dogpoop
Hello polycount,
I have been a lurker for roughly a year now, and have decided to come out of hiding by posting about a small prop. I am making shit, dogpoop to be precise.
I currently have a blocked out shape, with a texture that I had lying around applied to it. Here is what I have:
For those that are interested, i do have a couple of references lying around, but they are kinda smelly.
Thanks in advance.
I have been a lurker for roughly a year now, and have decided to come out of hiding by posting about a small prop. I am making shit, dogpoop to be precise.
I currently have a blocked out shape, with a texture that I had lying around applied to it. Here is what I have:
For those that are interested, i do have a couple of references lying around, but they are kinda smelly.
Thanks in advance.
Replies
-Consider Screen Space:
Generally speaking, this asset will only ever be on ground level. That being the case, this asset has way too many tris for such a minor asset. The argument could be raised that all portfolio assets should be created as hero assets, but I'm more in the camp of appreciating art assets in context.
-Fecal anatomy: It's very rare to have such a soft serve style curl to an animals feces. Unlike us, they aren't practicing the art of an unbroken log and are just trying to get food out of their body to obtain more calories. It's all primal, really, and the shape of the feces should match that action - a dog would be stopping and starting constantly leaving a result like this more often than not:
-Chemical Makeup: Pay close attention to the digestive process and it's results when it comes to feces...pieces of food undigested, fiber strands, and in consistent cracks / sectioning will result in interesting textures. also, based on this shot, I think you should re-examine the spec/gloss values to more accurately resemble the real world if you are using a PBR workflow.
-Diversity: There are many different variations to dog droppings, based mostly on diet and breed of the animal. You could make a set showing variations cheaply with texture swaps or constant color multipliers. Or, even consider making a pack of animal feces that a designer could use as props.
Good luck, and thanks for posting.
Post texture flats. Maybe we can help develop the texture if we set up some nice tiling horizontal UVs so you can vertex blend the variations like Gav mentioned. Or if you just want this to be the show stopper piece in the middle of the room you could uniquely unwrap it and use 3dCoat or something to paint it a bit more uniquely.
I would recommend you to put some corn on it. To give more visual interest.
Looking forward for you progress on this crap, good luck!
stick a spoon in it and call it a day
Also your textures still have a ways to go.
Keep it up! Love seeing progress shots.
@ isaiah sherman, @ Gannon,
its an texture that tiles in all directions, and that is mathematically applied to the object, any seams that exist through this process are hardly noticeable due to the low image resolution combined with the stupidly high texture resolution.
one thing that would quickly improve the texture quality is to make harsher cuts into its surface,
@Gav,
awesome feedback.
You are rigth when it comes to the specs of the prop, I think I want to set a maximum of 200 tris for the set.
As it is now the polycount is way to high(370 tris), as there is also a lot of intersecting geometry. This can probably be fixed by retopoing the shape as a whole, which would also make it possible to leave the underside of it open.
I am leaving this shape as it is, and I am going to focus on a more realistic approach of this. This means I will be doing a couple of shit sketches, and will finally force myself to properly learn what PBR is.
@ Dantert:
the shape is made by creating a curve in the desired shape, and then haven the mass of the shape decided by another curve, which is revolved around the length of the first one.
@ swizzle: it sure is,
@ MattyWS: im perfectly fine with that. XD
@ achillesian: he should be.
@ felipealves: corn sounds good, or maybe some red pepper.
and a big thanks to everyone who replied, it is a huge confidence boost for me, aand there was some funny shit between them.
I also knew a dog down the street that had intestinal problems and would poop like this if you were lucky. Typically it was a giant fountain. Anyways, it was a boxer breed so the distance the poop fell created more of a cow-pie look.
With your piece there's little to know gravity applied to the poop. Poop is warm went it comes out and thus softer and more pliable especially if it comes out as "soft serve". Think of the distance at which it falls out and lands. I guess what I'm saying is this just doesn't feel authentic. I'm not saying it has to be hyper-real, but it should be believable. Material, weight, shape, etc.
Anyways, sounds like you are on the right path with all the other crits.
B
PRO-TIP:
Be careful when looking for specimens to study. If you live in the city (ie: SF) not ALL the poop on the street are from dogs!
A typical scenario where the player blows shit up would probably be pretty easy to do (swap the shit out with other smaller chunky fragments of shit, with their own baked animation playing as soon as whatever variable you use to detect the shit being blown up changes. You could probably set it up with 0 programming using unreal engine 4's blueprint system.)
Perhaps if a player steps on the shit you can have a set of skeletal bones flatten out the mesh, and maybe do a lerp between two sets of textures (one being the current one, and the other being shit with a footprint on it. A normal map might help sell the details on this) If Unreal Engine 4 ever gets around to supporting vertex baked animation you can probably do some pretty crazy effects. Detecting the player stepping on the shit could possibly be a collision volume that simply changes the Boolean on collision with the player, which triggers the animation.
And one last nugget of an idea might be to figure out how to create the visual effect of what it would look like if the shit hit a fan. I'm thinking it would probably be a combination of the above two with some particle effects for additional visceral detail.
All of that might be a little out of what you're trying to accomplish, though I think everyone else covered the critiques pretty well with regards to the shit model and textures.