Week 4 - How did that get there!
- Morgan Jones
- Feb 11, 2018
- 6 min read
How does a boat end up in a tree? How does an inhabited boat look in a tree after many years?
I thought given these questions, paired up with my desire to re-imagine the already well known scene, it would make sense to go back to the drawing board and get something on paper that I could refer to. (Be it on the screen!)
I decided to experiment with a couple of different shapes and styles of boat but settled on a 'Canadian' style wooden fishing boat as it seems the closest to the original one used in the film. The resulting sketches are of what you see below. I messed around with extremes of damage and felt that the most visually pleasing was the clean cut in half appeal. It would still be noticeably damaged, but not un-inhabitable. I had the idea to connect the two pieces of boat together with rope and life buoys that not only acts as something practice but also breaks up the uniform boat shape alongside all of the broken boards. One final feature I really wanted to get across visually was the rib cage effect created by the curved supports that show off the frame work/ skeleton of the boat that will make for really nice variation within the space and shows off the degree of the damage that the boat received on its departure from the water.
As far as the model I wanted the volumes to be a decent contrast between the organic modelling of the tree so I opted for a low to high poly baking pipeline for this asset. This allowed me to get those simple boxy shapes down before I started sculpting on top all of the detail. The planks in the render seen in the darker material in the render below will all be modular. The beauty of this is I can not only arrange them however I want on the boat in the scene, but I can also re-purpose the models for the steps that go up the tree and simply vary the texture and colour seen which gets more out of what I create. This will free me up to then model other elements of the scene with greater variations because of the time scale I'm keeping.
After finishing the low poly for the boat, I took everything into Zbrush to do a high poly sculpt to get all of that nice normal detail. I used mostly orb brushes to get this nice wood texture throughout. Combining clay build up with some slashes and flatten tools, I managed to get a nice stylised texture that I was after. One idea I kept in the back of my head was to vary the amount of detail that went into certain areas of the boat. For instance, I simplified the planks and curved supports because I wanted them to compliment the higher detail on the boat exterior. This should mean that there is a visual contrast between the high detail of the tree and surrounding elements to the boat which should help it jump out a bit more and be enough to sell the fact its a boat, without being too visually noisy.
As this is one of the hero assets in the scene, I decided to do it uniquely as apposed to creating the boat justifiably with tiling textures as you might if it was more for set dressing. This meant that I had to pack everything onto a UV sheet utilising the most I could out of the texture space I had. Below is the UV render template of my finished boat unwrap. The modular pieces are going to be kept on a separate map for the purposes of changing the texture more in engine apart from the boat. This also allowed for a greater texture resolution for the main pieces of the boat.
After the getting the boat baked and in level, I soon realised that its not going to look quite right until I've textured it. The reason for this is because the lighting for this half of the scene is reliant on the light that emanates from inside of the boat which will make the rest of the boat look much better. Something I am going to focus on next week is getting the boat nicely arranged in the top of the tree with all of its damaged elements and rope ties to see if it needs any extra attention after texturing. At this stage, everything baked out clean and I am happy to move on to texturing.
To give the level some love this week, I decided to have a good crack at some post effects and lighting. To inform the lighting of the level a little more, I created a hand painted sky box. This sky box was tricky to get because I had originally gone very detailed into it but it wasn't ever pleasing visually. After some researching into foggy night skies, They tend to look more moody and atmospheric when there actually more minimal. At the same time, I wanted to get this hybrid between the misty fog and the broken up clouds into the dreamy quality of a starry night. I felt that this gradient really helps the narrative of the scene because I wanted to symbolically show that the scene is going from unease to a warmer atmosphere. After reevaluating what I wanted my scene to convey, I created a much more simplified ambient sky box with some nice contrasting sparkling star details above.
When getting this texture in engine, I decided to mess around more with the lighting and get some more post-processing effects involved to add some more vibrancy and interest with the colour palette that is developing as I add more assets. I'm still not sold on this lighting currently as I have been struggling getting my lighting to build which means that I am going to have to spend some time next week debugging the scene to see whats going wrong. After I fix this issue, I am going to go in and do a solid lighting pass and get some more more mood into this scene.
I also spent some time, putting in the broken pieces of wood into the tree to create the spiral staircase for Mama Odie to walk up. Given the nature of her voodoo powers, I took a little more liberty with what she could use as steps. I had this idea that she built this staircase half haphazardly as she was walking up it. She would simply grab some wood, break it off and ram it into the tree so she could keep walking higher. This allowed me to use things like doors and larger supports as steps which really helps the silhouette of the tree trunk look more interesting but still doesn't distract from its organic shape.
To finish off this week, I messed around with some particle effects to create the pathway of fireflies. I decided that the best way to get the effect to follow the curves of the path was to have multiple smaller effects that all travelled on the forward axis of the particle system. This means that I can simply place and rotate each effect to change the flow and tangent of the overall path. This is a more simple solution that creating splines which was my original idea but I think it sells the idea nicely and requires only a little tweaking to the system more than its placement. I want to keep the terrain relatively simple overall because of the pleasing contrast of style as you travel through the scene. Simple colours and shapes should help ease the viewer into the scene more without having hundreds of jarring noisy shapes. After texturing the boat and doing some bug fixes, I am looking forward to getting rid of the white box terrain detail, and start growing the level from the ground up with some tasty details. In the next week, I would love to have the hero assets near to completion so that all I have to worry about is secondary complimentary assets.
That's all from me this week though!
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