Finn Arnold - 3D Environments

This the final render of my 3D environment and narrative.

Over the past 8 weeks I have had to plan, design and create a 3D digital environment that shows the narrative of a character or an event that has taken place.

I started off with three ideas, a Roman Gladiator ring with the narrative of a fallen Gladiator; my second was an Industrial factory based in London during the Industrial revolution showing the narrative of the workers and the child labour that took place within. My third idea which I decided to pursue was an Elven Kingdom within a forest, however I altered this idea during pre-production to show an entrance to the Kingdom in the distance showing wall murals to portray the narrative of the Elven colony and it’s saviour.

I started researching into the Elven culture, finding source images to then create my own concept pieces and sketches of how I wish my scene to look. During this process I researched into digital environments within different sectors of the industry such as matte painting in film, environments in games as well as concept art within the industry.

From these concept pieces I started to block my environment in Maya creating basic shapes to represent my environment to then decide how I want to tell this story and portray my environment.

I used a source video based in Saas Fee, Switzerland to help me with my camera shots and angles overall helping me create my cameras in Maya and portray my narrative and environment better.

Through this I was also practicing different programmes such as Substance Painter, UV Layout and Zbrush, three key programmes vital to completing my project. I found Zbrush the most difficult simply because, it’s hard to work your way around the different tools and find exactly what you need to sculpt your object properly.

So I then started to model my objects in Maya with some difficulties with imagination, getting rid of N-polygons, lowering poly counts and simply creating objects quick enough. With time and effort I managed to complete my objects with enough detail ready to UV and texture, however, I was behind and only had ten days left to texture and render my entire project.

I had never used Zbrush before, neither had I ever created a complex model such as a Tree. Creating this object was fun but a struggle however, again not knowing my way round the tools in Zbrush, trying my best to sculpt it like an actual tree and actually texturing it without looking plain and flat. Overall I think I succeeded with creating this tree also creating the leaves definitely boosted my confidence in modelling and texturing.

Once I got comfortable with the programmes for texturing, it became easy and quick to texture all of my objects as I knew exactly what I wanted them to look like and I knew exactly how to do that. However, I encountered a problem with exporting these texture maps from Substance to Maya which made the colour maps look awful, I managed to work around this by taking screenshots of the colour base maps in Substance rather than exporting them out and simply adding the to the colour base material in Maya.                                               This took a while to work out but I was back on track in time to finish off little details in Maya and get ready to render.

I unfortunately didn’t have time to create my own drawings/paintings to tell my own narrative due to problems I encountered with this project, time management and simply my ability to be able to draw digitally is to a great standard. So I used images I found online that portrayed a perfect narrative anyway and blended them into the stone murals I created.

For finishing touches I added many rocks, roots and a cobbled pathway simply to help bring my environment to life. I then also used paint effects to add grass, bushes and a few extra trees to mask the flatness of my grass plain texture. Again if my time management was better and my ability to troubleshoot errors and problems I would’ve been able to create a better grass floor.

I created my cameras and keyframed them like my animatic and I also used physical sun and sky as my lighting simply because it doesn’t take up time and I like the way it looks.

Rendering took a 2 days in total to render luckily in time for deadline and luckily without out problems it looked how I wanted it to overall. I then took these different camera shots into After Effects and added a soundtrack overall creating my final piece.

Things I would’ve changed through this project would be my time management, I focused too much time on thinking of an idea rather than sticking to one and start modelling in the early stages. I would’ve like my skills and knowledge in certain programmes to have been better, and I would’ve also liked to have painted my own narrative murals and also a better flooring for my environment.

Lighting and Rendering.

Again where I didn’t have enough time to consider giving my scene a proper lighting effect, I went for physical sun and sky with mental ray. Personally I enjoy the lighting of physical sun and sky however, it is considered obvious and basic to many.

Creating lighting before the cameras are made can completely screw up the lighting so you have to select the physical sun and sky in attribute editor and simply update camera connections.

Cameras.

I created six cameras in total and used my keyframes to follow my Animatic and also moved them as shown in my source video of Saas Fee in Switzerland.

Finishing Touches.

Where I didn’t have a lot of time left I decided to create a simple but nice floor texture add some 3D aspects with the cobbled pathway.

I then created some simple roots and vines to stick out of the ground and wrap around the mural objects to give more of an overgrown look and give my environment a less flat look.

I also created some simple rocks again to roughen up my environment a little and blend my objects in better.

Murals.

I simply opened my colour base map into photoshop and also added my mural image too. From this I changed the opacity of the image and using the smudge tool and also a soft eraser tool I blended the image into the stone object.

I then added this image back into my blinn material in the colour section and with a few tweak in the UV Texture Editor to get rid of grey patches as you can see in the image, it worked.

Murals.

I unfortunately didn’t have enough time paint my own wall murals nor would they look how I wanted them too as I am not skilled enough with digital drawing yet.

However, I picked these four drawings to perfectly portray how the Elven colony found this valley and how this character saved them. So it first shows the dark lords taking over causing suffering and slavery, however these two characters sacrifice one another to create a stronger magic almost godly to oppose and defeat these dark lords. 

Textures from Substance to Maya.

Unfortunately, when importing my colour map into my Maya objects, it creates a terrible looking texture creating these black dots and taking away the actual texture and leaving a darker colour there.

So I looked into the base colour map to find that it weirdly expands and blurs when exporting from substance. I then compared it to the colour map that appears in substance and it seemed to look perfect and I couldn’t quite figure out why it was doing this.

Adding maps from Substance Painter to Maya. 

(Please select the images to expand them)

I first of all exported my material textures out of substance giving me five maps, Norms, Colour, Height, Roughness and Metallic.

To apply these to my object in Maya I created a new material, blinn, and in the attribute editor I select colour. From here I select file in order to import my colour base file into the object.                                                                       Some reason this connect with transparency causing the object to look see through so we simply right click on transparency and select break connection.

We then need to add our norm map to our bump map section, so again selecting this we select file and import our norm map into the object. However, we first of all need to change ‘use as’ section from bump to ‘Tangent Space Normals.’ This map gives me the height I created within Substance making these 2D textures appear 3D.

Substance Painter.

Like previously with the bionic arm I textured in substance, I used similar techniques with the fill layers and generators to get a slight mould or mossy feature to my buildings rather than rust.

I wanted to make my building seem overgrown and occupied but not ruined and so I decided to keep the structures intact with a few cracks and chips with the height tool on minus in Substance.

I also used the height tool on plus to create vines and leaves to show this overgrown elven architecture.

Tree Leaves.

So once I imported my tree into my Maya scene I needed to add leaves and branches to the tree.

In order to do this I had to create a flat polygonal plane, create a new material in this case lambert and attach a transparent image of a branch with leaves to it’s colour.

I then added some subdivisions to the plane to pull out some of the vertices so the leaves to appear to flat. Then I duplicated these around the top of the branches moving some vertices to get a variety of different shapes within the leaves.

Zbrush - Tree 

I started off modelling my tree in maya creating a very basic low poly shape to import easily into Zbrush creating the roots and branches separately and combining them with the base.

Once imported into Zbrush I started to sculpt the tree in subdivision 1 creating the base of the roots and bark with the clay brush. I then divided the tree to division 2 and from here started to sculpt more detail in the bark and crevices into the tree. And in division 3 even more detail such as chipped wood, sculpted roots and wholes in the tree.

I then decided to texture the tree in Zbrush rather than create my own UV map and paint it in Substance Painter. So in Zbrush you have to create a poly-paint UV creating an awful looking UV map, however when using the texture brush on the object it works. When painting you can scale the texture and rotate the brush so I could follow the lines of bark correctly. I also added a clay texture to this paint brush in order to create a 3D bark texture rather than a flat texture.

I also started to paint patches of moss and cracked bark to create a more realistic texture making my tree less flat and dead.

UV Layout.

Once I had finished modelling the main structures I then started to create their UV maps in order to texture them. First I had to import each object separately out of Maya as a .obj and loading them into UV layout.

Using UV layout it is very simple to use, simply by pressing ‘C’ this will start splitting the edges showing a red line. It can also be made quicker with the automatic yellow lines predicting where else you want it cut. However, if you do not wish to cut those predicted edges you can to press ‘W’ on them to keep them joined.

When you have cut the model up you then press ‘D’ to drop them into the UV map and from here you have to flatten the parts separately by hold ‘F.’ And the you can layout the UV’s in order and moving them by holding space and middle mouse click. To scale them inside the square area you need to hold space and right click in or out and to rotate hold space and click.

Once this is done you can then save this over the object and to check if it has work, import the .obj back into maya and select UV texture editor to see if it appears.

Elven Halberd and Quiver.

I decided to create some weapons to show that this guard post is still occupied despite being overgrown with vines and roots.

I wanted to create a spear type of weapon as they would look more pleasing and easy to see in the back the scene rather than a sword on a rack.

I also created a quiver as bows and arrows are always associated with Elves.

I created the blade and the staff separately to ease the process of creating this weapon. I started with the staff and used edge loop tools to again create trims to be extruded out, later to be golden plates.                                                         I then selected the parts that should be wood and selected soften edges to round it off and look more realistic. I then hardened the edges of the blade to create a sharper edge and made the material blinn.

Elven Archway.

This is another main structure for my environment I created today, the archway or gateway into the Elven Kingdom in the distance of the valley.

I started creating the first half from a cylinder which I dropped the divisions from 20 to about 10 or 12. I created the main arch from adjusting the vertices with the move tool to then adding edge loop tools to begin extruding the smaller arches out of the main structure.

After extruding the smaller arches out of the main arch I start to add more edge loops so I could start creating small trims around the structure which will later on be plated gold to as a more Elven effect. I did this by simply extruding the faces out again slightly.

Elven Murals.

These models created will show the main narrative of my environment. They will show chapters of how the Elven culture found this new place, starting with a dark lord destroying their home to their saviour freeing the Elves and finding this new home. This will be portrayed through wall murals painted onto the inside of these structures.

I simply created the main structure through edge loop tools and extruding these new face out and up times to create a sort of archway over the display of the wall murals.

Elven Guard Post.

I created my simple guard post from editing my tower part into a larger base structure. I also extruded the arches of the object out to later also create golden trims. I also added little archways to the of the structure instead of a fence to make it more unique.