THRONE ROOM - Lair of the Druid Prince - elindell

elindell

Hello, I'm excited to try my hand at this contest. I'm more experienced at the arch viz part of 3D design but I'm trying to learn more of the game engine aspect. My goal for this is to create a environment that runs well on an oculus rift using UE4 and also looks as good as I can make it. I'm trying to learn a whole slew of new software and this contest gives a great opportunity to do that.
So many good entries so far so got a lot of work ahead of me.

software I'll be using:
Houdini indie
zbrush
3dcoat
substance designer/painter/b2m
blender
photoline
artrage
UE4

For my throne room, my idea is a place of quiet contemplation that evokes a feeling of primal nature hidden within the depths. The phrase "still waters run deep" would sum it up. I want to create a small environment that gives the illusion of openness. If Superman were a druid, this would be his fortress of solitude.

All feedback is welcome

Here's a very rough first draft of my concept design.

elindell

Here is my throne concept
I wanted it rather simple in shape, like a slab of rock chiseled to get the barest form of a throne, overgrown with vines.

I started off in 3dcoat, I like 3dcoat because with the voxel sculpting its very easy to get basic shapes down.


Then I brought it into zbrush to add detail (I'm new to zbrush though so just trying to get a feel for it).


I brought it back to 3dcoat because I know its retopology and uvunwrap system better but maybe in the future I can just stay inside zbrush.


baked the high poly mesh onto the retopo mesh, took a bit of tweaking with the normals but finally got a good result



then to get the vines I brought the retopo model into blender and used the ivy gen addon to get this. I was pretty happy with how quickly I could generate the vines but I'm going to have to figure out how to keep this look while greatly reducing the polycount. I like substance designer's baking features so might be able to create a convincing normal texture combined with some of the vines layered on top. This shot was rendered in cycles

elindell

Doing some testing trying to bake the vine geometry into a normal map and testing out some of the other bakers in substance designer, then put it all into UE4.




Looks a bit flat to me so next goal is either add a few more vines as separate geometry or figure out displacements/height within UE4, coloring and roughness need work too, but I'm happy with it as a base to go from. Also I was playing around in substance painter and noticed the vines particle brush so might try to see what kind of results I can get from that.

elindell

Updated the textures for the throne, took some time to learn some the substance painter tools. Liking this result much more, and can go back and tweak setting since everything is layered. the underlying stone is probably too evenly smooth so will probably come back to that, and also add some separate floral geometry to give it more depth but its getting closer to what I imagined.



I also started work on the big tree backdrop, you can sort of see the start of in the background but that's still very much in the design phase. I'm going to try and tackle that next.

Also here's a shot of leaf-print tile I may use for some of the floor, I'm not sure if I like it though but I think I have to block out more of the room before I can figure that out.

elindell

Worked a bit on the tree backdrop. My goal here was to get a model done and do a quick paint job to see how it looks, I want to make sure all the elements work before spending too much time on getting perfect textures.

First started modelling in 3d coat to get basic volume, then brought over to zbrush for some surface details. After that made a quick retopo and uv map, which I will eventually redo because for such a large model the UV map is wasting a lot of space on parts of the model no one will see. Then brought into substance designer to bake some maps and then into painter. Last shot is to see how it looks in UE4. I'm happy with the tree though it's texture and lighting need refinement.






My next goal is to finish blocking out the room, still brainstorming but I have a general idea of what I want.