#3denvironments

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.