Week Eleven; Stylized Tree Continued... A Lesson to be learned

Much like the week before, I ended up doing double the work that was actually required. However, instead of the Willow tree I tried to model last week, I started modelling a Japanese Maple tree, purely as I love the forms and colours of that species of tree. Although, even now, in hindsight I see where I had started to go wrong – by somewhat disregarding the style guide. The look for this project was meant to be a sort of happy, medieval Euorpean style, whereas I started off with a Japanese Maple tree, and then moved onto a palm tree. However, I'll continue in what I actually did in the week then conclude the lessons needed to be learned from this exercise.

So, after trying and hastily giving up modelling my Japanese Maple tree (for the deadline was approaching fast), I moved onto modelling something I'd consider easier to do and more effective, as I seemed to be struggling with more conventional tree forms. As the palm tree's form is relatively simplistic, I didn't have too much trouble modelling or texturing the tree, only that I should have cleaned up the bark texture to make it a bit more plain so it'd have a somewhat stylized look about it.

Model with Wireframe & Flatshader.

Model with Wireframe & Flatshader.

Model with Wireframe & Flatshader.

Model with Wireframe & Flatshader.

Looking back on the project now I do wish I would have stuck to my Willow tree and Maple tree as they would have exerted my full skills at this point in time to see what I could do, seeming as I was struggling with them. If I had another chance to do the project I'd have spent a lot more time on polishing the textures and figuring a way to place the leaf alphas so they sit correctly on the model. I should have also gone back and referred to the style guide more often, which would have stopped me modelling a tree which isn't in fit with the style guide.

Final Model

Final Model

Final Model

In the future I'm going to set myself a project to force myself to model and texture the trees which I find challenging; more conventional trees such as oak, maple, willow, etc. with the same tri budget and texture constraints as this project.

Leaf Texture

Bark Texture

Week Ten; The Tree Project

So, quickly after we finished our stylized house project and submitted we had the last two weeks of term to complete two trees to fit into our medieval style village. The idea for this project is to have a better idea for creating organic forms in 3ds max, and as games are heavily populated with them, we start with trees. I admit I did struggle with this project in the first week and had to re-do my tree several times as I was not happy with it whatsoever.

Initially I wanted to model a Japanese style maple tree and a willow tree, but during the first week I encountered problems that I couldn't move past, which meant for the hand-in, I had to change what types of tree I was to model.

Flatshader of my Oak tree model

Flatshader of my Oak tree model

I started the week by trying to model a willow tree, but when it came around to texturing and placing the leaves, I didn't have a large enough tri budget to bulk out the canopy of the tree effectively. Therefore I moved onto modeling something more simplistic with big clumps of leave forms that I could model as one oval with alphas sticking out, whilst keeping with to the style guide – an Oak tree. The process started with a mood board; picking out forms of the branches, trunk and leaves. After this was completed I went straight into modelling, and in hindsight it was probably wiser to draw up some concepts and figure out how I was going to model these trees whilst conforming to the tri budget.

Areas of the oak tree look sparsely populated with leaves - should have populated the underside of the canopies
as that is where the player would have been looking at most.

I used the spline tool to model the trunk and pulled around verts to make the tree look somewhat stylized. I also used the spline tool to create a branch, and duplicated this branch, scaled it and rotated it to create the others. We were allowed three texture sheets, two for tiling textures and an alpha texture sheet. Although I utilised all three, using the tiling textures for the bark and the blocky mass of the leaves under the alphas, I feel I should have tried to spend more time stylizing the textures.

Undercoat leaves texture and birds nest detail.

Tiling bark texture

Oak leaf alpha

If I could have done this week again I would have just continued modelling the Willow tree and just have made it aesthetically nicer and spent more time on creating the alphas and texturing and modelling rather than having to rush the Oak tree because I ditched the Willow tree.

I'm definitely going to have to revisit this project and spend more time on modelling trees in my spare time as I am thoroughly unhappy with the outcome and it's vital to improve on modelling organic forms.

Final Render

Final Render

Week Nine; Polishing of the Stylized House

    Monday came around and in our lecture instead of handing in our project on Tuesday we had one week to continue polishing our finished model to make it look even better. This worked well in my favour as I could spend more time and care on my textures and make them tile better.

    So the start and end of the week basically entailed many iterations of my textures, making the cloth alpha and brushing up the details on my detail texture map. I'm glad we had this week in polishing otherwise I'd of been quite unhappy with the result.

    I also had the chance to fiddle with it in Unreal engine, where we were placing the model when completed with the other house assets our team had made. Unreal presented little problems, the only one I struggled with is the fact that I couldn't get rid of the Waterwheel space filler in the engine as It was attached to the foundations for the Watermill asset. However, I'm quite happy with the result. I used the extra time for texturing to look back at the style guide and correct any errors in the colour palette I used.

Alpha Channel of Cloth

    The rest of the time used was just editing the base mesh to cut down on the tri count and make the model more economical. At the end of the week I was quite pleased with my model and really enjoyed the whole project.

    If I could go back and re-do the project to make it better I would have definitely made better space

of the foundations in unreal engine, so the asset would be a better fit when I put it into engine. The only other thing I'd correct is my unwrap as it is incredibly messy.

    Here are the screenshots of the finished asset in engine:

Week Eight; Stylized House Continued.

    Continuing on from Week Seven, I quickly modeled my house in 3DS Max, using the orthographics I made last week, not adding any detail just using boxes. I used the screenshots from this process to put them back into Photoshop and paint over them to figure out where I was going to put some of the finer details and how it'd all look when I'd done that process.

     This helped me model the house as well as I had a better idea of where everything fitted in. I do have to say it took me around three iterations of modelling before I was happy with the forms of the building.

    After all of this had been completed and I'd done the main forms of the building and some details of windows and timber struts, I went back into the house and decided to add some more areas of interest, like a cloth roof for the porch and some barrels full of flour, just to make the Watermill a more believable structure.

    Creating the cloth was good fun, I made a custom box for the volume of the area that the cloth was going to drape off of the wooden struts, I then used a turbosmoother to give the box more tris to collide with the plane that I used as a cloth, thus making the drooping effect you see on the model.

    I then unwrapped the model into 4 different UVW Templates and made all but two texture maps used were tile-able. I did end up finishing my plaster texture and my wood texture this week but I fell ill on the last couple of days and couldn't do my cloth alpha map or details texture to the finish that I expected though.

   

Week Seven; Stylized House Project

    Hello! I’m joining you this week with a whole new project: The Stylized Village Project! So the brief of this project is we have to create four assets for our village: House, Character, Tree and Rock (which we did last week) in a stylized art style. For the next two weeks we’re going to be tackling the house.

    So for this project, we’re also going to be assigned groups which we work in, and each one of us in the group is assigned a house. I was assigned the Watermill of the village, so for this week I’m going to be concepting what my Watermill is going to look like.

    We were given a style guide for our villages, which generally follows a happy Disney theme, using warm colours and soft edges with wedged and curved shapes in the design.

    Before I started concepting, I wanted to find out how a Watermill worked and research what it did in it's community. So during my research I found out that the Watermill is using the kinetic energy of the water to relay this into a grinding motion to grind the grain harvested by farmers into flour, used by the bakers for bread. The Watermills use gravity to carry the ground grain down the Watermill to the different processes they undergo to turn it into flour; Therefore my design had to be tall to make sure that the Watermill could actually work.

    To start off my concepting I decided to use the “bash-kit” technique in photoshop, which starts off with referencing parts of the house I’m designing – I looked at key features of Tudor houses – and then layer them together to make a quick impression of what the house may look like.

    However I wasn’t too happy with the outcomes of my bash-kit so I decided to go through the route of silhouettes and value studies. Therefore I painted some quick silhouettes, picked the ones that could potentially read as Watermills and picked out the values and differentiated the walls from each other.

That concludes the work from this week. I'll join you next week for the continuation of the Watermill!

Week Six; Stylized Rock Continued...

    This week marks the continuation of the Stylized Rock project, and my modelling and texturing of my rock design!

    So first I picked the design I wanted, the “happy” rock, with the use of greens and warm light browns. After this, to start off this week I started modelling in 3DS Max. This process wasn’t too strenuous; I used a symmetry modifier to get the basic silhouette out, and then pulled out some vertexes and faces to make the form organic, instead of a uniform symmetry (which wouldn’t conform to an actual rock).

I then proceeded to move into ZBrush and sculpt out an extra layer of texture which I then baked into a normal map, just to give some extra definition of the forms.

 

    After the modelling stage I moved onto the unwrapping. To unwrap my rock I made a seam down to separate the front from the back, then cut out the gem with a seam and then pelt mapped the rock. The downside of this is that I left a visible seam on the model, so I should have found a better way of unwrapping, however I did play around with the different ways of seaming the unwrap but nothing was seeming to work so I had to keep it as it was.

    After this I moved onto texturing which didn’t take too long. I rendered out a hand painted rock texture and then used the clone stamp tool to cover the template. This left visual marks so I went over with a chalk brush in photoshop to blend all the lines together to make it seem like a seamless texture.

    In visual design this week we made a visit to the Guild Hall museum in Leicester, where we had around two hours of walking around and photographing the museum to aid our reference in starting the Stylized Village project in Week Seven. I made a few studies from life and I plan on doing a finalized painting in photoshop to submit to the museum!

    That’s all for this week, I’ll join you in Week Seven where we start our stylized village project!

Week Five; Stylized Rock

    The beginning of Week Five, me and my first year peers are set a new project: “The Stylized Rock Project”. The brief was we had to concept, model and hand-paint the textures for our own designed rock in two weeks! It’s only been five weeks and we’re already concepting, which I found out to be quite the hard task.

First iteration of silhouettes

Clean-up of First silhouettes and adding form detail

    I started off the week making silhouettes for the rock concept and filling them in with value to see if I could get the right form for my rock. On the first couple of iterations of this process, my silhouettes got feedback and I was told I should look at using boulders as reference instead of cliff faces, as this gives a better sense of scale and form. So, on my second iteration I scrapped my previous mood board and references and started a fresh, completely new silhouette and value studies.

Chosen silhouettes to move onto value pass of First iteration silhouettes

Gradient overlay with highlights of forms

Detailed value pass

Begining of colour pass, until I found out my forms were misleading, which I then scrapped.

    So here are my newest iterations of rocks, using bigger, blockier forms as to give a sense of the smaller scale - as the rock was meant to be about 5ft tall. I’ve also made four different groups of mood/colour pallet: happy, dark, frozen and lava, to give each rock as much variety in look as possible.

Second iteration of silhouettes

Value pass of chosen silhouettes from this iteration

Colour and mood pass of the chosen value studies.

    

    Sadly I didn’t get on to modelling this week, I’ve only been able to concept as I personally struggle with it, and it takes me a long time to flesh out the ideas, colours and forms that I want in photoshop. However, on Monday I will start week 6 and get a start on my modelling!