Illustrator, Painter, 3D Artist

(initial post from Oct - Dec 2018)

Here we are. The end. I can't believe it. This is the first project of such a big scale that I've done in 3D, and it was quite the ride! As I promised, I worked a lot on a video, in order to show you the idea of the whole place.

The Animal Shrine. As some of the Japanese texts I have on the walls of my Calligraphers Workshop suggest, this shrine is a place where you can leave gifts and pray to different animals. At first, it sounds like it is a thing for fortune, and good health, but read deeper and you shall come across sentences like "Those who bring gifts shall have powers...", "Point at your enemies and the animals shall follow..." and "The commander of the animals".

But before I say anything more, here is the video. Enjoy:

In Japanese culture, as well as in lots of others, the animals I have depicted have a very common appearance. In Japan rabbits are thought to bring fertility, cranes were thought to be immortal and as such were considered secret. Frogs, some say, bring luck. All of that is referenced on the walls of the Calligraphers, but I wanted to take it further. See if I could come up with something more mysterious and weird. And then actually have a go at executing it and telling it as a story through a video.

It was quite the challenge, I will tell you, and I redid that video about 4 times. Unreal's Sequencer gave me lots of trouble too. It was good though, that along the way of making my props, I was exposing every single parameter possible. That gave me control over the colors of the lights, and the glowing eyes.

Some more screenshots:

I have a second video for you. A sort of a development time-lapse:

I did not take 431 screenshots, in order to have them unrecorded and not seen... This is not all of them, of course, but I made sure to take lots of specific angles through the making, and them combine them in a video. Hope you find it interesting.

(I'm quite happy with this shot, but I am leaving it down here, in the hopes that you first see it in the Video, and won't get the whole surprise element spoiled.)

But now lets go to some technical talk. I recorded the scene in real time. The FPS is around 40-50 constant, but would occasionally drop down to 25-30 when looking through the cameras that overlook absolutely the whole place. I think you can feel a few frames drop on the first video.

At some point I was kind of convinced that I will not be able to record anything in real time, given that I am pushing my models and textures to appeal visually at their best. LODs are something I would love to do, but maybe not in a short challenge like this. I've tried to be very reasonable with my choice of texture sizes and my stacking of multiple objects on one texture sets. My machine is not bad, but it is by no means top-end either. I have a strong video card (gtx 1070), but pretty outdated CPU and only 8 gb of RAM. As such I am actually pretty happy with how the scene is running.

Let's see my Materials and Call-out sheet for my models:

First row: paper, gold, porcelain, bamboo. Second row is my landscape blending materials plus a weird looking hay I used for the "hanging rope" detail piece you can see in the second picture.

First row is some basic wood materials I did in Substance. I then combined them in different ways, using Smart Masks in Painter. Last material is the stone I use in the scene. I made a simple one with exposed parameters for cracks and for hue. I then overlaid green version on top in order to make some cheap moss effect.

This project was lots of fun to do guys. I haven't been to bed all night. I mean, its morning here in the UK right now, but when I woke up around 20 hours ago, to begin work on this, I knew it was going to be my final day on it. It made me feel kind of weird, melancholic. It's stupid, I know, but lots of you are so amazingly good at what you do, my only chance to catch up was to work crazy hours. And in those crazy hours, I got so used to this project, I feel like I'm gonna feel empty for a quite a while, given that I will not wake up to have a stroll in it first thing.

(initial post from Oct - Dec 2018)

My, my, I have a mountain in. It's not like it was not a vital prop, and its not like there are just 2 days to go... Priorities, right? :D It was super fun to do. I booted up World Machine for the first time, and at the start wasn't certain what I am getting into, but its Node based design, just like Substance, helped me navigate and get my bearing relatively easy. Exported high-poly from there, and took it to Zbrush for decimation and then Painter for baking and some color passes using the Curviture and Thickness.  

Tell me that the screenshot from Painter doesn't make the mountain look like ice cream...

My only consideration now, is that I'm not too sure how the trees in the distance fit in the scene. I tried to change them, I have better prop for them, but my FPS goes down crazily, even after quite a bit of optimisation. I prefer to keep those jaggedly trees, and be able to record a nice video with good FPS. I don't want it for the fly-through of it, the scene is quite limited to viewing angles anyways, but I really want it for the telling of a story through it. One I've had in mind for ages now.

I really needed that tiger statue in order to record the kind of video I want. I wanted to give it a more dynamic pose and so put it as if its ready to slap someone. Didn't have much time to detail it, but it will do. Before moving it to that pose, I exported it sitting straight too, though, in order to use that for the shrine.

Hopefully this is the last post, and next one is the final.

As usual, thanks for reading, have a good one.

Pete.

(initial post from Oct - Dec 2018)

Started photo-bashing my own sky. Finally got into SpeedTree, and using the leaves that I created ages ago, plus a new bamboo texture, I produced a better looking result. My tree in the distance still needs replacing though. The mountains too.

I toned down nearly every light in the scene. Especially the bamboo candles (which still need texturing, so sad...). Also increased the area of lots of them, trying to achieve more clarity and go away from the small clusters of bright lights, that would be more appropriate for modern skyline, than a feudal village in the middle of the woods... Could they do with more work? Sure, but we will see what can be done with the tight deadline.

I felt like I wouldn't have had a better opportunity to create spherical paper lanterns than this anytime soon. So that is what I did, an orange and a yellow version. I feel like they improved the mood and atmosphere quite a bit. They also made some of the random spotlights I had scattered around, feel like they actually have a source now.

The empty space in the Calligraphers, I filled a bit more, trying to tell a story of some sorts. It's hard though, as I don't have time to produce more props.

Cushions are looking kind of shy, but we will see if I have any free time to work on them more. Before that, I feel like the floor material and walls need my attention first.

Any comments are much appreciated. As always, thanks for reading.

Pete.

(initial post from Oct - Dec 2018)

Finally worked on those scrolls! I've been saying I will for what, maybe like 3-4 posts? Quite happy with how they turned out. I was worried that given that I fitted 25 of them in one texture set, there wont be enough texture density, and I wont be able to make them look proper. No matter if the texture were 1k or 2k. But they actually work quite well, even from up close.

Started them by making a paper and a sort of "gold leaf" materials in Designer. Got them in Painter, and then the first one I did, is actually the one with the branches detail. I went in Photoshop beforehand, and hand painted an alpha for it. I was quite happy to draw and paint once again, given that I haven't had the opportunity to do so since I've started this challenge.

I quickly realised, though, that I don't really need alphas drawn in Photoshop, as I can draw just as good straight into Painter with the gold itself. I think this was the most fun thing I've done for the project so far. That vase is also hand-painted. So I hope you like it... No pressure... hand-painted... I'm kidding, its not that impressive once you turn the symmetry on. :P

Furniture texture is looking kind of rough here and there, but I will have to keep it like this if I want to actually accomplish everything I've planned. Also the textures on the walls call for a bit more attention as well, but we shall see about that later.

Thanks for reading. Any comments are appreciated. Have a good night from me.  

Pete.

(initial post from Oct - Dec 2018)

Progress 13, what a fitting number. I just realised I have deleted one of my Zbrush sculpts... (in my original post, this was numbered as number 13, mainly because I skipped a number by mistake. Yay Maths.) I am nearly certain I won't need it again, and even if I do, I can start off right from the decimated, exported version of it, but still, made me wonder where the heck I am looking when deleting files... I blame Photoshop though, as it refused to launch and demanded for more "scratch disk space" and thus sent me into a chaotic (and apparently unsuccessful) process of trying to tidy up my vast collection of rubbish.

Anyhow, I sculpted and textured the stones the big shrine goes onto and also worked on the shrine itself too. My first version of the stone texture had lots of bricks and extrusions on it. It was too detailed and noisy though, so I stepped back to the ordinary stone material. I still plan on scattering a few more small statues on top, and adding more candles too, so it surely wont be left without enough detail.

Tweaked the lights in the Calligraphers and actually created a proper light source prop for them.

Textured the tsukue (desk) and put a ink holder on top together with some ink blobs on the desk itself. I'm going to create a few pens and brushes that go on special stands, and one of them will be rolled and have spilled its ink, as if someone left in a hurry.

I've planned on quite a few more props to fill the empty space. Lets hope I manage to create them relatively quickly in the next day or two.

Oh, and as usually - those scrolls still need texturing... I should get to them.

Thanks for reading.

Pete.

(initial post from Oct - Dec 2018)

I nearly finished texturing the whole exterior of the Calligraphers workshop. Texturing this was a self-exploration in the sense of realising that I am incredibly picky when it comes to wood textures... The result you see is a combination of 2-3 materials I made in Designer, combined with Smart Masks in Painter after a bake of high-poly sculpted quickly in Zbrush.

I'll show you the materials properly rendered in Designer, but that will be later, as I am a bit too lazy to go back once again to those dreadful graphs (dreadful in the sense of I, going back to them multiple times, after realising that I've forgot to expose a specific value, exporting them multiple times, and relying to naming conventions similar but just as plainly unimaginative as wooden01, wooden02, wood03_final, wood03_final01, wood_final_final...).

Although I tried to have some color variety in the wood itself, I knew that I will need to break it up with some ornaments. Also I really wanted to have something metallic in my scene. Every cool kid seems to have one texture set with just alphas for ornaments so I couldn't skip on making one myself. I did that by baking in Designer some high-poly shapes I made in Maya and Zbrush. Using the Normal and Curviture together with deploying a vast number of Levels Nodes to get some specific edges, I build up some color and roughness variation in the gold.

What I love about that pipeline is the fact that I can go back to my bake set-up, quickly add some more shapes, and after I do a new bake in Designer, the newly created shapes will instantly have the golden look without me having to do any more work. Also right now my texture set is 60-70% empty, so I have plenty of space to create some more interesting shapes and motives, instead of just the circles and the other one.

The way I've illuminated the front of that building is very theatrical and dramatic. Although I really, really like it, I will most certainly tweak it later on.

Next up is to model out some more furniture in there and also finally put some proper paper textures and roughness on those scrolls and posters.

As usual, thanks for reading. Have a good one from me.

Pete.

(initial post from Oct - Dec 2018)

I've spent the most of the time these last few days working on vegetation. I created a tree to scatter in the distance, some grass and a flower. The tree really makes me think that I should probably try SpeedTree, as what I produced cannot even begin to compare to what everyone else uses in their scenes thanks to the software.

Also, thanks god the tree is so far away, because let me tell you, for now it does not look impressive at all.

I am somehow more happy with how the grass and flowers turned out though. I managed to model them and then bake and place some rough base color and roughness. I will have to go back and give them a bit more noise and detail later on.   

I've put more work on my landscape materials too, creating more detail. They could use with a bit more though, so I will keep working on that too in the days to come.

Here is a GIF:

Last time I mentioned that I kind of struggled making the bricks path, and here you can see it in action. Also now you can agree/disagree with whether what I settled down with is the best from everything I tried with it.

There are 15 more days but if I don't hurry up with all of the furniture and texturing for the Calligraphers Hut, I might not make it... So next, I will try to focus on that. The foliage can have a revisit by the end.

As always, thanks for reading.

Pete.

(initial post from Oct - Dec 2018)

Remember how a few posts ago, I said I am quite happy to have a working Landscape blending material? Well I was sort of wrong back then, as my tessellation wasn't working. I knew that, but it didn't as much matter back then as I had no height information. Well, the other day, when I created that height, it put me in quite the stressful situation of spending the whole day trying to figure out how to finish the blending of the height itself.

Anyway, I got it working, then spend tiny bit of time on a grassy-mossy looking material and one that's kind of rocky. I'm not going to post renders of them now, as they are far away from finished. Still, its nice to have some roughness information on the landscape. I'll probably have more grassy bits, but I will do that when I have proper foliage/flowers to put on top, because without that it will just look silly.

The brick path leading to the staircase that you can see, I redid about two or three times. First time it was too perfect. Then it was too chaotic and broken, with pieces everywhere. I tried elevating the whole thing. Then I tried having it go a bit inside the landscape. At the end I settled down on what you see now.

No, your eyes are not deceiving you -- I finally have that Calligraphers Hut interior and some scrolls! (not finished and texture, but a progress nonetheless).

There is some thought into the text. As such I want to thank my good friend Rika Kanaya for helping me with the translation to Japanese. Lots of the texts are just wishes for good fortune. Just like what my research led me believe is the common practice. But then we have a few sentences that lead to some story about the place. It's meant to be a flavour text, so you wont be missing much if you, like me, can't read Japanese.

A few scrolls call the shrine an "Animal Shrine". Then some, like the very long one in the very middle of the picture above, explain that, "...this Shrine is a place for those who want to command the animals as their soldiers". Among others are "Spirits inhabit this place", "The statues shall come to life" and "Point at your enemies and the animals will follow". I made those so they lead to a story that I came up with the other week. The story is that you could leave gifts at the shrine and get involved in some kind of summoning ritual, where you can send thousands of critters after an enemy of yours. The animals would do your bidding. Its quite the fantasy spin, but that is what I like the most - fantasy works. I am hoping to be able to showcase that idea through my final video using some cheap effects, but honestly, I might not have the time to get that far.

(No, I didn't waste my time modelling a sign, but still wanted to see one in there for the giggles. Courtesy of.)

As always, thanks for reading! Have a good night from me.

Pete.

(initial post from Oct - Dec 2018)

Finally blocked out the Calligraphers Hut properly. It's actually more than just a greybox, as I split the hut properly into finalised modular pieces, UV mapped most of them and even turned the front one that's kind of dramatically lit in the picture, into a high-poly. It's all ready for some arduous hand-sculpting in Zbrush before baking and texturing.

The other day I made a rabbit sculpture. Today I made two frogs. I have this idea that the shrine could be one for offerings towards animals like rabbits, frogs, turtles, cranes, foxes and so on. All of them are seen in specific ways in Japanese culture, and I could have references to that in the Calligraphers Hut with the scrolls on the walls. I mean, those are common animals, they have their role in every single culture, but still I though it could be an interesting and nice way to fill in the empty space of the environment. Also its an opportunity for me to have a go at making my own sculpts and seeing what I can produce.

I got a grand idea about all of them tying up together in a specific way, to be seen in my final video fly-through, but we will see if I have the time to do it, so I won't go into explaining it this early.

In other news, I finally sculpted and textured the staircase, the Komainu and the modular fence pieces. I am quite happy with the Dog and the stairs, but those wood textures of the fencing could probably do with some more work.

And here are the modulars:

I'll make some golden ornaments to break up the places in the wood where its too uniform (I mean, look at that corner piece...), but I am more worried for the wood texture itself. I tried quite a few ones I made in Designer, but I didn't like any of them. Will have to try again I presume.

As I haven't posted any GIFs in ages, lets have one:

You can notice the change in the Calligraphers Hut here easier. Something else too - I completely changed the source of the light in the scene. It was coming from the left, but I rotated it to go directly from the right (as seen from this camera angle). It put the right-hand side into a dramatic shadow, giving much more dynamic feel to the whole scene.

Talking about the light-source also makes me think how I will need to work on the Skybox at some point. It's not seen much from this angle, but in my other main camera shot, we can see the sky quite a bit more. And then that reminds me that I need actual mountains and trees (or bamboo) in the distance. And all of that reminds me of even more unfinished stuff, but lets stop this rabbit-hole here. Ahhhh! Maybe I should have some rabbit holes too? Would be mysterious, right? Nah, I'm just kidding.

Thanks for reading. Have a good night from me.

Pete.

(initial post from Oct - Dec 2018)

Finalised modelling and texturing 2 modular pieces and a prop. I also did some work on the Landscape. The textures on the land are placeholder and colors maybe a bit too red, but I am really happy with how my Landscape Blending material works. Created it in a such a way that its very easy to include a new texture and also parameters for roughness and tiling size are exposed.

Here are the modular bits:

I decided to go a bit heavier on geometry, because my main shots include those pieces repeated so much, that they take quite a bit of screen space. Instead of tileable texture, I sculpted the two pieces, baked and then used my stone material I showed a few posts ago. Exposing HSV of it proved very useful as I was able to give it this green look that way. I might make the surface of the stones more light so they appear a bit more grey later on.

A meme to illustrate my thoughts (not mine, its a meme after all :D). In an ideal world for an ideal game, I would have to do lots of optimising with a few LODs for that modular prop. But as its not gonna get repeated that much and as we are dealing with specific angle shots, I can save time and not do it. That's the main reason I decided to go with geometry instead of Substance Designer for example.

Hope you like what you see, feel free to drop a comment. Good night from me!

Pete.

(initial post from Oct - Dec 2018)

If there is one thing that painting and illustration has taught me better than any anything else, it's the fact that sometimes you can feel in your gut that there is a problem in your composition, but you cloud your mind and decide to ignore it because of fear of failing in trying to fix it. The truth in nearly 10 out of 10 cases, though, is that if you put the time in and you do not ignore it, there is no chance you will not succeed in improving it.

In this environment, I could feel the square, too perfect shape. I thought that it fits nicely a Shrine, or Temple like that. According to my research, in Japan they did build them in that fashion quite frequently. But that does not change the fact, that no matter what angle I would take with my camera, most of the shots were too flat and kind of boring.

So I went in and used to my advantage the modularity of my props. I left the two main buildings elevated, but took the square hut and shrine down one level. I did that in hopes of capturing more dynamic shots with more interesting silhouettes and better shapes.

I feel like it did improve quite a bit, and although I will still be posting shots capturing the whole place, I am going to stick to some specific angles and work on what is seen in them.

The textures you see for the landscape are placeholders (kind of obvious when you take a look at those Roughness values).

In my very first post I mentioned that I have a special idea for the square hut. I finally went in and blocked it. I want it to look like the workshop of a Master Calligrapher. All around on the walls and the entrance are hanging countless of scrolls with all sorts of fortunes written in beautiful calligraphy. It needs lots of work but I will try to keep it relatively simple and give it more detail with the scrolls. A good friend of mine from Japan will help me put some proper sentences and texts on those.

I placed some tiny lamps on the shrine, but the idea is that they will be candles put in bamboo sticks cut at a sharp angle. I blocked out a few shapes in front of it. One will be a trough and the ones next to it will be vases, plants and some statues at the very front.

We haven't had a GIF for a while, so here is one, as usual starting from the beginning.

I hope you do agree that there is improvement. I want to thank a few friends that gave me the valuable feedback of saying that the place was looking a bit too flat, even though I had it elevated, and then every single building was on a different construction and level too.

I have a few important props still missing, but I will get right to modelling those and then I will try to focus on getting finalised textures and models. I created a cobblestone material, which I still haven't implemented in the scene.

Any comments are appreciated. Have a good night from me!

Pete.

(initial post from Oct - Dec 2018)

I haven't much created anything finished these last days. It has been more a process of exploration and learning of lots of things I had to go through. I started sculpting a Foo Dog, or what they call in Japan, a Komainu.

The best part of it, in my opinion at least, is that statues like those which are actually old, fall in a weird, soft "uncanny valley" territory. Sculptors that made them obviously did the best they could for their time. Do you know whose else's work falls in a category like that? Well, mine does. See, I don't have much experience sculpting. But because I am making something "ancient", I can get away with having weird proportions here and there. Although I did try to keep most of it appropriate.

Poor guy is still missing detail on his paws, but I'll spend some time on that before I bake him. His backside also looks a bit like a squirrel, but its an improvement from the look of a disabled rabbit that he had at first.

I might leave him looking a bit weird like that, because I can get away with it as of the aforementioned reasons. It might even add that extra charm and mystique to it.

He was the lesser of my problems though. I started doing textures for the ground, and sadly I still don't have anything to show although I did quite a bit of work. I did realise a lot of stuff though, and it keeps me positive that when I continue with it in the next days, I should have some successful materials.

I did a quick ordinary stone texture. Something to add to my library as I don't want to use any of the Painter defaults.

I also exposed all of the values - hue, saturation and value + some parameters for how much and deep the cracks are. Should be quite useful and a lot of models that call for stone materials are waiting for me anyway. I will do a moss now and mix the two.

Here is another model. A detail, as I badly need those at this point, my scene is quite empty.

Those big twisty bits and the things underneath them that look like bells right now, are made out of hay. Everything is tied together with ropes and looks quite immense and amazing to be fair. I couldn't pass on having something like that. Gonna bake it on a lower poly model and do the hay in Substance Designer.

Let me show you the reference.

And as a final thought, today I started some Foliage. I am doing a bamboo like plant. I keep calling it bamboo, but it really isn't. Its supposed to have thinner branch and lots of leaves that are more circular and spread out. Doing that in Maya, leaves in Zbrush and then baked and texture in Substance Designer (Thanks a lot to Karen Stanley for her insightful tutorials. You are a life saver!):

And this is how it looks in the Engine, although it is by no means final:

What do you think about it guys?

Also, for those of you who who made it through this long and boring blog post, and are reading this, I have a question. This foliage left me puzzled, as I haven't really done one before... Could you tell me how you do yours, guys? How do you put it in the Engine and what options look the best? See, at the end, I left the mesh (imported and used as foliage with the foliage brush) to be dynamic. Leaving it to static, and baking Lightmaps, at no matter what resolutions, produced a cluster of black rigged edges. No matter the size. Feels like increasing the resolution of the lightmap even makes it worse (does not make any sense).

The scene is quite empty yet, I haven't placed many pieces of foliage at all, and I've been really smart with my lightmaps resolutions so far. Not being able to bake this as static makes no sense.

Thanks a lot. Any comments are much appreciated!

Pete.

(initial post from Oct - Dec 2018)

I finally replaced those cylinders I had at the very front that were supposed to be shrines.

There were still some crucial bits that I didn't have even in greybox. Mainly because I was pretty confident that I know how I want them and it wont take that much to do them. Was I right? Well it took me 3-4 different iterations of doing the same balcony before I settled down on what I like, so maybe I wasn't right after all. But I'll tell you what - it felt refreshing and nice to do it after falling in the hole of "oh is this texture worth anything" yesterday and the day before that.

Props are still placeholders and some lack textures. Then there is the very long roof which is 3 shrunk huge roofs and thus the baked AO that has left marks as if from burnt. The bits that are not textured though I even UV mapped so it should be relatively quick to give them the wooden look.

I'm still working on the texture of the roof that you see on the big one. First version was very grey and dark, then I went into more of a brown warm wood look which helped a lot. The bits on the very top are gonna be metal and have oxidised green parts (bronze) that I hope will contrast nicely with the wood. Still I feel like it lacks a bit of variation and texture and as such I will go over the edges and add metal ornaments/rain plates and so on, that will hopefully break up the wood and make it more interesting.

Here is an ordinary wood planks texture I did in Substance Designer to go on the walls:

At first I though it was very boring and dull and is gonna look bad in Unreal. Turns out that wooden walls are very much ordinary, and maybe its for the best not to have anything crazy going on. I think i will leave it like that for now, see how it works with the metal and with the rest of the textures in the scene, and then maybe come back to it and add detail, make it actually realistic or completely change it.

GIF time!

The GIFs remind me of one last thought that I have about my scene development. Most of the angles I show in the GIFs have the thinking of "what would be the best angle to fit everything in the picture and show my progression in the most transparent way". Thus the far-away aerial shots from some of the previous posts. What I really should do soon though, is pick some specific angles that look good and make the scene justice. Then I will have to stick to those and make sure they above all look the best so I can use them as final images.

The idea behind my whole level and development here is that I want the scene to have the "Game Ready" look, where if you throw the player in, no matter First or 3rd Person, he can traverse anywhere and everything will look perfect from any angle. Will that work though? I might have to accept the fact that I might not be able to do that for the short deadline we have. Not with the quality that I want anyway. And if that is the case, then I need to have proper angles and bits where I can fall back to and know that they will work.

For now though, I'm sticking to the "Game Ready" mentality, no matter the size.

As always, comments are much appreciated and have a good night from me.

Pete.

(initial post from Oct - Dec 2018)

Yesterday, I modelled some hanging lanterns. I really needed to put some object that cast actual interesting light in my scene so I can start thinking about my light scenario. It's still in the early stages and looks patchy in the sense of having a lot at of light at one place and then none at others, but I'll be working on it more.

Today I sculpted a bit more the landscape around the place. I also scattered a lot of placeholders for the trees. It changed the mood of the whole place immediately in a way that I really like. I'll have to look into how I'm going to make the trees and what to do with my mountains in the distance (they are just placeholder big boulders for now). I'm open to any suggestions and tips when it comes to creating the landscape guys!

But back to the lanterns, they were kind of very fun to do. Their process was interesting to say the least. Right now they are an Actor (Blueprint) attached with a rope and a Physics Constraint. That way I can apply physics to them and use Impulse to add force and nudge them in one direction. Gives them a slight animation and it makes such a big difference!

While making them, I had to explore how the Physics Blueprints work in Unreal as I had never used them before. It produced an interesting result. Just when I thought that none of the Blueprints worked even the slightest, I looked up and saw a few lanterns suspended in the air, rotating around as if in zero G.

I have them working now, and its something that I believe will add quite a bit to my scene when it comes to the final rendering videos. Also now I know how to do stuff like that for any other object I might want to implement that could be moving. Only thing left now is to actually texture those lanterns.

As in my every post, its time for a GIF now:

I had to change the fog once again in order to make the "trees" in the distance appear lighter and thus look even further away. The fog changed how my roofs look though, made them maybe too light for my liking. The Volumetric Fog and Atmosphere actors are things I will have to tweak a lot more before I get to what I imagine, but at least there is progress.

That will be from me tonight guys, have a good one.

Pete.

(initial post from October 2018)

Yesterday, I started texturing. I wasn't planing on starting this soon, but I wanted to have a preview of what is to be. I also knew that I will go for a pipeline that I haven't mastered before, so I wanted to make sure I can do it properly. I started with objects I have the exact dimensions of. That is the wooden supports that go around the place to create the "scaffolding".

This is the result:

I knew that I wanted a wooden texture, but to be fair I imagined I will need to do a detailed pass of Substance Designer and then use that in Painter to layer out more finished non-tillable texture feel.  

Instead, I got the object in Zbrush, did a high-poly detailed sculpt of it and then baked it on low poly. I then layered a few colours together using the Curvature mask that Substance Painter bakes. The result is what you see, and to be honest I am pretty happy with it. If I manage to give everything else the same level of detail, I reckon it should be good.

As you can see in the image above, I modelled the basic shapes of the house a bit more. It got me, to what looks like in Maya, a Hensel and Gretel House. Note, I've marked with reddish colour, shapes that don't matter. What is white, is the shapes I need to bake and texture and then repeat to get the rest (the roof of course will be a piece of its own, with and UV of its own).

I've been working with modular pieces quite a bit (as seen in the wooden supports). I realised that I can do much more with less models than I imagined at first. After I learned my lesson with the wooden supports, I made sure to make the most out of the shapes I create with the house models.

As always, lets do a GIF! My favourite.

Note, I haven't put much work into the lighting scenario. I am really happy with the modular pieces though, because they are really low poly and I managed to get the most out of them by baking.

You can see them laid out here:

What I did is two big pieces (a part from the very small one) I modelled those those out - sculpted them in high detail - and then baked. Then I cut the pieces in the very middle. I didn't have to do any changes on the UV or textures. I managed to get 2 extra pieces out of one sculpt. And that did make quite the big difference. Using those, I could manage to recreated and replace all of the basic brushes in Unreal.

Something else - quite obvious but still - a cube (or parallelepiped) has 4 sides. If you sculpt and bake those properly, you can rotate the same object each time you repeat it and get enough variation out of it!

I'm gonna texture the new pieces I did for the main buildings soon (the emissive windows and etc.) and I hope it looks good. I'll share all of the results with you.

Good night from me, and I hope you are doing great!

Pete.

(initial post from October 2018)

In general I've been going around and replacing Unreal basic brushes with proper models. Takes a bit more time, as I try to model them in a way that they are ready to jump in for high-poly and Zbrush before baking.

I also feel like I've been mastering my technique of making smooth roofs by now. I did one 3 times, wasn't happy at all with the result and then came up with better idea of how to do it just when I was drowsing off having a rest in my bed.

What I am most happy about, though, is my modular pieces for the fencing.

There are 3 pieces in total. One that repeats to create the main fencing, one corner and on edge bit that I use at the very front gate. I'm really happy how they fit together and that there are no weird lines and shadows where the pieces meet (only weird lines right now are from the quick placeholder UVs that distort the texture).

I've also increased the fog a bit, which will interfere with my perfect aerial shot GIFs, making it harder to see, but oh well.

There is a square gazebo of sorts (not sure what the proper name is) that I've placed at the very entrance of each big building. I also made some lamps that at first looked like Old London light posts... They are a bit better now but still really need a texture to convey at best what they are.

There is also a Shrine now:

Also, its time for my favourite part, a GIF! Lets have one that starts from the very beginning and gets to the current state:

As always, thanks for reading and have a good night!

Pete.

(initial post from October 2018)

I've spent most of the hours I've worked on the project today on the roofs of the buildings. I started doing that in Maya, modelling them in such a way that they are good enough to be turned into high-poly, then baked and textured. I'll add more detail on them before I do that of course, but its nice to finally see them in and realise what silhouettes the buildings create.

And here is a GIF:

They are really smooth and lack any tiling mainly because I imagine them to be from wood. The reference I am looking at in this case, is the Izumo Taisha Shrine:

I'll replicate the texture in Substance Designer later on use it on the roofing. My only consideration is that they might be left looking a bit bare and not finished at the end. I think it has to do with the fact that, when we talk about Japanese or Chinese buildings of this style, we always imagine one covered in numerous pretty, circular tiles. As such by the end I might collide a few different styles and end up with something of my own.

Here is a close up of the work:

Any comments are much appreciated. Good night from me guys!

Pete.