HAND-IN PAGE: GAME PRODUCTION
Village character - The Earth Witch
The last project of my first year in Game Art was to create a village character to match our previows building creation. Following the art style from before, I had to create the owner of my witch house, which had to be sort of a self-portrait with similar anatomical proportions. Since the beginning of the village project, I have been thinking about a character that would fit my house and had I vague idea of the direction I wanted to take. As you might know already, my house is kind of a mix between an apothecary, a herbalist and a witch. I added many mystical and magic symbols, a potion store and a nice tree as support for the second floor. What I really wanted to do was to add many vines and leaves to the house so It would give a herbalist mood, but I had to discard this ideia because of the time I had to finish everything. Because of that, I really wanted to make my character very earthy and give it a feeling of a connection to earth. At the end, of course, I had to discard a lot of things I wish I had done. Most of them, related to making her more earthy. Sigh.
One of the most interesting things was to realise how our own proportions are not always exactly like Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. Myself, for instance, have longer arms and a longer neck than I should have. Also, my legs are a little shorter. That was interesting but while I was modelling, It started to feel weird, and I had to reduce some sizes and make some others bigger. Another thing that felt weird was... my face. I looked into the model over and over again and everything seemed just fine but even though I had used my own face reference, it didn't quite look like me. Later on I figured it that was because of the symmetry thing. The picture I took for the reference had a clear difference between my left and right side, and I only used the right side to create de model, and at the end It would look a little different anyway. The side view is perfectly me, though.
My character is the daughter of a Romeni couple and had to estabilish herself in a small village after she saw too much of the world. Her ancestrals taught her about the arts of magic and she makes a living by creating silly little potions for the townspeople. Transfiguration potions are her expertise. She often goes into small journeys around the county to find herbs and new ingredients, that's why she carries the belt with essential objects. At night, she can be found in her house casting new spells and cookiing some potions.
I didn't want to create a cliché and give her a witch hat (I gave my HOUSE a witch hat, so...) and make her look scary and old and ugly. I find those stereotypes very boring when It comes to design new characters. She's human like everybody
else. I may say, though, that I grabbed some inspiration from a trip to Glastonbury, where I met a whole different world of magic and paganism. Her clothes and hairstyle were heavily influenced by the people of Glastonbury and the Goddess worshipers.
I messed with my schedule and ended up not having time to play with the colour pallete for her clothes, and I literally just experimented until I tought It was good enough. When I started the rigging, I noticed that attaching the flowers on her skirt was a bad, bad idea. Worst idea ever. I removed them all.
Painting the textures was a discovery for me. I can't tell how easier It was compared to all the other textures, and how much better It looks compared to the others. I started painting the face and I was delighted to see that, this time, things were actually working in the way I wanted to. The plan, however, was to make the normal and specular maps as well, so at first I didn't care much about the bump maps, but later I realized I wouldn't have time to create the other maps and just tried to adjust the diffuse so It wouldn't look to bad in a flat model. At the end it looks acceptable! I think I could have worked harder on the other skin parts such as the hand and arms, but I was very proud of the face and skirt. I design the simple pattern for the skirt based on spell symbols and pentagrams, as well as astrological symbols. I'm very happy about the colours, despite the fact that I didn't plan them first (I know, wrong).
rigging my character was a slow but was not as impossible as I thought. The only problem I actually had was with the elbow bones. See, when crating a biped, for some reason its arms don't move towards all the directions it SHOULD be moving. At first I didn't mind so much because I was just weighting the bones and everything, but when It came to posing the character, I had to make some serious magic here to lift her arm in the right position because I couldn't move it in the right direction, despite it would be anatomically right. I'm still not sure of what caused this or if it's default (what I think it's wrong?? not cool??), and I had to make a lot of changes to the weighting so the blouse wouldn't spin like crazy when just lifting the arm. I would like to ask for advice from a tutor, but at this point I didn't have any more time to fix it.
Aaand the potions from the house actually came in handy for my final pose!
This project hav raised some questions about animating the hair and the dress/skirt. I really wish to learn a lot more about how these things are done in the big companies, because I see they are not particularly afraid of creating long-haired woman or animating long dresses. I also want to know how to animate cloth as an an semi-independent element from the body - I don't know how to make this very clear, but what I mean is that when I was rigging the legs, whenever I moved them, the dress would move as well, even the parts that were not touched by the legs. It's like the dress is not cloth but a solid element and it bothers me so much.
Looking at my final model makes me want to work harder on some details I left behind. Maybe fix her face, her lips and her deadly look. Add more leaves and flores to her arms and paint it over to make it look like moss is growing on her skin. Those were part of the concept, even though I didn't manage to complete everything. At the end, my model had just over 6000 tris and I could have used up to eight thousand! I feel like I could fix a not of problem on the rigging by adding some loops to the skrt and her shoulders, but apart from that, the animation seems smooth and nice. I didn't get the change to make her an idle animation, though! That's probably something I'm looking foward to when I'm done with all the Uni work.
Creating the character was by far my favorite thing of this year's projects. I'm very excited to learn more about animation and character creating for my next three months at DMU! I want to create some concepts that don't involve putting my own face on it (basically because I've been doing that for my whole life, artist problems, right?).
Group Level - Village Project
Giving sequence to the Village Project, our team was finally put together to work in an UE4 level and gather all the buildings that were created individually to create a playable scene. This stage was not only the most complex, but It was also introductory to a whole lot of new things I didn't even imagine. I was wrong to think we would only have to place our buildings in their respective plots and create cute assets to dress the level, we also had to make the lightmaps for our houses and the collisions for every asset. I thought I'd have learned a lot by creating the Witch-house, and didn't expect there would be so much more to learn here.
Creating the collision for our houses and props was not as difficult as I thought It would be. I was interested in how UE4 can recognize the collision just by nominating the right objects in 3Ds Max, and at first I thought the collision boxes needed to be... boxes. But no, I can actually create different shapes like cones and cylinders, and move the vertexes to fit better the shape of the object, even tough I can't have concave shapes at all, otherwise It won't work properly. On the other hand, creating the lightmaps may have been the most confusing thing I have ever done in this course so far. Understanding what a lightmap is was already difficult enough, and creating them left me with the feeling I was not doing everything as It should be. I thought I would have this exact feeling when I was first introduced to bump maps (normal, specular, emissive, alpha), but I found those a lot more simple than the lightmaps. I looked into some tutorials, some guides that explained better what they are and what they do, but at the end I just didn't know HOW to make them and It took me some time to understand all the steps.
After placing our houses into the level, we had to think about all the individual and shared assets each one would have to create. I took the task of creating all the bunting for our festival-ish village, and wanted to create some potions and cauldrons to dress my house! and once I had the lighmaps for the house, I decided to make them for the props as well, even tought we didn't have to. Creating the potions was the most tricky, because I had to make three sub-object materials to achieve the glass and translucent effect I was aiming for. In fact, the 3Ds Max models of the three potions are very rough and simple, because I only focused on creating the glass and translucent liquid when everything was already at UE4. I tried to make one single object and paint the texture so It would look like a glass bottle with liquid inside, but it would just not look right for what I wanted. Good thing is that my potions and cauldrons were later used as shared props as well, and I didn't expect people to like them so much to use them around the level!
To create the glass and translucent effect on the potion textures, I used the Fresnel modifier linked to a Multiply linked to the alpha channel on my texture, connected to the Opacity menu of the bottle. For the liquid, I just changed the material mode to translucent and created a emissive map to give it a little bit of a glow. I was short on tris left fot the house props (what I figured it later I was completely wrong because at the end I had almost half of my budget left!) so I decided to model the cauldrons as simple as I could. Made the handles completely through normal maps instead of modelling them. I didn't need anything else for my house, and even tough I had a small number of props, I copied them a lot around the shop and It looked really good at the end.
I had a complex process for creating all the bunting for the level. I had to look at many references from real life bunting at festivals, but those were not enough to know exactly the best way to suit them at a game level, so I went in a search for festival events and towns in games, and as you can imagine, I didn't find many things. Despite of that, the few images I could find were really, really helpful. I had a colour pallete at first which was very diverse and bright, but talking to the other people in my group we decided to go for a more warm, vibrant scheme, with lots of reds and yellows to balance the overall mood. I also found many fun and different bunting shapes and arranges, so I didn't want to stick with the triangular common bunting (although those were used the most at the end).
I made four types of bunting and a wood stand to support them if needed. The primary idea was to hang them around the houses, but if someone decided to place them somewhere without a support, we had one. The fourth one was the most difficult to place around,and maybe It was not the smartest idea I had for this project. The others looked really nice on the level, and I spent a lot of time placing them around, playing the possibilities. It helped me to understand better the interface of UE4, even tough I still struggle a lot trying to navigate through the scenes.
The highlight for my shared props was the wind modifier I added later! Everything was looking very static and we decided it would be nice to give it a little bit of flow. Of course the modifier was supposed to be used on grass, so I had to be VERY, VERY careful with the intensity and amount of wind, otherwise everything would just start shaking in a bizarre way. As the ropes are not actually connected to the bunting, I had to watch out for any
awkward movement and try hard to avoid them at any cost. At the end, the movement of the flags were very sutil and the player would have to stop and look directly to them to notice the wind. It got me thinking if It would be a smart idea to do this in a big game like an MMO. Probably not. I had everything modelled and texture, ready to UE4, and then I added the collision and lightmaps for everything. My individual contribution was then almost done, I had all the bunting placed around the level and helped some classmates to import their models into engine.
Evaluating our project as a team, I must say we did have some communication problems and other issues that are quite common when there is more than five people working at the same thing. Liam automatically took the lead - rightfully, since he was the most concerned about the progress of the project - and some other people didn't contribute as much as expected. We had several buildings missing until the very last week, and some props were not finished or not finished in time to be placed in the level. I had to wait until the last three days of work to begin placing the bunting around because I could not do the job while there were still missing buildings. I was at the labs two days in a row for group meetings where only four or five people showed up, what quite stressed a lot of people. Two days before the hand in, we had pretty much everything done and missing only some small details, and the level looked great, however, on the day before, we had some problems with the lights and suddenly we could not build our map anymore, and It looked very lagged and the lights were just too bright. I wasn't in the labs when this happened, and I was a little sad because I thought everything looked perfect on the day before, but I honestly don't think I get to say something about it, mainly because, well, I wasn't there. I did not help them with the post processing (because I have absolutely no idea of how to do that, and UE4 is still an enigma to me, after all) so I don't think I get to complain about the lag. I spent a lot of time placing the shared props around the village, but I think I could have helped more with other things, and I think that what stopped me from doing this was that I am still unconfortable with standing out and saying what I think in English. I still feel a little intimidated.
Despite of al the problems we had throughout the process, the overall look of our village is great. I am so proud of how everything turned out to be, and how we managed to make everything look as one whole thing. Working in big teams is a reality in the industry and I am glad we had the opportunity to experience that at least once this year, even tough I honestly think It would work in a completely different way in a big company.
Wicked - Village Project
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As you know from my weekly posts, I have been working on a new project for the last three weeks. Today I'll be posting the result of my work, which will took place in a bigger project that is yet to come and involves all my classmates. I'm talking - as the title says - on the first part of the Village Project, which I call myself the Wicked project - first because my building is an Apothecary Witch house, and second because this building have been hunting my life for the last weeks. I want to say It's over now, but It's not. I'm still not completely satisfied with how my building turned out at the end and some changes will probably happen in order to put every other building in the same village. Now, what the hell, I'm skipping a lot of explanation here! Let me start from the beginning.
The Village project consists in two parts: the individual creation of a building and the gathering of all the buildings to create a village level. All the buildings should communicate with the environment and between themselves to create an harmony in the scene, which means all the students should talk to each other about their work during the individual part, so drastic changes wouldn't be needed when placing everything in the level. I must say that my group was lacking some communication, and I'm guilty on this, there were some people uploading their progress on facebook and others that wouldn't do anything to show their work, and I just posted my model when requested to test the Unreal Level, so I should have put some more effort in the group. I believe that happened mainly because we are not very close; there are small groups in all classes and I particularly don't thank with many of my classmates, except for four or five of them, and the language barrier makes me feel even more distant from everybody. I'm aware this is no excuse, because I'm not the only international student there and not the only one whose first language is not English, but I'm very quiet in Portuguese, and I'm 10 times more silent in English. However, we did have a moment to see everybody's work on a GP lecture while Mike was helping us to export our models to UR4! And whatever wasa little off was pointed out. One of my classmates was kind enough to create a mood board that everyone could look at while thinking about the texture colours and environment, and at the end I think the buildings look similar and It won't be hard to fix some inconsistences.
This project had a lot of first times. It was my first time using normal and roughness maps, and It was also the first time working in UE4. It took me some time to understand the normal and roughness maps properly (to be honest I don't think I FULLY understood roughness/specular yet, I'm always confused about which colour does what and always need to double check if I'm doing everything right), and Unreal is just too much for me, for now. It doesn't even run properly on my PC! But I think I did a good job for someone who has just started and spent a total of 2 hours on UE4.
Also, I had a lot of questions of how to do a lot of things. On my previows project, the Diorama, I didn't know I could apply more than one texture to the same object, what made me create a UV map for my island and paint everything separetedly, even though I could have used tileable textures to create everything. The sub objects really changed my life, although I think I could have used tileables into more objects, because I created a lot of unique textures that made me took twice the time It would have taken if I was less perfeccionist. Other than that, There are some elements I would have done differently if I had more time (aka if I had managed my time better): I really wanted to make glowing windows with some sort of green-yellow colours to imply the witchcraft going on inside of the house, but I was not sure If was going to be able to do that, because I was using a single 2048 texture for all my uniques, and for previows experience, If I set the glowing tool on a material, everything would glow, and not just the windows. I would have searched more and I actually plan to add this during the next steps. Also I wanted to work more on the little shop. It looks very empty and It doesn't make much sense the way it is now. I want to add some shelves and paint some potions, and a light needs to be added somewhere over there because light can't reach it properly.
I got the apothecary building. I was very pleased with the task I was given (or chose, in this case) and I had this idea to make it owned by an earth witch since the beginning, and I also wanted to make my building a little more different to caught the attention, not because of some egocentric feeling, but because a witch house is always very weird and curved due to all the witchcraft and potion creation, and you can always tell which house belongs to the lunatic. Also, I didin't want to rely on the props to make my building recognizable, and I was always thinking about the details of the construction that would give some hints. I ended up with some really nice elements like the tree supprting one of the corners of the house and the metal details on the front door with mystical elements like the moon and a black cat. I also ended up with a not-so-discret witch hat roof on top of everything that I am very proud of, even though I had some internal conflicts on how should I texture It, everything ended up fine!
Another thing I was willing to communicate with the player is how sloppy and disorganized is the owner of my building. A witch just doesn't care and her house is always a mess with potions, herbs and books all over the place. She decided to open this potion shop right on the side of her house and she doesn't have a proper sign for it, so she just took this plank and painted a sign with white paint and that was enough for her. She doesn't own much money either - which was one of the reasons she opened a shop - and couldn't pay for a proper sign advertise.
I sure used every texture sheet I had available, al the four 1024 tileable textures and the 2048 for the uniques, each one of them with its Normal and Roughness map (I also did specular maps to correct the reflection on SketchFab) and I'm looking foward to create my props to use the other 3 sheets available. Unwrapping only certain faces of an object to create the unique texture was a tricky one. And I couldn't actually solve it the proper way, I think. I had to detach the faces in order to fit only the right objects in the UV sheet, so the final result would look like the image above.
You can click on each set of textures to take a better look at them; Also, if you want to check the creation process including all boards and sketches for my building you can find these at Visual Studies hand in page and also throughout all my blog posts between weeks 15 and 20.
Working with the Multi-sub objects and materials made me value more the people behind these softwares, because It's just brilliant. Me, that have absolutely no clue that It was possible to assemble different materiais to different faces of the same objects, was completely amazed.
On the left side you can take a look at my material editor panel. It works somehow like this: you have a primary material assigned as a Multi Sub-material; from this you can start adding all your textures and sub-divide them into three, the diffuse colour, normal and roughness (specular) maps. I think Max works with the specular maps instead of roughness, but we were told to create roughness maps for UE4. Later on I had my maps inverted and created speculars as well to create my SketchFab model. It is important to mention that every face of every object has to be set an ID matching the texture It goes on, for instance, my roof tiles texture is my #2 sub-material, which means all the faces with this texture have to be set to ID number 2.
as silly as you can imagine, but when we are stressed and just want everything done, you just don't realise the most stupid things; FBX files in fact didn't work, because my wood beams and some other objects were completely out of place for a reason I haven't discovered yet, and I didn't know I could import textures manually so I was just fraking out because an OBJ would exportas a blank model. I had a friend telling me It was possible and It just saved my life, but again, a hell lot of time being wasted on applying all textures again and again! Oh god. But!! At the end I had a beautiful new born baby!! And I also discovered UE4 is actually witchcraft, because look at these beauty shots below. These are some BEAUTY shots right here, mate.
If I was to give myself some feedback, It would be mostly something that I have been telling myself since day one, and that I quite didn't hear properly yet: START TO PLAN YOUR STUFF BETTER. Know exactly what you are going for before you go on a rampage and start modelling everything if you're not even sure If that is going to work. I did good this time planning which textures I had to paint, and It looks small and irrelevant, but having something solid to look at, actually having something written down saying exactly what I had to paint helped a lot. Now. It doesn't go much further than that because It doesn't help if you have a "WITCH HAT TEXTURE" written down on your TO-DO list if you don't know HOW you are going to paint the witch hat. And that was exactly what happened. I am not going to lie and pretend I did several sketches and colours experiments, because I didn't, and I am ashamed of myself, because I imagine my project would look a lot more consistent at the end If I have done so. That being said, It leads us to the next criticism: I need to plan my TIME better. As always, I got too carried away with small details and forgot I still had everything else to do, which resulted on some really high quality textures - for myself - at the first days, which took me several days to finish, and some ridiculous and hideous stuff at the last days. You can see a practical exemple: I painted the tree and the front door on the first days, and I spent so much time on them, that I didn't have the proper time to plan my shop and the windows better.
Now, that didn't work out very good when I was working at the labs. I had my final project finished at home and went to Uni to work on the UE4 file. When I tried to export my model to FBX, 3Ds Max wouldn't locate my textures, even though they were all in a sub folder where the .max file was. Because I had all the objects merged already, only locating the files was not enough, and I had to select every face again and apply the right texture, and It took me a lot of time, but when I had everything ready, UE4 imported all the textures already with the normals and roughness applied, so I just had to correct the lights on the scene!
Well, talking about exporting issues, I had a huge trouble trying to export my model to SketchFab. Of course the reasons were just
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I finished this part of the project with a lot of things unfinished, but happy, nonetheless. Regarding the teamwork I was saying before, I don't think we had much time to work as a team during the individual project, mainly because we had to conciliate our time with an essay for Critical Studies and a lot of digital paintings for Visual Studies, so everyone was very focused on their own work. However, I really want to make a bigger appearance in the following steps, because I want to overcome this barrier I have, and because I really want to help, even though I don't feel like I am able to lead a project like this, despite the fact that I should be, professionally speaking. I can write a better view on our teamwork at the end of the group project, and I hope I come back here with some good news!
Now, to finish my blog post, here's my SketchFab model! After fighting against the website for hours It's finally here, and It even has a grass stand!! aww.
With all my models uploaded here and on UE4, I begin to notice some inconsistences on the materials, and that's something I need to study a little more; the witch hat texture is very bright compared to the other roofs tileable texture, even though both have the same roughness level; It's very hard to control the brightness levels on the unique texture sheet, because I have very different reflections at the same texture, and I couldn't reduce the brighness on the witch hat without reducing it on everything else. I also wanted to make the moss a litle brighter but If I did that, It would be impossible to even look at the hat. Well.
I'm off to the next part of the project! And to fixing the things I left behind as well. a ha ha ha. This nighmare will NEVER end. "Welcome to Game Art", said Anya.
Diorama
After one month running against the clock trying to do my best for this and the Galleon Project, I can finally call the first term done. The last three months have been so intense, and I could never prepare myself for what was about to happen. My life has been twisted, but for the best. I can't measure how much I've learned in this course, and I can't tell how much I miss my University in Brazil. I'll probably write something about my exchange experience so far, but I'm here to show you guys, my newborn Diorama.
I am so, so proud of my final piece. It's not perfect, in fact, I would change some things, I would have worked a lot more on my textures, mainly on the plinth, because I didn't like the way the Goddess' face turned out to be, but I was out of time, and in general, It's a nice diorama, It doesn't have animated assets or a huge imponent figure, but It's my baby.
Before posting any image, I'm going to talk a little bit about the context and story around my diorama.
My Diorama is a path leading to the plinth of the celtic goddess Ceridwen. To climb the hill is part of the cult and the aligned circles of stones from another time, already spoiled and fallen, still emanate the charms and magic. To reach the top layer of the hill, the celtic people use spells, and cast their biggest charms under the statue of the great Goddess. There is a large, bent tree that probably was not purposely sown, now fully grown in the middle of the path. Finally, hidden on a cave on the botton of the hill, lays a treasure chest that does not belong to the celtic people. Who was responsible for that, and why It lays there, opened, waiting for someone to grab its fortune, is unknown.
The idea to create a celtic orientated diorama came from my favorite books, The Mists Of Avalon. I have developed a passion for the mystical and religious community around the island of Avalon, Morgaine the fairy, and... henge of stones. I can even say one of the reasons I chose to study in the UK was because It is the crib for such an amazing tale, and I couldn't live without seeing Stonehenge with my own eyes (in fact, I DID visited Stonehenge at the Winter Solstice and I can say It helped me A LOT with this project, It gave me a better notion of how the rocks are placed and their specific shape).
Here are the references and the first ruff sketches I had before starting modelling everything. You can notice my final colours are much warmer and vibrant than the colours of my references. I had in mind since the beginning I didn't want a mossy, green and grey predominance, I wanted something a lot more colorful, and ended up with a orange light. For the sketches, I changed basically everything from the beginning to the end. I started making things a lot more vertical instead of a plane, flat platform, and placing the props in the middle of the scene instead of surrounding the middle of the platform.
On the left you can see some beauty render shots I took from several angles. I focused a lot of time on the ground detalis like the grass, and I was amazed by how they gave a whole new look to the scene.
I also decided to experiment some new unusual colours, like the blue tree bark, and I really enjoyed the way It balanced the other colours. I also like the contrast between the orange of the leaves and the green of the grass! Both colours matched the brown rocks, and the low saturated rocks and statue helped to create a lighter environment.
I modelled the base as a floating island, but in a game, It could be inserted as a "normal" island in the middle of a lake, and the only way to reach It would be in a boat. It also could be in the top of a montain, or embraced in mists, any way the access would be difficult.
I would like to have a version of the textures with moss and vines. I discarded this idea because I didn't want the rocks to have much green and blend with the environment, but in the future maybe It would be nice to see how It would look If It had a more abandoned look.
Another idea, that only came to me in the final steps and I wouldn't have time to do, was to put a sword craved in the stone inside of the cave, as in the legend of King Artur.
If you didn't follow all the steps for the creation of my Diorama, you can click on the images below to go to the pages and see a more detailed process. There is also a SketchFab model on the 3d Models page that I'll also be posting here with all the textures I used.
For the grass, stones, wood, treasure chest and rock textures I used the gradient map after creating a nice black and white contrast, and for the statue, grass and branch I painted directly in colours (mainly because they were the last textures I painted, so I was just fed up with everything and decided to finish them as fast as possible).
Painting textures is always the hardest work, however, is the part of the process in which I learn the most, because It was the first time I have painted grass and stones in my life, but after everything was done, I felt like I could do another million grass textures, I feel confident enough to make new textures in the future!
I was having some trouble with the alpha maps for the branches and the grass, because for some reason Max wouldn't recognize the alpha channel inside the Targa archieves, so It would be all transparent or all RGB without the alpha channel, there was no between. Then I went to a Uni computer and I could fix everything?? I don't know what happened, honestly.
Once again, I wish I had done something more detalied for the statue, as I think her face doesn't even appear properly on the model, and I could have made some cracks and rain marks on the stone to make it look older. Also I wish I could have used the space on the right side of the platform in a different way: there is a large space of rocks that I could have drawn some different rocks or even more vines. I don't know if It would be too much or not.
I have had some feedback from Mike P. and he pointed out that my statue may look a little goofy if you take the arch as being a separation for legs (those are not suppose to be legs) and I had to agree with him, I would probably need to rethink the design or try to change something so It won't have this problem. He also said It would look more natural to make the ground a little more irregular, because It looks too perfect and machine-made, and I could have done that If I thought about it earlier, It's really a thing.
Also, for some reason, my branch texture looks very low quality and appears with a white border on sketchfab. This is a problem that wasn't happening on 3Ds Max, not even when rendered, so I don't know what could it be that's making It look bad. It's a real shame because is a huge and important part of my composition and I didn't want it to have a poor texture quality. I'll keep trying to fix it even though the deadline is now over, because I really want it to be part of my portfolio and I'll keep refining the textures and model until I'm perfectly satisfied with everyhing.
Treasure Chest
Making the treasure chest was probably worse than every other project so far. Even worse than the Diorama itself, probably because It was the first time I was actually modelling and texture something from scratch, and also because in the middle of the process I had to start it all over again. My final treasure chest doesn't look the most beautiful, or the most innovative, it's very similar to the one we had on the brief, and I really wish I had time to give my personal touch to it, in fact, I'm still going to make my own texture independent of the brief we had, and It will be all ornate and fancy.
I was not prepared for the treasure chest. I think I would never be prepared for this, even though modelling everything was easy and nice, I was shaking when I was given the task to actually paint a texture for it. That's probably why I decided to make something different, to push myself into doing something nice (It didn't work because I had to go back to the brief and make a wood and metal texture as everyone else). Below you can see every step for the painting of the texture and the final result!
The planks took me FOREVER. I lost count of how many hours I spent painting them, because It was just too much. I thought about giving up many times and I don't know what inside of me kept me from doing so. I followed the tutorial step by step because (as you are going to hear a lot of times in this blog) I'm not very good at digital painting so If they had just told us to make a texture with no further information I would just lay down on the floor and cry for the rest of my life because I never know where to start or what to do. Happily, after I finally finished the treasure chest, I felt a lot more confident to make my own textures, even though I still feel lost at the beginning, I always find my way sooner or later.
Unfortunately, at the end I just couldn't stand looking at my texture anymore. I had spent many days doing the treasure chest solo, nothing else, basically not even eating, and I just wanted to kill myself If I had to look at it for one more hour. So as you expect, the coins inside of the chest look absolutely hideous and I am very ashamed of them. Please don't judge me.
After I had all the values, contrast and details done, It was time to start using the Gradient Maps for the first time!! I had a lot of problems with it. And I didn't have the time to go and search for tutorials, so I had to work my way to make things work, and they did! But what I did was so wrong.
What happened was that after I had a gradient map applied, It would cover all the surface of my texture, and I didn't know how to apply it just to a selected area or specific layers, and the result was that my final file looks a mess. I later found out what to do, but It was too late for me, everything was already done. Maybe I will use it the right way when I make the second version of my texture.
At first I was going to use some light colours like silver for the metal and a pinkish wood. But then, playing with the gradient map, I found myself thinking "oh what a beautiful colour, I'm gonna use this one" and It would be a normal brown and gold. Well, well, well.
Even though my treasure has nothing very special or different, I am very proud of how It turned out to be, because I was expecting it to be a failure and look all hideous (not only the coins I mean). It was the first time that I finished something like this and I feel powerful, I feel like I can do anything!!!
I uploaded my chest on SketchFab and I am so glad I didn't have issues using the website, people were saying It was hell so I was scared. I guess my model is just too simple to go wrong.
My hands are ITCHING to make colour variations for the metal and wood. Maybe if I haven't gotten so many things to do in such a short spawn of time, I would do that.
I fixed something on sketchfab as well, I must confess. Looking at my texture, I wish It would be more vibrant, more shiny, and I found a way to do that after I uploaded my model so I wouldn't have to change all my Gradient Maps. It looks more WoWish right now, with the background and all the lights.
I also wanted to add some other details like a spider web! But that would have to speak to the whole scene as well so I would probably want to make a more darker and abandoned treasure chest for that, maybe a pirate chest!
Giving birth to my little child was really difficult and I cried a bit. But having everything done, even though it's not the best I could do, is just priceless. I can't believe I'm really doing this. 3D always seemed so difficult and distant. It's weird to realise how tangible it is to follow your dreams.