Tuesday 23 February 2010

Landscape and Inner Wall - Progress

Since the last holiday I have been keeping a personal journal on the progress of the landscape.

Since then I have remodel the building, experimented with the new purchased software Vue 8 and have textured and bump mapped the necessary buildings , and am at a safe area where the work is progressing and coming along nicely

To make sure that all does continue to come along nicely I began to brain storm all of the aspect that need to be considered. This is shown below and is focused on the inner city walls(where the most detail will be paid).





I then applied this to a table where I could tick of the various task which need to be undertaken for each section / building.




In conjunction with a progressively planned timetable this plan very much set a solid way of completing my models,,

Building Re model / Inner wall development

Upon designing the city I made a beginners mistake and didn’t bevel any of my models (as seen below), which meant they all looked very rigid and somewhat fake, so I had to redo them all, which wasn’t a struggle as most could be bevelled there or then, or quick remodels of specific areas could be done.




After remodelling the buildings I then had to apply a colour scheme, so I based it on the research I had undertaken previously. Since there is very little left of the city, much of the colour scheme available seemed to be varied. But I did find a common trend. These were darks shades of green ,red and yellow style rock / textures, These seemed to be a consistent theme so I applied them to my buildings. Here are a few of the results.




This is the main temple where the sacrifice will take place, here I experiment with displacement maps, and came into a few problem. At first the texture would appear very bloated and would tear some of the geometry away from each other. This at first seemed like a very big problem, but after meeting with my supervisor he provided some very useful tips and solved the problem.

Unfortunalty after all the stress of getting this kind of texture to work, I decided not to use it due to the very long rendering times it presented after and it would not be feasible for me to use this technique. So instead I will replace it with a simple bump map, which would provide the same level of detail. The only let down is that close up it will not be as impressive as a displacement map.

Below are some more examples how the textures (along with the remodelled building )

Below are some more exampleesof how the textuers (alogn with remodled building are coming along)

Landscape Development

As mentioned above me and Will have invested in a very unique and advanced programs called Vue 8. This software is purely design to deliver very complex, realistic and unbeatable landscape and eco system 3d models. But in no way does it simply do it for you, after watching many tutorials and learning a great deal I have become fairly familiar with it.

To being this journey I first had to create the city landscape from scratch. Lucky I found a blue print of the city and was able to use this as an image plane which I could draw over with EP curves to design the whole city. Below is the blue print


As you can see above this is a very detailed plan of the city, and I don’t have the time to consider every little detail. I sectioned out the main area first.


I then began the very tedious task of cutting up the individual section, but only the big section. This way it save time and makes it easier to populate the vegetation when using Vue 8 .
After making the section the model looked like so.


THe next part of the jounrey was to try and see how i could apply my skills used in vue to create some mountains,the surrounding sea and some epic atomsphere effects.

Below is a draft of what i am toying with.




As you can see the reults are amazing, and i am still descoving alot about the programs. This opart of the project has been a huge learnign curve and i hope to use this progam many times in the future.

As you can see the results are amazing, and i am still discovering a lot about the programs. This part of the project has been a huge learning curve and I hope to use this program many times in the future.

Thing still to do

• Finish off the remaining inner wall building (in term of texturing and UV mapping)
• Create the landscape e.g. vegetation, atmosphere and mountains
• Making lower resolution building for the out city walls to compliment the Vue Effects
• Animation the characters with will
• Then test renders, and finals render
So far, So good

Wednesday 17 February 2010

Character Development - Update

It's been a while since we last updated the blog. Ive been working hard creating the models for the animation...

My ideas and skills have developed since the first model shown below:
I had a few attempts at arranging the topology correctly until this model was made I was satisfied with the main topology for this model and built upon it for my further models.




A week later, after adding textures and further development on the topol...Here is warrior number 1: The Sub Surface Scattering skin shader in mental ray was used to create the skin tone with a texture mapped to the colour input.
below are the base meshes for the body and face

Heres warrior number 2: made some adjustments to his facial features, where his body remains largely the same as number 1. Extra apieces of armour and clothing have also been modelledHere is woman number1: Her body is not textured at this stage, not have i decided on whether to use fur or not for her hair... research is underwaywoman number 2: Also untextured... i have been experimenting with fur... its proving quite difficult to achieve natural looking long hair... this one, with short hair doesnt really do the trickThe main man - the priest himself... This guy is going to contain the most detail... in order to keep the poly count down ive been experimenting with normal maps in zBrush... still need to figure it out.
All of these models should be finished by the 26/02 and be ready to rig and animate. Ive been experimenting with TSM and found it very quick and easy to set up a basic rig for our characters.