Virtual Environments n9215921 @virtual9215921-blog - Tumblr Blog

Conclusion

I had a great time working with my team this semester and I am really happy with how Lucy’s bedroom turned out in both normal mode and nightmare mode. Although I had to overcome a few problems it was a great experience modelling and texturing the 6 assets allocated to me and acting on my peers feedback to make sure we created environments with one coherent art style.

#niceoneteam

Completed texturing nightmare

I was able to use the cartoon material template I created in Substance Designer for the nightmare table and laptop as well as the nightmare chair. However it didnt turn out too well on the table so I had no other choice but to manually paint in the highlights and lowlights. I used a hard brush so you can easily see where I painted. However the material worked excellently on the laptop and chair, leaving me little to no need to hand paint extra detail.

Completed texturing

Texturing time! Soon after I started trying to hand paint a cartoony texture with highlights and lowlights that matched our art style I realised how necessary it was to have a solid understanding of realistic drawing. I can not draw and so it dawned on me this would be much harder than I first expected. After doing a lot of research about different cartoon art styles I decided to create a cartoon material in Substance Designer that uses the baked thickness map along with the world normals to create a cartoony highlight and lowlight effect. This did work and saved me a lot of time painting the basics. This material is most evident on the office chair as I did not paint any of those highlights or lowlights, its all been generated from baked textures. The keyboard turned out perfectly and looks like its been modelled in because of the details in the normal map. For the striped on the table I used a brick texture and set the brick width extremely high. I was then able to move the texture along the x axis until the mirroring in the centre wasnt noticable.

Final Nightmare models

Total Polys: 10k 8k of those faces is from the nightmare chair. I found that when reducing the amount of polys below this it started to become noticeable and feared baking the highpoly mesh would result in shading artefacts from a large variation in the meshes.

Final normal Models

Total Tris: 10k All meshes are mirrored on the X axis to double the amount of texture space given to each model. This will allow for higher quality textures for the same file size. There is also high poly versions of each model which will be baked into the normal maps.

Nightmare Modelling

Both 3D models were made to be as similar as the nightmare concept art to keep the same style as other group members. I didnt add the keyboards keys in the modelling phase as this would drastically increase the polycount when it could be shown much more efficiently in the texturing phase with a bump and diffuse texture.

This week I focused on learning Substance Designer to hopefully develop a master substance that I can use as a base for all scary/nightmare meshs that I am texturing. I tried to keep the material looking cartoonish to make with the style guide. As this was my first week using Substance Designer I found it quite hard finding the right nodes for what I wanted to achieve. However after a few tutorials I was able to pickup a good understanding of the workflow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzKtubDsC9o

Screenshot of the chair in Substance Designer:

Photoshop!

I then tried to learn Marmoset Toolbag to render it out and see how it would look.

Its pretty dark, I must have imported the textures incorrectly or not had enough lighting.

Now all I need to do is figure out how to expose the Substances parameters and import it properly into Substance Painter. Providing im happy with the level of cartoon but I’m not too keen on playing around with it forever. I’m not good at drawing so its easy to see how creating a “hand painted” material would be very difficult for me haha

Week 5

This week I began modelling the nightmare version of the office chair. Once again I closely stuck with the concept image as it looks incredible. Because the nightmare objects are all curvy and made up of organic shapes in the design/animatic/art direction, I decided I would have to learn the sculpt tool in Blender. I found this tutorial to be one of the most informative tutorials I have ever seen: youtube.com/watch?v=tZnUgt659oI

I planned to start with a simple proxy of the chair and then go into sculpt mode and start getting a lot more detail into the model just like in the tutorial. I underestimated the importance of an accurate base mesh as once you get into sculpting its hard to make large changes especially rotation. Because of this I had to start all over again as after sculpting for a while I wasnt happy with the shape/curve of the chair and its horns as it wasnt curvy enough for our desired art style.

This time I used much more geometry to get a more accurate start. As well as using the multi resolution modifier instead of dynatopo with allowed me to go back and make larger changes while retaining any higher resolution detail that was added.

As the concept image didnt show the front of the chair I imagined it to have leathery cushions with a similar indentation pattern to the one below which I used as a reference.

After sculpting the chair I found the polygon count was at 300k which is certainly not suitable for a realtime game engine. To reduce this count I found the decimate modifier worked really well to lower the poly count while keeping as much detail as possible. Like with the office chair and desk I decided to mirror the textures to double the resolution. This took much longer as anticipated as the decimate modifier left huge gaps in the mirror modifier so I had to manually stitch the centre of the chair together. I ended up reducing the polycount to 8k which can be reduced but it will suffice for now.

When I get to texturing the chair I will use the highest resolution version of the chair and bake all its details onto the 8k mesh. I have never baked normals from such high poly objects before but i’m interested to see how it goes.

I also only modelled one horn for the ones around the bottom of the chair so I can use the same uv space for all of them. I’m also thinking I may be able to just import one of the horns and then duplicate them around the chair in the engine. I’ll have to ask in my workshop whether thats worth doing or not.

Week 4

This week I modelled the daytime spare bedroom office chair and Laptop. Modelling the laptop was quite simple as I decided to leave the individual keys on the keyboard to be shown through the normal and albedo maps in texturing.

While modelling the office chair I started using too many polys on the rounded edges. Especially down near the wheels of the chair which should be lower poly than the rest of the chair as it will be down low to the ground away from the viewer. I may need to use the delete with angle constraint tool in blender to lower the poly count while retaining as much quality as possible.

As I will be doing a lot of texturing very soon, I decided to start looking at reference material for the nightmare textures. Some of these images could be used as artwork in the nightmare version. Of course we would have to check to copyright first.

Week 3

This week I modelled the daytime spare bedroom Desk. I planned to make it obvious this was a little girls desk so I found some reference images. I noticed that having curvy legs and lots of smooth bevels heavily influenced the look of a girls desk. Because of this I spent a lot of polys on the bevelling to make sure that it looked really smooth. This however meant that the final desk had 4k vertices:

I knew this was overkill and so researched ways to simplify the model. I found the decimate tool in blender works well to a degree. It doesnt keep the curves it just sort of turns them into triangles which wasnt looking good enough. I then found another method of reducing polys which is called limited dissolve. This removes vertices wherever they are not contributing much to the model based on their adjacent angle. This angle can be modified and the results of the mesh are shown live so you can get the best balance between polys and detail.

I was able to reduce the vertex count to 2k using this method. Keep in mind the model above is triangulated so it may appear to have more geometry than most models. This is just so that the smoothing groups can be calculated properly. As you can see from the leg on the left it doesnt look quite as good but is still half the vertices so very much worth it.

While modelling the desk I kept in mind texturing and how I can maximise the texture space of the uvs. I decided to mirror the desk twice so that I only had to model and uv unwrap one quarter of the desk. This way the uvs can overlap and be mirrored saving a load of texture quality.

This is similar for the shelf on top of the desk as I decided to mirror it too, saving texture space and increasing overall quality of the texture.

Week 2

The main thing I worked on this week was getting reference images for all the models and texturing I will be doing this semester. I tried to find images specific to a little girls desk and chair so that the models and textures fit inwith the rest of the room. It will also help tell the background story of the little girl so its very important to think of these details.

However when trying to find images for the nightmare transformations of the desk, chair and laptop I found it very difficult to find any relevant images. This image of a laptop being the best thing I found.

This concept art image is fantastic as without it I would have a very hard time coming up with scary designs for a chair, laptop and desk.

In today workshop I helped a team member by showing them how to import the proxy models into Unreal from Blender.

Week 1

Started thinking about the asset list and what I really wanted to learn and work on this semester. For this subject I plan to focus on nailing the texturing and am really looking forward to doing the nightmare textures. I have planned to do the texturing for team members who prefer to do modelling.

I also Imported the current asset list into Trello with individual cards and separating the cards into spare bedroom, nightmare spare bedroom and grandmas bedroom. I also began assigning team members to their chosen cards. After choosing the assets im working on, there were still a lot of modelling left over so I am going to model and texture the desk, chair and pc in both normal and nightmare modes. I will still help out modellers with texturing.. especially for nightmare mode

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