3D Art Week 14 - Mountains and Skydome

Scheduling things this week was even harder than usual because of the break, but I managed to finish this assignment in time...  First, I finally sculpted and texturing my interactable skull object.  Next, I used World Machine for the first time to create a proper set of mountains/terrain, exported the maps and mesh from there, did some additional sculpting in ZBrush, and textured it all in Substance Painter to try and give it a more stylized look (as opposed to the more realistic original texture from World Machine).  Then, I made a custom skydome (this took a lot more trial and error than expected, and I'm not completely happy with the result so it will take some more iteration I think.)  Lastly, I addressed the critiques from last week as best I could.

Last week's critiques:

-player start: blue line should be at floor level

-get rid of white outlines on grass

-desaturate grass (desaturation node in the material editor)

-make grass a bit smaller

-more variation in flower color

-cracks in the medium rocks are too dark

-skull not interactable (fell halfway through rock) - make sure to test

3D Art Week 13 - Pillar Sculpting Part 2

This week, I started the sculpting process from the beginning and re-did the textures for my column.  Based on the feedback from last week, I decided it would have been more work to try and continue working from the previous sculpt, especially with all the edge wear I had put on the model.  Turns out making a stylized/simpler sculpt is actually harder than putting a lot of details onto it to create a more realistic look!  I also worked more on the ground texture painting, foliage placement, and started proxies for the mountains in the distance.

Critiques from last week:

Column Feedback:

-more wear/highlight on edges (flatten edges, more crisp edges, smooth edge highlight); try beveling game-res more and/or push lightness on curvature on texture
-more cracks toward the top like the one at the front bottom
-more intense chips 
-less noise on the pipes, flatter look

Other:
-make foliage more unevenly spread (less uniform)
-pull down overall lighting to focus more on manmade bulbs

Common Art Week 13 - White Boxing Complete

This week, my team worked on finishing up proxies and creating more concept art.  I made proxy models for the Mad Hatter, Dormouse, Cheshire Cat, and Singing Flowers, as well as ten basic food proxies and some other set-dressing items.  Some of the character concept art is not complete yet, so the character proxies may still be updated.  After placing them all in our game scene, I made some simple materials for everything.  I also edited the looping background music for the level (we might be replacing it with custom music I record later on).  Despite two of our four members being sick this week, we still accomplished everything we set out to do, which I'm very happy about!

3D Art Week 12 - Pillar Sculpting Part 1

This is the first time I'm genuinely happy with how my VR environment is looking!  I finished the high-res sculpt of the pillar in ZBrush, then baked the maps on the low-res version (with UVs I made in Maya) in Substance Painter.  I put some preliminary textures on the model just so it can be displayed in Unreal Engine, but I might still work on them next week.  There were some issues with how the textures were showing up in Unreal Engine, but I figured out how to fix them with some manual tweaks to the metallic channel and sphere reflection capture.  I also remade all the foliage and populated the environment a lot better than before, and even got the wind to work so it feels really nice to just look at all the flowers waving in the wind.

Critiques from last week:

-rotate directional light even more

-skull interactable still not working

-add more density to foliage (4-5k on foliage brush)

-grass too saturated

-lighten rock color

-more moss around grass

Common Art Week 12 - Custom Art Style Guide and Proxy Development

Our team finally met with Chris this week, so we were able to really flesh out our concepts, characters, and proposed mechanics.  As usual, we also had a team meeting to talk about the week's goals and divide up work.  I made a Jira project so that we can start organizing our tasks in the future (and getting used to Jira before Capstone).  The main thing I did this week was proxy modeling most of the items in our Mad Tea Party scene.  I also put a lot of work into the presentation this week to further unify the look and feel, and with everyone's help we are starting to add custom art to help in that regard.  I'm including the slides here that I was solely responsible for, but I wrote the text for many other slides, including all the character slides.

3D Art Week 11 - Vegetation

This week, I worked on adding foliage to my environment using a technique that allows for low-res geometry in a scene through flat cards with textures on them.  Sadly, I think the proxy models from week 1 look better than what I managed to do with these final grasses, so I still kept some of those in for reference (will test for performance and might have to remove them later).  The wind I added is not working yet, but eventually the grasses will also be swaying in the breeze.

Last week's critiques that I also worked on:

-fix nav mesh
-check player height-check 

-make sure interactable is in the scene

-adjust sun to be a bit higher, maybe just override
-update ground texture so it matches Orb's style better
-increase groundplane texture resolution
-work on setdressing with help of foliage brush

Common Art Week 11 - Art Style Discovery

This week, the team focused on finding images that represent the look and feel we want for our VR game (working title, Mad Tea Party).  We used Photoshop filters and effects to try and unify the presentation, as well as researching different fonts and creating a custom slide background for the presentation.  This week, finding the images for the slides was more collaborative, but we were each responsible for the final pass of the same slides as last time.

I organized and led the meeting, and mostly worked on character design ideas this round, adding a few images to Mood and Inspiration as well.  I think the biggest challenge was trying to make the images look unified but not too similar in color or monochrome.

Character concepts: characters resembling roles, unsettling eyes

Alice (the player): seems innocent but can be unpredictable

Hatter: very patchwork appearance with clothes and skin, heterochromia

March Hare: scruffy fur and cybernetic eyes, shifty

Dormouse: dangerous aura and empty eyes (missing an eye)

Cheshire: taxidermy-like appearance, mouth can open very wide, blacklight glow

Flowers: disturbing shapes and human faces wreathed in petals

3D Art Week 10 - Ground/Modular Rock Set

For this week, I worked on all the fixes from last week's in-class critique, as well as sculpting and texturing the ground plane and rock set.  I ran into a few issues, mostly involving UVs (or lack thereof) on the sculpts, but I've solved every issue with some help from my peers and worked out a pipeline that I was able to use for the later assets.  I found it fairly easy to make the rocks in Orb's style, but I'm not sure the texture on the ground plane quite matches...

Notes from the first critique session:

-make sure there is a nav mesh

-make sure ground plane has collision

-make super simple version of ground plane to use for collision

-only have one level in folder on Perforce

-check on player start height, align ground plane with grid

-decimate in ZBrush to maybe 2000 polys for large rock, 1500 for medium, 1000 for small

-make more of a visual path for player to get up to the monument

-move skull closer to player start, check scale to make sure it fits in the hole

-make sure skull is interactable 

-round out corners of play space so it's not so square

-flatten top of space where monument sits

-play with fog levels and atmosphere, create clear lighting scenario 

-populate grass/plants with foliage brush