I saved in on lots of polygons by creating the top using alpha instead of creating each and one of the bits as geometry! The reason for this is because there will be particle effects in there anyway so the player wouldn't see any difference anyhow. Here is how it ended up in engine with the standard fire effect already available in Unreal Engine 4.

To further expand on the environment I created two vines in Speed Tree. I will probably replace the texture of these vines in the future with my own but for now I use a tileable bark texture from Textures.com.

Here is how the environment now look after furthering polishing it and also adding these new assets.