Cube World - Digital Art Practice Week 11

This week I added some finishing touches and completed my cube world. 

I cleaned up everything further and added a simple background. The constrast of the buildings with a greener background was something I picked up from numerous references and from real life architecture that I've seen before. 

I added a Multiply layer to apply some more distinct cast shadows on top of what I already had.

After painting in some texture and some additional lights, I had my finished product as seen below.

I also painted one more material, which is a far better version of the first brick material I made three months ago. 

After completing work on my project., I created some more thumbnails for potential materials I can do in the future. 

Overall, this project has taught me the importance of separating my work into different layers, and has also shown me some of my shortcomings that I wasn't aware of. I had more trouble than I expected at the start with the lineart, and since I didn't really know what I was doing with layer modes besides Multiply and Overlay, I feel like there might have been some lost potential. In my future projects I indend to face these challenges head on.

House Project Week 5 - 3D Game Production Week 11

  This week I finished up my project by organizing everything and exporting it into unreal engine.

First of all I renamed all of my assets to more understandable names.

I checked my tri count and optimized further by removing geometry that wouldn't be visible. I ended up with just under the tri count limit. 8000 tris for my main house, and 7000 more for my unique props.

I exported my project from 3dsmax into Unreal Engine in order to finalize the project. 

I grouped materials, textures and my objects into their individual groups to make everything more organized and understandable. This made the project much easier to work with as well.

I optimized some lighting, added a player spawn, took render shots, and further cleaned up my model.

House Project Week 4- 3D Game Art Production Week 10

 This week I worked on improving my textures, and on creating unique assets that would give my house more identity. 

In this trim sheet I included all the main materials I would be using. I made sure to use every material in multiple places; the brick is used for the chimney as well as the stairs; and every plank is used in multiple places. 

I also repainted the textures from previous weeks as the quality did not satisfy me. I picked better references this time and spent an adequate amount of time on them. I was much more satisfied with the result and decided to keep these textures.

                                            

                                     

Since my house is also a butcher shop, I added carcasses of meat, and some sausages. I put these on large pieces of cloth and those on tables. The UV unwrapping of the carcasses gave me a great deal of trouble, and I had to learn a few new techniques in order to optimize it. I learned about the importance of removing ngons here as well.

I added a chimney to my house, and broke up the silhoette by boarding up the base.

I added individual planks to my door.

Finally, I added some medieval era props that made sense to me. They also gave more life to the behind of the shop. This area would be some sort of storage area, where the store owners could receive supplies for example.

Shading- Traditional Art Week 9

  This week I got a start at working with shading. This part of the drawing process has always been difficult for me, and I made sure to work on my technique during this drawing. 

First I made a drawing in order to determine the correct composition and proportions. Making this drawing beforehand let me understand the complex shape of the teapot on the right side. 

For my final drawing, I started with an initial thumbnail in order to have an easier time with proportions and composition as I drew.

First I worked on my lines exclusively; adding line weight and cleaning up whereever needed. In contrast to what I was doing in previous weeks, I now can say that I understand the importance of working in stages that are clearly divided. After cleaning my lines and checking the perspective, I started shading using a simple technique of following the surface of the objects. 

This week has been very informative in terms of shading, and I am looking forward on working on more similar projects later on.

Cube World and Material Studies- Digital Art Practice Week 10

This week I refined the final lineart for the cube world. I added some details such as the bricks and some line weights where it would make sense. 

I used my previous thumbnail paintings and references in order to paint in the main colors first, before separating everything into separate layers doing first a base color, and then a layer for implied lights and shadows. 

I also painted one more material this week, which is just a normal rock.

Material Studies and Cube World- Digital Art Practice Week 9

 This week I worked both on my cube world and my material studies.

I started the week by improving the previous week's material a little bit with some added surface texture.

I painted a rock material as well.

I gathered references and made a simple reference board for my cube world. I used mainly real life reference, but I also gathered reference from video games.

I developed my initial sketch further by expanding it and adding extra things.

                                              

I made some sketches for individual objects in my scene. I ended up not using most of these directly, but the design elements from these came into play when designing other objects already in the scene.

I finished the week by adding a simple value drawing to my initial line drawing.

House Project 3- 3D Game Production Week 9

  This week I worked on further improving my model. I modelled my roof, worked further on my textures, blocked out my unique props and worked mainly on my trim sheets. 

I started the week by modelling a sample roof tile to repeat the texture on to the entire model. The tri count for a single of this tile ended up being 266.

I repeated this tile a number of times across the model in order to achieve the result that I wanted.

Straight away I realised that I would need to break up the repeating forms with either wooden beams or individual unique tiles. I added a number of beams, constantly referencing my real life references. In order to break up these vertical beams, I added diagonal beams as well. I added beams and bricks to break up the ground texture a little bit as well.

While placing my beams, I made sure to have most of them slanted a little bit in order to provide a more interesting shape to the house. I did this from every angle of the house.

I further modelled the house with parts that could be later repeated if needed.

I a multi sub material in order to have an easier time controlling my materials and to have an easier time assigning them when the time came. This was a really significant improvement over the previous method of assigning a material to every object manually.

I left some texture underneath the roof in order to provide a darker background to my roof.

Next week I will be working on improving my textures further, painting my trim sheets and modelling some unique assets.