End of week4

After the 4th and what was supposed to be the final week I have finished all of the retopology, UVing, and normal map baking. Last post I mentioned that I wanted to get all of this done by last Friday but alas it is now Tuesday. Below is a couple of screen grabs from UE4. I spent most of today importing and assigning all the texture maps to the meshes in the scene here. Obviously it is far from complete. I'm hoping another two weeks will get me there (if not very close). I've learned a lot so far and I want to put some of my new skills to the test for my next project. But for now I will continue to try and finish this piece.

I know it still doesn't look like much but once I get some texturing done and all the lighting set up I think it will turn out nicely. Right now I just have the ambient occlusion bake as my diffuse as a placeholder. I did all the normal maps out of Zbrush and then used nDo for a cavity map, AO, and spec conversions. Not sure how useful they will all be in the end but I'm just kind of playing with my workflow for now to see what works. I tried some xnormal today but I feel like I'm not ready to try and learn a whole new program right now. It seemed way to slow to manually set up all the cages but maybe next time when I don't have like 50+ meshes to bake.

For this week I want to focus on getting the lighting all set up along with the sky and and ground looking nice. I have a few ideas on how to do that but since I don't know much about Unreal 4 I will have some learning to do. Also I will be out of town this weekend so I will have to make up for that in the next few days.

Oh before I forget here is a comp of a few of the AO texture bakes. I figure it looks nicer that seeing a bunch of wireframe UV sets. This is four of the 7 that I have.

Retopology and UV's

I made the choice earlier on that I wanted a fairly high res meshes for the low poly surfaces in order to capture all the organic forms and silhouettes, especially in the vine wall pieces. Below is the progress I've made this week. I feel I've been working very hard but I clearly didn't even come close to finishing with all the the sculpt like I had wanted to by now. I feel like I'm taking way too long to do this part of the project and I may have to rethink my process once I'm finished. I feel like I'm getting pretty quick with UV's but my retopoing is slow as hell. I picked up a trial of 3D-Coat a few days ago and that seems to have sped things up a tad; I think I might purchase the student version when my 30 days are up.

I'm giving myself another few days to finish this section of the project and I hope I can start texturing by Friday at the latest. That means that I won't get done by the end of the month but I still want to see things through to the end. I imagine I will get caught up with the texturing process as well so it may be a while yet before I can show a finished product. We'll see...

This is just a couple quick renders I did in Maya with the wireframes below each. I'm thinking that while I really will catch all the detail I would need once I apply the normals/textures, I went overboard with my polycount. Right now I'm sitting at about 75k tris for everything here. That should be a little over half of the entire thing. That's probably what took me so long. No sense in dealing with it now though, I would rather push through since the hard part is done. The top shells shouldn't take too long anyway. Though some of them still need some attention in ZBrush....

After Week 2 of Sculpting

This what I have right now. It's not completely fleshed out but I like how it is as it stands right now. My main goal this week is to get everything retoplogized and UVed. There are some small details I would like to add by the end but for now this will all have to do. The "wall" behind the vines will be replaced and I'll give it some glow and color so I don't have to model the inside. I want to be able to place this into Unreal and be able to walk around and up close to it. I don't think some of the models have as much detail as I would like but like I said that will have to wait.

One thing I don't really like is how some of the top shells turned out a little "lumpy," for lack of a better term. I fixed some of the edges but I will have to go into it a little more before I UV the rest of it. Anyway here is a comp of the front, back, top and some other details.

Week 1 Renders

After the first week of this model I did make some progress but not as much as I would have liked. There is still a lot of modeling to be done before I start retopo and texturing. The bottom shot is of the front of the building while the top is the back. I isolated soem of the vine pieces for easier viewing as well. Even though the concept piece is only one shot of the front I decided to take some liberties with it. It's hard to make out all the little details in the concept so I kind of made my own thing with it. That's actually what took the most time this week; trying to figure out what to do with the back, etc. For the vines I just used insert tubes brush but looking back I think I could have gotten quicker results and better control with ZSpheres.

I hope to get the rest of the sculpting done this week and start retopo next Monday. That shouldn't take too long but I'm debating whether to try and use 3D-Coat for it. I'm intending on getting an academic licence but I don't want to slow down my workflow for this project from learning it. I want this whole piece done and game ready inside of UE4 by the end of the month. So this time around I will probably just do it in Maya. Anyway here is a comp of the renders. Be aware this is NOT textured at all, I just threw in some colors to give it some interest and to differentiate all the parts.

Shell/Moss/Home Thing...

This blog will act as a catalog of all my 3D works in progress. Most of this stuff won't be finished work. My goal here is to post once a week of my current progress.

Since this is my first post I don't have too much to show just yet. Right now I'm working on a shell type building. I found the concept below at http://drawcrowd.com/huoniao0029fb

At the top right is the one I'm working from. So far this is what I have for a blockout:

I know it's not much to look at for now but I'm just getting the basic shapes and forms down.I'm not quite there yet. Will take me another day or two to get the top shell parts where I want them. Once I have that down I'll move onto the walls and arches.