Week 5 Tuesday update

This week I'm focusing on my character. I firstly blocked in a simple character first and dyna meshed it. I didn't spend too much time on the base model as the character from the concept I'm working on has thick clothing so doing very detailed realistic muscle definition would be a waste of time especially considering that I'm about 1 week behind.

Below you can see my moodboard/notes.

I've firstly blocked out my silhouettes after extruding them off the human figure base model. I did my best to capture the curves and body shape of the character from concept drawing. She's on the thicker side, with large breasts accentuated even more by the thick outerwear and tight fitted in the waist vest. Since I can't see the full proportions of the character in the concept I had to eyeball them and make many decisions of my own. Character's hips look quite wide so my guess is she is supposed to have an hourglass figure so that's what I went with.

Below you can see how the character's jacket has changed so far, from the extruded base to where I am now. I still need to work on it so the forms don't look "doughy" but that's a lot of progress I'm happy with.

Below you can see my notes based on the feedback I received in the Tuesday session.

And here is the adjustments I made, there's still room for improvement but my model is already looking better!

Blockout of the helmet: At the end of the day I decided to start working on the helmet and blocked it out on my model. It's rough and not finished by any means but I thought I should document its progress often since it's the focus of the project. This will be very challenging as I have pretty much 0 experience with hard surface but have always wanted to learn more on that.

More to come this week!

Week 4 summary

Week 4 done.

I've finished my 3rd asset, the blunderbuss. I wanted to include this asset in my scene so that I have a variety of different material and surfaces. Blunderbass as opposed to the fish skeleton and a hurdy-gurdy has more structure and is mostly made of metal. It's not completely hard-surface though as it has to fit the games stylised look.

Firstly, I've done the Zbrush sculpt, mostly using polish and flattening brushes for the stylised feel.

Then I've moved on to re-topolising, unwrapping uv's and assigning colour id's for easier texturing process. I think this low-poly model turned out best so far and my bake turned out very clean.

However, it was not that good at first, I had to do a second take on the re-topology but it was worth it as I learnt a lot on cleaning up my low poly models.

Lastly, it was time to texture my model, I stuck to the given concept, matched roughness and metalness of my other assets as well as the instructions for Sea of Thieves asset materials.


Now that all my main pieces are done, it's time to arrange my Unreal Engine scene. I've made some new assets as the brief required making a simple setting. My idea as seen of concepts from week 1 was a corner of a table with cloth over it and walls in the back. To make it my scene more interesting I decided to model cloth, candles and add some posters on the walls.

This way I was able to experiment with cloth folds, fabric materials, lighting for the candles and procedural pipeline for the posters so that they don't take up much space in the scene.


Finally, I've set up my assets in the unreal scene to match my concept. I did make some changes based on the feedback I've received for my peers. I made the scene brighter and less 'spooky'. This made my scene fit the Sea of Thieves style better I think.

Unreal Engine screenshot:

Overpainted screenshot:

This is what I plan for my scene to look like when finished, as you can see I'm still missing the details for my setting and need to adjust sizing of my assets but that's not a high-importance task. Because I'm still catching up my projects I'll now move on to next project, the helmet-wearing character and finish this scene in free time on weekends.

Mid-Week 4

Time for an update!
As of Wednesday I've finished sculpting, retopo, uv unwrapping and texturing of 2 of my 3 props.

I've scultped the Hurdy Gurdy basing on my low poly 3ds max blockout. It was quite complex as there are many small pieces and I had to keep in mind that I need to be able to simplify it with retopo later.

I could go higher with the numbers of polygons of my retopo model, however I didn't think it was necessary due to my test normal map bakes being successful and high res. I've also adjusted my fish skeleton low poly model and blocked out colour ID's for my textures.

Retopo :

Colour ID :

Hurdy-Gurdy texturing process :

Fish skeleton texturing process :

Assets imported into UE4 with their textures applied:

I still need to re-adjust colour and properties of my metal material but I'll do that after I texture the gun as it also uses a lot of metal.

Week 3 summary

Illness still holding me back but it's getting better. To make up for me not being able to work at a computer for long hours I've turned to tutorials and lectures for the time being.

Some interesting things I've learnt:

InstantMeshes - An interactive field-aligned mesh generator
Some people enjoy retopology, but I'm not one of them. So I'm on a constant lookout for new ways of making this task easier. I did like this software a lot as we're able to retopologize to desired vertex count, there are different alghorithms to choose from (quads and tri based) and a variety of tools to help with proper loop placement. It did not work as desired with small, low poly props I'm currently making but will definitely use it in the future for speeding up the production process in the future.

Zremesher - I compared my results with Zremesher, however even with polypaint and loop strokes it did not generate desired results. I'll keep trying with other models but this time I had to tweak my low poly meshes by hand in Maya.

In order to test my low poly retopology models I've tested them in Substance Painter. In my 2nd year projects I got really lazy with my UV's so I tried to improve these. They're still not perfect but I'm behind because of the illness at the moment so my focus is going to be on finishing the rest of the assets, their materials, shaders & presentation.
Turns out my model baked really well and I'm satisfied with the results, this gives me a good base for texturing :)

And here is a quick mock up of some default substance materials on my fish skeleton model ( I do not own these materials and did not alter them in any way, it's only for testing purposes only)

I've also made an initial Unreal Engine blockout for the formative submission purpose only. 

Week 2 summary

This week has not been very fruitious, I've fallen very ill and unfortunately couldn't do much work.
Since I've had my blockouts ready I managed to sculpt one of my assets in Zbrush. To challange myself I started from the one that seemed most difficult - the fish skeleton as it involves very different materials - wood, metal and bones that are stylised on top of that. I've referred to the style guide to stay true to the Sea of Thieves look, however I've realised that my texturing will be key to pull of that style so I kept sculpted detail to minimal.

Week 1 summary

My focus this week was to complete the research, moodboard, concept, blockout, sculpt and retopology phase for the RARE  - props project.

The first step was to make a low poly blockout base for my models. I've chosen to 3d model a Hurdy Gurdy, a Blunderbuss and a Fish Skeleton. It was difficult to choose 3 assets that'll look good together in my final beauty shots which is why I've made composition thumbnails first:

Then I've moved on to 3ds Max to make my blockouts. In order to keep my scale consistent I've set the units to centimetres, made a few box "cages" to which I can refer to in terms of size, and finally, set up half-transparent planes with concept drawing elevations on them. Onto modelling!

Right off the bat I've noticed that there's some challenge to these concepts and space for my own interpretation as some of it is not accurate. For example, in the concepts, fish skeleton has a greater number of spine bones in the top view as opposed to side view. In industry environment I'd have to communicate with the artist/project leader but since the assets already exist in game, I referred to the finished products when making decisions.