Introduction
Uni has started and we were assigned to choose a preferrable specialism and create a project based on it. I chose environment art because I liked the idea of making a modular kit and I'm also heading into environment art in general.
I was inspired to make a British countryside village. I chose this because there is plenty of influence within convinient range. Other than that I think there is a lot of potential for it to make a good looking level.
Planning (brief & art bible)
I had a perfect image in mind of what I wanted to make but the mind is often wrong so I collected lots of images of UK village houses & street ways. There were certain attributes I was looking for. Mainly to suite the style of traditional cottage-esc housing. Explored certain decorative features that convey that you are in Britain. Early 20th century to avoid modern complex details like cables and macdonalds.
Research
Along with the images I also took some photos myself, I was surprised there were good examples nearby that convey what I'll be making.
I looked at a few videos as well.
Everyone's Gone To Rapture Behind the Scenes shown me their intentions and the atmosphere they went for. I also got to see some close-ups of the houses.
Everyone's Gone to Rapture video
Material tutorials, I used the brick tutorial at some point and it really helped. I will learn from it again. Some others may help as well.
Designer brick tutorial
Cobblestone wall tutorial
Designer playlist
16th October
This is the first time I came back to the blog since the first week of the project, reason being is that I was too busy with the work at hand. Ideally writing the blog while travelling is the best solution as I'm doing now.
The Process
The second week was all modelling. My first intention was to create very warped house parts to avoid any major sharpness to the final piece. However that was soon postponed as I was told thats not very effective as it goes against the point of a modular kit. It would have also been difficult to allign each asset and would have made up for a lot of excess time.
So I went for straight simple shapes.
The modelling took about a week, I finished off with smaller props. One of which was the plant which I made using an improvized method. I had small planes randomized using Mash function to create leaves. This was quick but needs tweaking as many planes are visibly hovering.
The next week was uv's. At this stage I had been consistently behind schedule by a few days. I organized all my assets into trimsheets. At first I had all my uv shells as tight as possible with some tileable shells out of the uv space. I then re-did all my uv's as having shells out of 0 to 1 space would need more tidying than necessary so I re-arranged my shells. There was more empty space in some trimsheets now.
For the materials I started off by making some simple stucco paint walls in 3 different variations; brick, rough (grainy) and generic flat wall. For the most part they were just normal maps and the other outputs like roughness and base colours were added later in the Unreal material editor. I did this because its faster and easier but you could argue I could have made up a better quality material with all the Designer outputs in place.
I spent the most time doing the old brick material as it was hard to recreate from the reference image because it had a lot of complexity to it.
The textures were made in Substance Painter, I prepared high poly's for baking to specific assets and made to different Painter projects for highpoly baking and non-highpoly.
In the last two weeks I created the Unreal scene which would be my street level. At first I was mainly testing out how well all assets fit together and I did have to remake some to fix some errors like gaps and wrong material sets. I tested out materials.
I then really sat down and actually attempted to create something worthy with the kit. Once I vertex painted and lit the scene I really started to feel more confident with my work.
The problem with straight edges was relatively dealt with through vertex painting and placing decorative assets around them. For example the edges of the house roofs now have planks, gutters and ceramic plates.
With the flat triange at the end of the bay window roof I vertex painted some moss to blend the hard transition between the roof and the wall materials.
Overall I am happy with the fact that it looks like a British village and complies with my original intentions.
Some more detail like decals and singular props could really improve the scene.
The level scenery could be further advanced with trees.
Today was the deadline and I've added most of what I wanted. Overall I'm glad that the kit can make something descent for a videogame.
Small decorative assets are pretty much mandatory to cover up the sharp edges, they really complete the level.
If I had an extra week then I would re-texture more materials and trimsheets. Add emissive lights to the lamp bulbs. Redo the decals and populate the scene more.
The bay window may have too much edgeware to the point that it looks stylized from far away and unappealing from close up.
I could have organized my textures more and put more effort into my materials, some materials may feel incomplete.
There are certain things I didn't add like stone fence asset, cobblestone material, pub sign decal and window parallax.
I also thought of adding window emissive decals and adding physical ivy.
Another approach I could have took is make fewer assets but with more going on, so instead of a plane wall there being extra inbuilt features.
Theres many singular assets but you can make a lot of varied houses in one area with them.
No comments:
Post a Comment