Roof Tiles

These are some Roof Tiles I made. I used an Ambient Occlusion Node, Tile Generator Node and Height Maps for the first time and they are awesome !

Still a lot of work to do. Will add more detail and some light sparkle to the material and see if I can define the gaps to the left and right of each tile some more, bot overall I'm happy with how it's coming together. And ironically the tile texture isn't very tileable just yet.

A simple graph but I plan to expand on it.

Substance Designer

I started learning Substance Designer as I wanted to create my own Physically Based Rendered materials. I watched a couple of tutorials to get me started and for the most part this is pretty basic stuff. No photos were used to create these textures, they were all created from a mixture of filters, modifiers, noises, gradient maps and other nodes within Substance Designer. I have barely scratched the surface but I am planning on learning a lot more over the summer holidays as I want to focus on modelling and texturing for now.

I replicated tiles I have in my bathroom here 

Basic bricks

 Wet Bricks (I can control how wet they look and randomise the water pattern too within Substance Designer, but I can also leave parameters open for an engine user to alter)

 Cartoon Wood (followed tutorial for this one)

 Metal Floor (also followed a tutorial for this one. I think this was the first one I made)

 Red Carpet 

 Basic Water

 Clean Wood Floors (again, tutorial)

Old Wood Floor (used what I learned from the first wood floor and made this)

Tree side project 2

I wanted to make a more realistic tree. Rather than focusing on the overall quality, I wanted to understand the process of making it. From what I learned I would then go on to make another tree, but take my time with the small details.

I modelled the try using reference images (no concept art as not stylised in anyway). I used the Create CV Curve tool, then extruded a cylinder along the curve I drew for the initial shape.
Instead of fitting the main branches to the model (attaching them via vertices etc) I simply modeled them and placed them in the tree. Players won't see that high and there may have been seems from UV's anyway. I made a branch in photoshop with leafs attached which I added to 3D planes and attached to the actual modelled branches.

This is the branch I made in photoshop. It's very basic and ugly as it was only for practise and to see whether the actual method would work. Next time I will make a more relistic branch, but the wood will be thiner and there will be more leafs spread out on it. This way I should be able to bush out the tree using less 3D planes and reduce the poly-count. [edit] I apart from it being a shit branch, I didn't think about using normal maps in their material so it looked really odd in the scene. Should have used algorythimc's  Bitmap2Material.

These are a couple of the trees placed in unreal engine. They look ok for quick trees but no where near what I'd use in an actual game or Uni assignment. But I have the method down so I can refine it now. Depending on whether I make another basic tree that would be repeat countless times in a game, or a Hero Tree of which there would be a couple or even just one, I may sculpt it in Zbrush first.

Tree Side Project 1

I made this tree as a side project to practise Zbrush and Re-topology in maya again

The detail on the tree itself didn't really come out in to well when I did the high to low poly bake. I think I should have added more detail.

Also, once I applied the bark in substance painter, the hight information of the material pretty much killed of any info you could see from the bake. So I have to figure out where I want what amount of detail to come from.. the high poly sculpt or the height information on the textures. They can clash and you can loose out on some nice detail you worked on.

As with my Flint model, I left some pretty harsh edges during the re-topology stage in Maya. it really affects the way the light flows and can give some ugly results. (which can be seen towards the right of the tree)

I think the detail of the rocks came out pretty nicely though.

I used images of branches in photoshop and placed them on planes before attaching them to the modelled branches.

Environment Assets for Production Practise

Working with the animators, we made a small video that showed the furniture in a girls room warp and take a different shape. I made these models for the girls room.

I used Blend Shapes in Maya which allowed you to warp the original asset in to the deformed asset gradually by moving a slider.

Because we weren't working on a game, I felt like I could go crazy with the poly-count, which was a mistake. The assets could have looked identical with a lower poly-count but I just didn't pay much attention to it as I thought it mattered less for animations. Whereas the poly-count can of course be much higher in animations, each polygon has to be rendered so the higher the count the longer the rendering time... which can affect deadlines and also cost more money.

So always keep an eye on the poly-count and know your limits.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUvX-_wHfA4


https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.SixteenSwans.FurrySurvivor&hl=en_GB

First Environment Assets for our Uni Game

These were a couple of assets I created for an art target (basically a screen shot of what the rest of our game should look like). We placed all assets in Unreal Engine along with other assets and textures made by the team and took a screen shot for an assessment. I was fun and a great way of making screen shots that make you believe the rest of the game could exists beyond the frame of the picture. I'll see if I can add it.

The Bridge was a little over complicated for what it was. I should have just used a plane an textured it instead of making every individual plank.

We also didn't really work of concept art which is why the assets don't look cartooney enough. I did everything from reference pictures.

Note to self - Don't work without concept art if you are working towards a particular art style. (ideally try to never work without concept art)

First Character Model (Flint)

This was my first character model. I made him in Zbrush initially. The poly count was in the 100s of thousands.

I did the retoplogy in Maya using the Quad Draw tool. Only worked on half of the models and later copied the other half across and flipped the normals before merging the vertices in the centre. 

I didn't know that you could do the topology on separate body parts at first. Poly Loops were originally carrying through from the face all the way to the legs etc increasing my poly-count. I was able to reduce the polygons substantially by using this method. The animator applies the weight paints in a way that prevents the parts from coming apart during animations. 

I thought I'd get away with the rough topology here, but in the game engine it is really noticeable and something I will have to fix before next term. 

I brought Flints poly-count down to about 7000. He is still pretty dense in places so I am confident in future I can bring it down further.