Blueprints

Though I hadn't originally planned on doing any Blueprinting for my UE4 scene (mainly because I hadn't touched it before and I found the idea of using them kinda scary...), I did actually end up using a couple of them in the end! This blog post is gonna go through what I used, how I did them and most importantly what they did. :)

The first blueprint I did is to do with my happy weed character. For those of you who missed my last blog post, this is him:

In my last blog post I also shared the link to a vine of him dancing (which can be found here), and in THIS blog post I'm going to explain how I made that happen. Here we go...

 Being surrounded by UE4 geniuses on a Games Design course is a useful thing, and along the way I've heard of various tips and techniques that can be used to bring a scene to life. One of these things being a 'SimpleGrassWind' which does exactly what it suggests - makes grass blow calmly in the wind within a scene. I tried this with my weed character, though for some reason it didn't work. Okay. Back to the drawing board.

So after watching some useful tutorials on Youtube I found another way to do it, and here it is:

Super simple! The 'Panner' and 'Sine' are used to decide which way I want my material to sway (on the X/Y axis, or both if needs be) and how much I want it to do so. Then I just connect it to 'World Position Offset' with my texture connected to 'Base Colour' and there we go! 

While it's obviously one of the simplest things to do in UE4, it's also my first time using blueprinting so I'm overly happy about it and the result created. I just can't get over the fact that my little character is swaying, it's great. :D 

The next blueprint I did is a little bit trickier - I made my own water shader.

I was originally just using UE4's default water for my scene as I didn't know how to make my own, but it really didn't fit with the art style of the rest of my assets and stuck out quite a bit. Here are some shots of the scene with default water so you can see what I mean:

 

It wasn't terrible but it wasn't great, so I needed to do something about it. I started by creating a tileable water texture to use, so here's that:

I kept it simple because I didn't want to end up spending a tonne of time on a texture that then didn't work and couldn't be used. I did have the intention of going back to work on it some more once I had made it work, but in the end I just kept it the way it was. I may go back and add some more to it at some point, but for now I'm satisfied with the results. Speaking of which, here they are:

I feel that this water works much better with my scene as it follows a similar style. The UE4 default isn't bad but it much better suited for realistic pieces - something my scene certainly isn't! 

Finally, here's the actual blueprint I created for it: 

As you can see it's a little bit more complicated than the previous blueprint, but the idea is similar. 

The two 'Texture Samples' are attached to 'Panner' nodes which make the texture pan on an X/Y axis. The 'TexCoord's are there to help resize each texture. By making both textures different sizes and having them pan in different directions, the illusion of moving water is created.

The 'DepthFade' and 'Fresnel' nodes are there to add the effect of water hitting another object - if you look at the rock character and its surrounding area in the picture above, you can see that the water looks different where it is hitting the rock mesh. This is because of those nodes - they make it so that the water texture reacts depending on whether or not it is hitting another mesh.  

I found creating these blueprints to be extremely useful for my scene and it certainly helped calm my nerves about using them quite a lot! I'd like to explore blueprinting some more in my next project to see how much I can bring a scene to life, so that's something I'll be considering. 

Overall I'm happy with how these turned out and I think I will forever be amused by my swaying weed friend. 

He's just having such a lovely time, it's great. <3

Green

Over the last few days I've been making strong progress on my scene. Included in that progress is the creation of a few assets, so I'm going to be talking about them in this blog post. :)

The first asset I made was this little guy:

There's an interactive model of him on Sketchfab if you'd like to take a closer look and see more sides to him! 

I'm quite happy with him as he remained fairly similar to the original concept piece I created. Here it is so that you can compare!:

Then finally for this little guy - and possibly one of my proudest achievements - I made him dance! Here's a little vine showing him in action if you'd like to see!


Next up is a bush I made for my scene. Here's an image of it:

And as always there's an interactive version on Sketchfab that can be viewed here! 

Completing these two assets means that I have enough to create a full scene now, so the next step I've been taking is making the actual scene. I have a lot of development to post for it so will be giving it a blog post of its own, so look out for that in the coming days if you're interested in seeing how it's going! 

Thank you so much for your time and have a lovely day. :)

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