Building Bridges

Or in this case, just the one because it's all I needed. ;)

The next prop I've got for my scene is a wooden bridge. Luckily I had this left over from the Ukie Game Jam I took part in (blog post soon to come with more on that!), so it didn't require much extra work outside of texturing.

Hopefully I'll have a little river in my scene by early next week (crosses fingers), so it's useful to have a bridge to use in order to stop your toots getting wet! 

Anyway, here's the bridge:

I've also put the model onto Sketchfab, so if you'd like to have a look at an interactive 3D version then there you go!

UE4 Test

With a few assets made I thought it'd be better to put them into UE4 sooner rather than later. There'd be nothing more annoying than finishing a bunch of assets and having none of them work or render the way they need to! 

For this test I added the rock family, trees, and also tested out a grass texture that I had created. Here are a few screenshots:

 

 I'm happy with how they all look, so now it's time to get cracking on the environment and make it so that it can actually be walked around in! :D I'm excited to get this done, and of course will be posting progress on this blog as I go along. For more frequent updates please be sure to follow me on Twitter @TeaAndMonsters, as I am a lot more active there!

Baking Trees

Hello! I have a slight backlog of blog posts to update on, so some of this work has been done for a little while now - I just haven't had the time to post about it! I'm going to talk a bit about the process of these creations as I feel that I learned quite a lot while making them, so I've decided to dedicate a blog post to each piece. This one is going to be about trees - how exciting! 

I began making the tree for my scene by blocking out a default shape in Maya, and then sculpting over it in Zbrush to add more details. Here's the result of that sculpt:

 

I love sculpting in Zbrush, it feels so natural and fun. I was never one for being good at sculpting with actual clay, so it's nice that there's an alternative to make me feel as though I'm at least slightly capable of using it. ;)

Now because I sculpted this guy in ZBrush, the polycount was high. Extremely high. Too high for a single tree let alone a tree that needs to be placed in the scene many times kinda high. So I had to bake it. 

I hadn't baked anything in Maya since roughly second year, so it was interesting to get back into doing so. I'm quite happy to say that I did remember most of the process, though! 

So after baking this guy onto a lower poly version, I ended up with this:

 

As you can see, most of the detail on the tree's bark is gone, though the leaves still look more or less the same, which is good! This took my tree down from 88624 faces (ouch) to a much nicer 3395.

Then it was time for my favourite part - the painting! I used 3DCoat (which is a blessing to us all) to paint directly onto the model, which was a joy as always. I applied the texture to both trees so that you can see what they look like in colour side by side:

The high poly version is on the left, while the low poly version is on the right. :)

The real significant difference is the amount of detail in the tree's bark, though honestly I don't see that as much of an issue. The lower poly version still looks like a tree, and the UV map still reads as a tree, so that's what matters! 

Here's the UV set so that you can see the painting on its own:

 And then finally something I found out entirely by accident... Apparently Photoshop has a 3D option??? Am I the only one who didn't know this? Anyway, this is what the tree looks like in Photoshop. In 3D. Amazing:

That's all I have on trees for now, though I do have another blog post incoming with screenshots of an actual scene that you can see them in, so look out for that if you're interested! 

Thanks for reading and have a lovely day~

This Family Rocks!

I've used the title pun across 4 different websites now so I can finally say that I promise to never use it again. ;)

Been a little while since my last update and in that time I've gotten a fair bit done, so what I'm going to do is split my progress into a few different blog posts so that they don't get too long. :) As the title suggests, I'm gonna start off with a family of rocks that I made.

I started off sculpting one of them in ZBrush which was quite an easy process. Rocks aren't that complex in shape so it didn't take long at all. Here's a picture:

He's just happy to be here really! 

Up to this point all was going well! I got him textured to a standard I was happy with, got his normals sorted out and all that jazz - all I had to do was put him into Maya and bake the high poly onto a low poly version. This is where I started to get a few problems. :( 

Since I had sculpted the whole thing in ZBrush, the polycount was preeeetty high. Ridiculously high. I don't want to talk about it levels of high. So when it came to trying to reduce those polys it was a bit of a pain. I had done this with a tree and had no issues at all with it, so I assumed it was going to be the same simple process. Oh how wrong I was!

The rest of his body was fine but because I had sculpted his face into the model it was causing a few issues. Lowing his polys would work to a certain point and then just mess up completely, and in turn refused to bake onto a lower poly version. :( 

So with a heavy heart (and some useful advice from Jim) I decided it was time to just go back to the basics and make him in Maya instead. Here's the result of that:

He's a little more blocky than the ZBrush version but overall I think he came out pretty well. I also cheated a little and used the UV map from the original, then applied it to the new model and painted over that to save some time. Here's his UVs so you can get a look at the painting:

With the first rock done it was time to make his family! This was a much faster process when done just in Maya, so thank you Jim for making me see sense! Here they are all together having a good time:

I wanted them to be a range of different shapes so that they're easily distinguished from all angles. My plan is to use them in my upcoming scene and have them having a picnic or something. I was originally going to separate them across the environment, but I can't quite get myself to split them up now! 

The whole family are up on Sketchfab, so if you'd like to get a closer look at them you can do so by clicking this link! 

Finally, here are their UV maps too - just for continuity. ;) 

That's all I'm going to write about these rocks for now. I'll post more about them when it comes to putting them into a scene. :) 

Thank you so much for reading and have a lovely day!

Log blog

Hopefully my last blog post on logs for a while, for the sake of my own sanity if anything. ;)

I finished the second ZBrush log I was working on in my last blog post. I finished it up by putting it into 3D Coat and painting on it, so here's the result of that:

I also put the model onto Sketchfab so if you'd like to have a look at the full thing and spin it around and stuff then the link is here! 

The second log related thing I've done is go back and repaint some of the concepts that I originally posted before I began to model. It's quite amazing to see the difference a few extra days using a program can do, because the difference in quality is quite evident. Here's a picture:

(The one on the left was my first try, one on the right is the second try just in case it isn't clear, which I hope it is...) 

For now I'm going to focus on making some quick scenes to try and get quicker and improve my 3D skills. I honestly just really need to move on from this part of my project because it's been too long. :'D I'll come back to him sometime, but for now I need a break.

That's all for this entry, thanks for reading and have a nice day! <3

Growing Slowly

It's been a couple of weeks since my last blog entry, so I have quite a lot to talk about!

Since my last post I've been working with ZBrush to try and bring a tree stump to 'life'. I've made 2 separate attempts at it, and I'll explain why...

Here's the first one that I made:

Looking back on it now, I can understand why people weren't really registering it as a tree stump. Let's look at a picture of an actual stump for reference:

Notice the issue? It's the bark - it doesn't grow horizontally around a stump, it grows vertically up as that's how the tree grows. Now with that in mind, here's the second tree stump I modelled:

I think this one reads much better as a hollowed out stump, but I do still have a little way to go with it. It's also tricky to tell how convincing it'll truly be without texturing it, so I need to do that next.

For now I want to go back to some concepts - I've spent way too long on tree stumps and I need to get moving with this project so that I can make what I actually set out to make! 

Thanks for reading and have a nice week. :)

Friendly Treestumps

Since my last post I've been working on some tree stump designs. They're the first characters that I want to try modelling for my scene so I wanted to spend some time desinging a few different stumps that I could try out.

Here are the sketches that I started off with:

Josh suggested that I try Paint Tool Sai to create these, which I hadn't even considered. :'D Sai feels more like you're actually painting onto a canvas, and this is something that I really want to apply to my work. So rather than working on them in Photoshop, I've taken on the challenge of trying Sai. Here's the first tree stump to go through the process:

I feel happier with the texture that this image gives off, so I'll definitely be sticking to Sai for the other designs too. I'll be getting them finished over the next few days and will post them when I'm done. :)