THRONE ROOM Throne of the Elven King Poly Leaf
interpolator
Hello all,
Lucozadez and I are teaming up for this one, we are both doing our last semester of our last year at University so we thought if we team up we might be able to make a reasonable environment due to us both lacking in time.
Our aim is to create a throne room that looks fit for an Elven King. We like the whole idea of having a throne room with dynamic elements, foliage and the architecture. We plan on combining nature with human built structures based on medieval/elvish design.
Lucozadez- 'The idea is this, the start of the throne room is long and have the usually characteristics with pillars and arch ways but this section is quite dark. Leading up to the throne is a pathway and either side is a section of water only small and thin which runs along side the path. Then where the throne is situated is a dome . Here is where the ceiling has an opening so there's quite a bit of natural light coming through highlighting the throne and the surrounding area. The throne itself is surrounded by the stream of water leading up to the throne. The throne is built up on a platform of steps and foliage (grass and dirt). In this area is ivy and other plants growing with the added bit of the roof opening. But situated behind the stone throne is a tree which looks to protect the throne growing behind it'
Here are some reference we gathered for the type of style and look we want to go for (some concepts might be the same because we both did it separately)
Luke also got together some concepts of his own for what we are looking to create.
I myself have been messing around with Zbrush to get ready to create some base textures.
We are both looking forward to this and hope we get the time to make it look great.
Lucozadez and I are teaming up for this one, we are both doing our last semester of our last year at University so we thought if we team up we might be able to make a reasonable environment due to us both lacking in time.
Our aim is to create a throne room that looks fit for an Elven King. We like the whole idea of having a throne room with dynamic elements, foliage and the architecture. We plan on combining nature with human built structures based on medieval/elvish design.
Lucozadez- 'The idea is this, the start of the throne room is long and have the usually characteristics with pillars and arch ways but this section is quite dark. Leading up to the throne is a pathway and either side is a section of water only small and thin which runs along side the path. Then where the throne is situated is a dome . Here is where the ceiling has an opening so there's quite a bit of natural light coming through highlighting the throne and the surrounding area. The throne itself is surrounded by the stream of water leading up to the throne. The throne is built up on a platform of steps and foliage (grass and dirt). In this area is ivy and other plants growing with the added bit of the roof opening. But situated behind the stone throne is a tree which looks to protect the throne growing behind it'
Here are some reference we gathered for the type of style and look we want to go for (some concepts might be the same because we both did it separately)
Luke also got together some concepts of his own for what we are looking to create.
I myself have been messing around with Zbrush to get ready to create some base textures.
We are both looking forward to this and hope we get the time to make it look great.
Replies
Me and Luke have just started our last semester and damn we tired.
Anyhoo we are slowly getting back our power energy from the all mighty gods of 3D modelling.
We've changed our idea slightly as we thought our previous throne room, which we did end up blocking out but not sharing, as it wasn't grand enough.
We then thought more about the idea and chose to go for more of a stone throne room with foliage and water about so keeping some of our initial idea.
Here is the blockout of our new idea.
Bye for now and we shall see you soon with more updates.
When looking at the updated images you will be able to see that we filled it a little more as we felt the blockout was looking quite empty.
I also created some ivy for the project and I thought I would show my process on that so you guys could see some in-depth behind the scenes stuff.
1) What I did first of all was get hold of a texture from CGTextures and edited it inside of Photoshop. I got rid of things like holes that I didnt want inside the ivy leaf. Next I made the leaf greyscale.
2) With this greyscale image, I placed it inside of Substance and used a gradient map to add color information. I found this a quick and easy way to just make sure the ivy has no lighting information.
3) Inside of Maya I placed the leaves together and gave them some depth and a bend so when it baked it looked a little more natural. Once I laid them out, I then baked out mental ray passes for the diffuse (no lighting), opacity (for both with the vine and without so I could have a SSS one for the leaves) and a normal.
4) I then made another Maya file and used some 2D planes with more verts so I could bend them so they were not straight. I made 3 clusters and had the single ones too.
5) I placed these clusters inside of UE4 and then created a basic texture for it using the Subsurface material profile.
6) I created parameters so if Luke was to edit it in the future to test the Ivy on something else, he can do that with an instance. Im still currently working on the amount value.
7) This is how it looks in the scene currently. Im not 100% happy with how it turned out but its something I am going to tweak in the upcoming weeks.
Currently we are having a problem with our Subsurface (we have it inverted because currently it gives us a better effect) we have a UE4 thread for it so we can fix it. - https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/172668/subsurface-on-foliage-not-working-correctly.html
Anyway here are our new shots.
Here you can see the step by step process i did to create the trees we currently have in our throne room.
1. I started off by creating the trunk and main branches of the tree to see what the possible silhouette would look like from all views.
2. Then I created a single leaf texture with all relevant maps which would be used on the branch later on.
3. Once the leaf had been created i made a simple branch and placed the leaves on until i was happy with how it looked. Constantly looking to see where possible gaps are and how it will look when placed on the bigger tree branches.
4. From this I once again created all the relevant maps and baked down a lot of information to create a much more optimised image of the branch which would be placed upon a plane.
5. I then applied the texture to a plane inside of maya and started placing that on the tree trunk until it gave a full look to the canopy of the tree.
6. This is the current result of the tree inside of UE4.
Previously I did have another issue where the planes weren't lighting correctly inside of UE4. The planes with the branch texture had very harsh shadowing on them.
Looking in to this i found that it's because i hadn't tweaked the vertex normals on the planes, which was resulting in the lighting errors.
From here i used a stretched dome covering the tree planes and transferred the domes attributes over to the trees.
I simply, re-imported the tree back in to our UE4 environment and it looked a lot better.
I still need to work on the trees as they're not completely how i would like them to look, but for now they're looking alright in my opinion.