Module 4 - Environment Part 03- Chinese Wisteria Hero Piece

 

Module 4 - Environment Part 2 - Chinese Wisteria Hero Piece

 This week I didn't get to do as much work as I wanted as set in my schedule due to game lab. So I need to catch up a bit. So I did a little extra research on how to go about building the lower poly version of the tree so that will save me time in the future. The process pretty much goes that you need to build a lot of small pieces and then build up from there. These three sculpts may not look like much but once they are combined with Speedtree they will compose the entirety of the canopy of my tree.

 

Artist Research

 

Module 4 - Environment Part 01- Chinese Wisteria Hero Piece

 For this project I will be creating a Chinese Wisteria vine that is taking over a Japanese Zelkova tree. This will be a hero piece and visual target for the summer Common Art group project. 

My schedule to have this done by the final industry review of the Spring Semester will be as follows:

 3/31 - 4/6 : Block out the entire tree, this will include any additional pieces to the tree such as creeping plants/moss clumps/mushrooms etc. This will also include any props that may be attached to the tree, such as rope for the Shimenawa purification ritual. This tree will be part of a shrine so this would be accurate to denote a sacred place. Import into Unreal for size reference.

 4/7 - 4/13: Sculpt out the cards for the flowers and leaves. Will need to also sculpt out some if the pods and stems as well for the Wisteria. Basic sculpts of the additional props will be done as well. Would want one of the bark textures to be done for the tree that the Wisteria is clinging to.

4/14 -  4/20: Create the Wisteria vine bark material. Texture the wisteria flowers and leaves. Create subsurface scattering for the flowers and leaves. Look dev in Unreal. Optimize model to be game ready.

4/21 - 4/23: Final texture tweaks and optimization pass. As well as making renders for Industry Review.

 

Module 3 - Environmental Art Techniques Part 04

 

Module 3 - Environmental Art Techniques Part 03

 Three Techniques for Vertex Painting

 Nanite Tessellation with Mesh Painting

This method uses Nanite to displace the textures, however it stores the painted vertices on the mesh in the content browser. Which does not allow for instances to be painted differently. You can only use this method to paint using the modeling tools within Unreal.

Parallax Occlusion

 

This method uses parallax occlusion to fake the depth in the material. However unless finely tuned it makes the textures look a bit blurry.

 

Vertex Paint Blending 

This is the method(kind of) we learned from the video of the assignment. The method in the video doesn't allow for more than one texture to be blended so I needed to add some different nodes that would allow multiple materials to be blended.
 

Module 3 - Environmental Art Techniques Part 02 Unfinished