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Town of Timberdale [Environment WIP]

Metemer
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Metemer vertex
Heyo.

I've been working on an environment project for a while now. For too long. And progress has been slow, so I thought I'd make a thread to keep track of my thoughts and as a way to encourage myself to do work.

The idea: A small settlement in a fantasy RPG setting, resembling the likes of Dragon Age, Witcher, Elder Scrolls, what have you. I hope to keep it a bit more on the colorful and saturated side rather than dark and grimey, while still keeping it realistic. When it  comes to workflow and technical details, I'm trying to draw most from Witcher because it's the most recent and has a lot of educational content available from last year's GDC and others. I want to make sure that the environment is optimized and up to the standards of that game. Of course that will be next to impossible but that's alright, I'm in no hurry!

The goal: To familiarize myself with good environment art workflows and develop libraries of assets, materials, scripts and blueprints that I can re-use in the future, all while making a central piece to my portfolio.

Let's get to the stuff that's done already:

The planning stuff:

The whole thing started with this prototype house


Which isn't necessarily going to make it to the final product but I made it as an experiment to see if a cube with some windows on it would look good enough or if I need to add some other stuff. Stole a lot of aspects of this straight from W3's Beauclair, but I aim to have the final result be a lot more unique and look less stolen!

I also made a plan for the layout of this little village, which could still change, but it's nice to have a clearer image in my head of what I'm doing:

[Ground view]
For example one issue I learned from a W3 GDC talk is that long uninterrupted roads like that are bad for performance, so I should probably change that. There are also not much of interest here right now. A graveyard, brothel and an inn? Come on, surely I can do better. R-right...? Either way, I'll probably make a new plan from scratch sometime later. 



My file name and folder hierarchy conventions. I knew at the start that this project would have hundreds of files and that if I let myself go or start it without planning out my folders first it would turn into a week spent just fixing filenames and locations. So I did plan it out, and been so far sticking with it. Not very exciting but I decided to post everything I can, so there you go.

The art:



These are all the props that are already done. Some of them are meant as "first of a type" since making multiple of the same type of prop is boring, but will be necessary. What you might notice is that none of these props can build up a house. And yeah, that's one of the main reasons I'm starting this thread. The houses are the most important part, and yet I can't get myself to work on them. It's because whenever I do work on them I'm not very satisfied, because I don't see how the pieces I'm making will fit together in the future and then look good. But they will, I just need to convince myself of it! See, I'm already doing it.

There are some house pieces in progress though:


The "Roofs" file is quite a mess atm.



These windows are super boring, and that bothers me. Which is why I stopped making them after this 3. Not yet having a glass material doesn't help. What would help is if I accepted that windows don't need to be fancy. Yeah, that would be great.
Character from previous unrelated project there for scale btw.

Materials:

"Bottle glass" material made for windows.
"Wow, that looks an awful lot like the windows in Novigrad" - shut up. Actually mine looks worse because there's a gap between the rows I'll need to fix later, among other reasons.


This wall plaster is currently written off as a failed but useful attempt for obvious reasons. It looks like shit. But I'll try again later. I'm still pretty new at substance designer if you couldn't tell, but I'm getting there.

Beyond that, I have a pretty sizeable material library that I scavenged together from Substance Share, Substance Source, freepbr.com, textures.com, google, Substance Painter's defaults and whatever other dark corners of the internet. Unfortunately, as you might expect, not many of them fit my needs and standards, but if one out of 10 does and I have 150 that's already 15 materials I don't have to make myself.

I'm still considering whether it would be worth my time to make decals, but those would be a very last step anyways, so if I want to make them at the end, I will.

Tech stuff:

Stuff that's not necessarily art but either still necessary or useful to speed things up or workflows that I just felt like sharing because they took me a bit to figure out.



Video: https://streamable.com/d9tx4

Grass Wind tech!
I kinda hate the look of UE4's built in SimpleGrassWind so I decided to make my own grass shader. It's coming along alright, but it could probably still use some tweaking. I can control grass speed, direction, randomness of direction, adjust hue/sat/val, randomness of hue, noisiness of wind speed and probably some more that I'm forgetting. Video is a bit exaggerated for effect, probably too much, but you get the idea.

I'm getting ahead of myself though, first, here's the way I'm making my grass textures:

First I Model it in the quickest way even if it means having 2.5 million polygons. Also making sure that the UVs are laid out in a way that I can do maths with it. (ie. straight up)

Then I do some simple shader stuff with it to give it some colors, and render that out with a single large point light behind and above my ortographic camera.


Then do some more maths to get a normal map - this is extremely important because this normal map makes the grass look 10x better from up close. I have no clue about the performance impact though, but I'm not planning to have such a ridiculous amount of grass like in the video linked earlier.

One important thing to note when using this workflow is that in Blender under Scene->Color Management you want to set View to Raw to avoid converting the result into sRGB color space, ruining the normal map. Also you can figure out the normal channel shuffle by applying that material to a a sphere and checking which parts of the sphere are lit up by which channel. Also it will differ based on how your camera is orientated in world space, since the Normal Map's output is in world space.

Still todo on this subject is more grass, flowers, bushes, trees and terrain textures. I do somewhat enjoy doing this but damn that's a lot of stuff to make.

Next up is a script I quickly put together to import "texture sets" as materials into Blender. This is because there are some props that I create with the intention of not texturing them manually but instead applying various existing materials to their different parts. So, to preview said materials while creating the objects, I need to have them ready in Blender. And there's hundreds of them, so setting them up manually was out of the question. It's okay though, I wrote many a auto-material scripts before, just none for the glorious new Principled BSDF. 
Pastebin
Video

Alright, what else is there... oh right, material blending tech... I'll talk about that later because this post is long enough and I kinda broke it the last time I touched it. Here's an older video though, imagine this working but in UE4.

Well, that's done I guess, now here's hopin' that I'll actually do something useful tomorrow.

Replies

  • Metemer
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    Metemer vertex
    Well... today I made a shrub... in just about 12 hours.


    Which mostly consisted of learning about optimization; UE4's (lacking) LoD system, experimenting with sprites inside the bush which turned out to be kinda ugly so I left them out, figuring out the most optimized way between huge square alpha planes vs cutouts, since as it turns out rendering a lot of transparent planes is more expensive than having a few extra verts.


    Oh and I also found out that a bunch of my objects had disproportionate scale so I went through all of them and fixed them.

    It's quite frustrating how much time I burned into how little results, not to mention the bush itself is kinda ugly because, well, first time's not the charm. And now making the next ones would be easy and they'd go a lot faster but after how much this burned me out I don't know if I'll ever be in the mood again! >.>
  • Metemer
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    Metemer vertex
    Yesterday I didn't have time to do anything.

    Today I made another window substance, and finished the one I already had. imported a bunch of unfinished assets to UE and tried to put together a house just to see how it would look or what problems i'd run into. At first I wanted to build a house inside a blueprint but that felt super clunky and didn't seem that beneficial so in the end I just built it normally in the world. Also finished some roofs and in general made things a bit less of a mess.



    I didn't over complicate this one, it's just a bunch of squares with some basic parameters.



    Different parameters.



    I think I have everything figured out. I guess now it's really just coming down to doing a shitload of art. Could really use some better non-brick wall textures. Need a bunch of doors, windows, different sizes of the same roofs, different house bases, balconies and whatnot. Many things.
  • Metemer
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    Metemer vertex
    The plan for today was to make some doors, but instead I ended up being stuck making some funky pattern elements for carved wood, which for now make up this one finished panel:


    Why is this so huge jeez
  • TropicalTommy
    These are great, what program was it made on?
  • Metemer
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    Metemer vertex
    @TropicalTommy Thanks! I'm using Blender, Substance Designer, Substance Painter and Unreal Engine. The normal map magic is all Blender. I might do a quick write up on it sometime, it's pretty simple.

    On to todays stuff: Made a bunch of simple meshes! And they are house related too which is great. Still no doors and windows though, but I'm feeling a bit more inspired and motivated in the past few days, so I think when I get to them they will be cool. Just a matter of time!


    A fence cobbled together from rocks and cement, low & high poly, waiting to be baked and textured. Also, yes, it does loop

    These broken panels of different materials, to be used over house walls. Might make some more, since the more the merrier.



    A set of wooden fences.
    Background, left to right: Fence_Wooden_01, Fence_Wooden_01_Fallen, Fence_Wooden_01_Collapsed
    Foreground, left to right: Fence_Wooden_01_Chipped, Fence_Wooden_01_Chipped_Fallen, Fence_Wooden_01_Chipped_Collapsed

    Mesh names getting out of control and turning into books but that's alright.


    Some very basic building blocks, and so far very few because when I realized how many I could make I didn't want to make them anymore.


    Apparently these are called Corbels! The one in the back would be some kind of metal, probably gold.



    Couple of wooden panels - I'm trying to make up my mind if I want to texture them properly or just leave this generic "Wood_09" on them. Also need to make more similar panels that would be made out of different materials like stone or plaster or I dunno.


    Finally, some... pillar type stuffs. 
    Left to right: Actual pillar that will support superincumbent (thanks wikipedia's Corbel page) floors, a smaller pillar that will be sort of stuck onto walls to break up flatness, and the last 2 are decorative sticks that will also be stuck onto walls and windows to break up more flatness.

    So, that seems like I did a lot today but all of this was just cubes and cylinders without any texturing, which might sound like I'm discrediting myself but actually I've been too lazy to do all this stuff thinking it'd be boring for the longest time so I'm glad I finally got around to it. And it wasn't as boring as I thought!
  • TropicalTommy
    Wow, I am brand new to 3D modelling, but to see how the stone wall just moves to the shape you pull is amazing, didn't know you could do that, though I have no idea about blender, now just wondering how hard this would be to do in zbrush.
  • Metemer
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    Metemer vertex
    Today's stuff!



    Made a sword, just as a sort of clutter prop, I donno, people leave swords lying around in this village.


    And textured the rock fence

    I aim to avoid doing any work during the weekend, but we'll see.
  • Ashervisalis
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    Ashervisalis grand marshal polycounter

    Hey, looking good! Here’s some things I’d mention;

    With the brick house, you have grey plaster. It’s really weird thinking that they would put plaster on the outside of brick. If they did that, then the plaster has worn away so much, but the rest of the house doesn’t look old enough for the plaster to have warn away this amount. The tiles on the roof are huge, I’ve never seen tiles that large before. Your houses are currently just cubes, which is a little boring. I can see a lot of repeats in the texture for the bricks. The bricks look really small, which makes the windows and door and stuff seem really big, and really cartoony.

    I’m having a hard time figuring out the age of your town because different things look aged differently. Your window materials look brand new but your brick house looks a combination of old and new.

    I think you’re putting too much of the field grass into one plane. The bulbs at the end should probably be made of 2 planes. If I was looking at this in game, I’d walk around it and instantly notice how flat it is. Something like this field grass, I’d probably make out of 5 different planes, not including the bulbs.

    Your house roofs all have a different style, I think it would help if they had a more uniform style and colour, but slightly different. I’d say try to think of an era, culture, building material, and then try to stick to those. The house also has a huge bevel on the edges which a brick house wouldn’t have.

    I’d like to see some sort of ruins among your town, that’d bring interest to your town. It would also show some range in modeling skills, being able to create ruins would be a bit more difficult than a house. Here’s some other ideas to bring some life to your town; statue, river, hanging cage… Try and think of a mood that your village sets; dark and mysterious, dangerous, rich, peaceful, etc.

    I won’t critique your props because you said they weren’t complete!

    In your wood structures, I don’t see any nails holding the pieces together (I’m looking at the corbels). The one in the middle, the wood grain doesn’t match up on the side vs. the front; It looks like a wood grain texture was just thrown onto the different parts.

    The wood panels don’t look like wood, they look like rust. But it doesn’t look like these are in game engine yet, so I don’t know if you’ll be changing up the material at all.

    I'd put some thought ahead of time into the landscape. Whether it's mountainous, ocean-side, etc, that'd determine so much in the town. It would also determine how buildings are built and placed. Are the townspeople miners? Sailors? Soldiers? Farmers? Wizards? I want to know more about the town. I want it to have a story!

    Looking forward to seeing a finished town!
  • Metemer
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    Metemer vertex
    @Ashervisalis Wow, thanks so much for all the feedback! 

    As for the house, no worries, the material of either layer can be changed on the fly. I will also make it so that the UV scale can also be changed so I can customize the size of the bricks. And then ofc I'd refrain from using bricks on beveled edges, or alternatively I could hide the beveled edge with some wooden slabs(as long as I can make it look not out of place ofc).

    The age of the town is meant to be not particularly ancient or destroyed, but it also wasn't just painted yesterday. Ruins and ancient elements are something I was planning to have near the graveyard area, where houses would also be older, smaller and poorer, but not too poor. I'll have to make sure that this information comes across at a glance.

    Good suggestions on the grass, and I know exactly what you mean by having 2 planes for the bulbs. I'm probably not going to use any of the current grasses in the final product and just make better ones, those were sort of the prototypes, I guess!

    For house roof styles I feel a bit time constrained because I don't have the time to make my own materials with the timeframe I aim to finish this. For now I'll just try to get the most out of what I have - (free materials from substance share and such) and if I have extra time at the end, I can always replace them with custom made ones.

    I was wondering if the roof tiles were the right size but since no one mentioned it until now I left it alone. I will definitely double-check the consistency of my scaling, thanks for pointing that out!

    Nails for wood things, totally doable, should be a nice touch, thanks for the idea!

    And for the wood panels, it is indeed just a slapped on material at the moment, I will probably texture it normally down the line.

    The landscape was sort of planned out, as a slightly elevated terrain barred by a steep mountain cliff with a path up to it on one side and farmlands on the other side. I wanted to do a river but I don't want to worry about making water look good at the moment, since I'm not a fan of the default water materials in UE4, especially not for a river.

    Whew! Well, tomorrow I think I should do the second iteration of the layout planning like I planned, and if that goes quickly do some asset improving and importing, maybe fix the roof scales and add the UV scaling functionality in my base material. Actually I should probably touch up all my base materials because they are a bit of a mess right now. We'll see how much time I have though.
  • Metemer
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    Metemer vertex
    It didn't go quickly! I think this is better than before although a bit more ambitious(was even bigger at first), and could still be improved but I don't think I will bother until I'm further into it and have a better idea of what I'm doing and what looks good and makes sense in terms of layout and what doesn't. Probably not very interesting for you since you don't have the images in your head that I do, but for me it is quite useful to have this.


  • Ashervisalis
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    Ashervisalis grand marshal polycounter
    The map for the town is 10x better with the descriptions of the surrounding area! Before I was picturing flat grasslands which never ended, now I'm picturing an actual countryside. Will you be creating the trees for the forest yourself?
  • Metemer
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    Metemer vertex
    @Ashervisalis Yes, I would like to. I don't know how many different kinds yet, it will depend on how quickly I can make them. I made one tree before for a friend's project using Blender's Sapling add-on and some custom trickery which I forgot about but I'm sure it'll come back to me when I need it.

    I also fixed the scaling of that roof mesh, and fortunately I found out that that was the only one with messed up scale. (before after)
    -
    Today I finally finalized my magical material mixing system, it should enable an insane amount of variety throughout the project, just observe this slightly long video showcasing its features: https://streamable.com/yzkbr

    So, it is a blueprint with dozens of parameters which allow you to select a mesh, override 3 of its material slots(can add more but I don't usually use that many), and layer 3 more materials on top of the mesh(not on top of each material, that would be insane) using vertex painting. The parameters let you change the materials themselves, color hue, saturation, value, roughness and UV scale of each of the 6 materials.

    For some reason Epic decided that the default value for vertex paint should be white(1,1,1), so if I used each channel as the mix value then the third vertex paint material would be on the entire mesh as soon as it is spawned, and that sucks. So it is inverted, therefore you don't add more of Vertex Paint Material #1 by painting more Red, but by erasing more Red. It's weird but the alternative is to have to fill every single mesh with black when spawning, and that'd be tedious. Also, currently the order of the parameter groups is:
    Material 1
    Material 3
    Vetex Paint Material 1
    Vetex Paint Material 2
    Vetex Paint Material 3
    Material 2

    Which triggers me beyond my English vocabulary, and neither me nor google has any clue how to fix it.

     Anyways, if  you like node horror, here's the blueprint: 
    http://i.imgur.com/Rfs2gQt.png You can see a very similar idea is being repeated 2x3 times, which looks like this:
    http://i.imgur.com/VjBGXGz.png And more of the same inside "Set Vertex Paint Material Textures":
    https://i.imgur.com/N04ePkw.png
    But none of this makes sense without knowing what's inside the master material, which all of my materials currently instance(except those, which do not!)
    https://i.imgur.com/0nfDxFr.png 
    https://i.imgur.com/aeGE2UW.png This part is of course repeated 3x
    https://i.imgur.com/jhUyIuo.png And the base of it is the same thing with a couple extra tiny parameters which I didn't find important enough to put into the vertex paint, such as NormalMapIntensity and NormalMapUseBlueChannel.

    So you see how this material has a crapton of parameters. Those are the parameters which get filled in by the blueprint using Dynamic Material Instances. I'm not entirely sure if I'm doing everything correctly, because I might be creating a bunch of these dynamic material instances that just end up feeding the garbage collector, but I don't think so. At least not during runtime, when the construction script isn't being called over and over again. I hope.

    Shader complexity: https://i.imgur.com/KlYUGNk.png is considerably higher than usual but still in the green. Still, if this was a full scale production, you'd probably only use this blueprint on meshes that you will actually vertex paint, not every mesh for the sake of "just in case I'd want to vertex paint this in the future", which is what I'm planning to do.
  • Metemer
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    Metemer vertex
    I made some more building blocks and built a house in the engine from a bunch of wooden beams and whatever I could find.


    This is more or less satisfactory for me. Building it in the engine(rather than 3D software) from small parts has its limitations and disadvantages(eg optimization), but I think that's what I'll continue to do because it's faster.

    I should already be able to build many different looking houses from different pieces, but I could use more stuff.
    Also, chimneys, I just realized I forgot about the chimneys.

    Anyways, now that I have some faith in myself that I can build acceptable looking houses, I intend to do a full block-out in the engine of the town, make more house parts, make more foliage, make more clutter props, and then build the whole thing! Will be done in no time!

    (kill me)
  • Ashervisalis
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    Ashervisalis grand marshal polycounter
    That house looks cool! Here's a few critiques I've got for it;

    The texture on the wooden beams gets darker towards one end. This makes it so you can tell it's been duplicated for every beam. If you adjust the texture for the beam so that the darker bit is just near the end, and on both ends, it'll look a bit better imo.
    The shingles of the roof are a bit too obviously separate. I don't think the house needs them. They also look bigger than the shingles from the texture, and you can see shingles underneath the added shingles.
  • Metemer
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    Metemer vertex
    Thanks again!

    I think you're right that they don't look great on that one but I think I have a better solution than getting rid of them altogether - The reason I don't want to do that is because then the roof would have a very sudden and straight edge - which is to fix their actual location which I seem to have messed up at some point, and to improve the lighting to get rid of those ugly shadows. I think it's caused by the normal map, since I'm trying to fake something that is actually there. So I'll give those guys a separate material which doesn't use the normal map.



    (Sorry picture is a bit bright)
    Actually, fiddling with the lighting and fixing the locations was enough. If necessary in the end, I'll do the separate material thing. I also re-made all the wooden beams because I originally had them beveled and straight, thought that would look somehow fancy, but it was quite the opposite and it looks a lot better imo as sharp and slightly crooked(you can barely notice it, which is perfect). Coincidentally, it fixed the odd shading. Other fix I could've done if I wanted to keep the bevels is to insert some edge loops to hold the smoothed normals together.


    Yay, more blockouts!
    Ended up with far more houses than originally planned but I think I can deal with it, I can always duplicate more and change some colors around. Now that it's all in engine I can play around with the layout much easier, and I definitely might, but I think it's shaping up nicely. It's a bit of an awkwardly sized settlement, because I'm having a hard time deciding what it should be surrounded by - a proper wall, just a small stone fence, a thin but tall wall? Might go with the third one, but I didn't originally plan to, so we'll see.


    Got some landscape happening now as well, obviously early stages and I'm still learning how it works. It's starter content materials for now but I might just keep those, since most of the materials in this aren't made by me anyways, that's definitely not my main focus right now.

    Now props, on the other hand! Here's some doors, they look quite flat in all their nakedness


    But the frames and handles(just those two rings for now, more later) are here to help.


    More wood carving! I think the red and green are inverted on this one because it's from before, well, I fixed it. Here's a sneak peek on how it's done: https://streamable.com/mmz38
    And a light rotating around the 3rd one in SP: https://streamable.com/zdc5b

    Well, that's about it for now!
  • Metemer
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    Metemer vertex



    S'more houses. 7 done, 42 to go. *sigh* Although I should probably finish a "block" first, then gather some feedback before doing a bunch more, because there's definitely a lot of space to improve here. (also still missing chimneys and vegetation(vines and stuff) but I'll add those retroactively when I'm doing the rest of the foliage)

    I also made a funky blueprint that lets me create fences super quickly and super nicely using a curve.
    Video: https://streamable.com/qhn1u

    Also a similar blueprint for Decals, but that's still in progress(as in, it's done but I don't have any decals or time to test it with and I need to acquire those things first.)

    At this point I really have all the hard stuff done... All the tech ready, all the tools learned. Now it's truly just a matter of making stuff... And damn, it's a lot of stuff.
  • Ashervisalis
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    Ashervisalis grand marshal polycounter
    Your roof has a really low roughness value, it's reflecting the grass it looks like.

  • Joopson
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    Joopson quad damage
    Your roof has a really low roughness value, it's reflecting the grass it looks like.
    I might be wrong, but I think it's meant to be moss? I did think the same thing at first though. Reads like a weird reflection.
  • aclund3
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    aclund3 polycounter lvl 6
    Excited to see how this turns out.  Pretty ambitious project :)
  • Ashervisalis
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    Ashervisalis grand marshal polycounter
    @Joopson I think you might be right!
  • Metemer
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    Metemer vertex
    Thanks guys, but I'm afraid due to some situation changes IRL, this project will now progress a lot slower than before because I have to focus on some other things. Maybe this is a good thing though, I've been starting to burn out a little and I definitely wouldn't want to leave this unfinished. And I doubt I will, it will just take longer than I'd hoped.

    Oh and yeah, that's moss >.> I might get better textures at some point, I can swap it out in the material instance, easy peasy!
  • RustySpannerz
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    RustySpannerz polycounter lvl 13
    This is a really cool project and it looks like you've learned a lot throughout making it. But I think maybe the scope is just a little bit too big for you right now, and when you mentioned that you were feeling a little burnt out, it's really not surprising. I know this because I've made the same mistakes, months and months of big projects that I keep needing to go back and fix because I've learned new things, and the stuff I made at the start doesn't look anywhere near as good. I would focus on making little scenes that take 2 weeks tops to make, or little dioramas with some really interesting props. And really try to focus on quality over quantity. And this is advice I really need to learn to heed too. Good luck anyway!
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