Week 9 - Did I say Diorama?
As you can see, The scene isn't exactly looking like the scene I blocked out last week. This was completely intentional as I came across a bit of a game play problem that would've made my scenes look a little disconnected within the same level. I'd recently received some great feedback on ideas of how I could make the levels feel more connected from a play-ability standpoint that could impact both levels in unison. Instead of working from the first person camera and being able to run around the level, I've been looking into turning the levels into a 'Point and Click' adventure style mechanic.
Back to the interior scene, I revisited this scene and made it more appropriate to this idea by closing off the walls and removing the floating diorama elements whilst keeping a lot of the layout that I felt was working in the original scene. Within this scene, you will now only be able to see the interior instead of both as well as, you will now be panning the camera back and forth to interact with the scene instead of orbiting it around the scene as it was like before. I feel that this change has given the interior scene more context and further integrates the two levels much better than it had done before.
Now, I've started moving onto modelling the assets which is (100 percent) my favourite part of creating these levels which means I do tend to get a little carried away. The first obvious thing for me to start creating was the main focal point of the scene which in this case was Mama Odie's wicker chair. The main focus of this asset was to get a very clean bake so that I can convey thickness effectively on a 2D plane with Opacity. I also dotted around the odd area of 3D to the Low Poly Chair in order to further the illusion that the rest has thickness. Im feeling pretty good with how this chair is currently looking and I would like to get it to the point where it is ready for texturing before I start modelling another asset.
As I felt it was unnecessary to bake absolutely everything from the high poly models, I created a tiling wicker material using max and Xnormal that I could apply to the model and edit within substance painter. The beauty of this technique, is that its a little more flexible to edit and reuse on other assets than just doing unique to one asset details. this material currently doesn't have a base colour input yet, the reason for this is because I would like to give it some unique details to the chair inside of painter. I plan on getting onto texturing these assets later down the line when I've got a few more finalised models inside of the scene.
After creating the wicker material, I got in the mood to create some tiling board textures for the interior structure of the boat. This texture was created in Zbrush and Photoshop in total as Its a comfortable process for me to create something that I can keep coming back to and iterating on later to get something that I'm happy with. When I get everything in Level, I am going to apply this texture to the floor and create a non-cut up version for the walls with an editable value adjustment to give a lighter tone so it reads well in the scene.
To continue my modelling spree, I've created a fruit box that I can place around the scene with various iterations of fruit that I also created more of the fill the UV space more effectively with the box. The difference with this asset is that in using the weighted normals script in 3DS max for the box with edge chamfers, I dont have to spend valuable time creating a high poly box to bake as it would be an unnecessary waste of time for such a minimal asset.
The only part of the box that I am baking from a HP is the piled up fruit that you will see inside the box. All I did for this was create a plane around the shapes of the fruit that I had piled up and baked the AO and Normal maps with the intent to mix 2D and 3D to create a more fuller looking box.
Amongst other nitty gritty assets that I have been working on, I created the Deep sea divers helmet that the old Blind lady has come across on her many travels into the bayou. This asset also makes use of the weighted normal script to save on having to bake edge chamfers which is great because now I am able to take all of the assets I have created and Unwrapped, straight into substance to get on some texturing. However, next week is likely going to be a little slower of a week for me because Easters kicking in and Im allowing myself a little more leeway with production so I can take a step back and evaluate what I'm creating with fresh eyes. That being said, I fully intend on getting everything in UE4 that I've created whilst doing a lot of set dressing with assets and textures that I can reuse from the exterior scene. This goes hand in hand with the lighting as well so it might well turn out to be more hands on than Im currently seeing.
All in all, Im on top of things at the moment and I'm going to get back to it!