Pirate Diorama

Samuraidragon13

Starting a new small diorama environment with a pirate theme.

HiPoly Crate

Samuraidragon13

Crate and Barrel WIP

Lucas Annunziata

Well, you certainly have got a box, and a barrel, 2 staples of the 3d artists diet. Is the second image a maya render of the low polys? Its usually good to present your low poly assets in the engine that they will ultimately end up in for the scene. If so, your normal maps seem to have some errors in them.

Do you have a concept for the diorama?

Samuraidragon13

Yeah its a maya render of the low polys. I'm not sure what's up with the normals, I made them using xnormal. I'm going to redo them. The idea that I have is to do a dock with a small pirate life raft, the crate and barrel, and a canon.

Diffuse WIP

Samuraidragon13

I will be using UDK for this since I don't have UE$ yet.

Nosslak

Generally you'd block out the whole scene with some simple primitives before you start making the detailed assets. This is the most common approach as you can establish proportions early and get a better overview of what unique assets you'll need. Otherwise you might find that you finish all the assets and the scene you had in mind looks like crap after you've wasted all that time on finalizing all assets. Better to find that out early and fail faster.

Not sure what kind of style you're going for, but as I see that you're using phototextures I'll just assume you're going for realism. If this is the case you should bring your highpoly meshes into ZBrush and go over the boards a bit with the mallet and trim brushes to get some more interesting wear on the edges at least as the boards are way too uniform right now.

The crates proportions feel kind of cartoony as well, but again not sure if that's what you're going for or not.

Samuraidragon13

Thanks Nosslak. Yeah I probably should block it out and save my self the time doing that later. I am going for a realism style. Unfortunately I don't have a computer powerful enough to run mudbox or zbrush, so for now all I can do is use maya and photoshop.

Samuraidragon13

Blockout in UDK. I feel much better about the scale of the everything now. Thank you Nosslak for reminding me to always start off with a blockout it makes the beginning process feel much better.

Brygelsmack

Maybe do some cool sculpting in Zbrush for those wooden assets. (:

Samuraidragon13

Working on the main body of the dock. Eventually gonna create like 5-8 boards that I can mix and match as instances.

Samuraidragon13

Made some adjustments to the dock and started on the boat.

peanut™

Dont forget to triangulate your meshes before export in UDK