The Rock Shop: Stylized Environment
polycounter lvl 14
*EDIT*
Adding current progress to top post
Finally getting around to starting a new thread! It's been a long time coming.
Anyways a while back I grabbed a concept from one of my coworkers Wes Wheeler (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nE9dO) that looked like a lot of fun. I kept waffling back and forth between wanting to just handpaint everything from scratch, or to sculpt things. In the end I decided it was important to push my Zbrush skills as well as my painting. So my plan is to sculpt all my meshes and then bake down to a simple lowpoly and use those bakes as a basis for my painting to emulate artists like Fanny and Orb etc. Whether or not I use those bakes on the final models or just use it to inform the diffuse will be decided later.
I only have some preliminary work but I wanted to get this thing started so I'm a more accountable, cause this project keeps getting put on hold as it is.
I colorized the concept and planned out some really general pallete guidelines and a list of potentially necessary textures, which I'm sure will grow.
Got things generally blocked out, though some proportions might shift as things go. It's to scale of a base Unreal first player character. Which in this case means oversized for said character, Wes intended this to be owned by ogres so it's intended to dwarf a human sized character somewhat.
And some of the early sculpting, I'm going to sculpt 3 different stumps and use them interchangeably for the 8 I need for the fence, the rope will use a tileable strip on the same texture. If it's not painfully obvious I'm pulling heavily from Orbs stumps that he sculpted for Heroes of the Storm for my shapes (https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/002/379/978/large/michael-vicente-58.jpg?1461036983)
Definitely plan to update frequently, I tend to get around 2-4 hours a day to work on, before or after work, so it'll be slow going
Adding current progress to top post
Finally getting around to starting a new thread! It's been a long time coming.
Anyways a while back I grabbed a concept from one of my coworkers Wes Wheeler (https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nE9dO) that looked like a lot of fun. I kept waffling back and forth between wanting to just handpaint everything from scratch, or to sculpt things. In the end I decided it was important to push my Zbrush skills as well as my painting. So my plan is to sculpt all my meshes and then bake down to a simple lowpoly and use those bakes as a basis for my painting to emulate artists like Fanny and Orb etc. Whether or not I use those bakes on the final models or just use it to inform the diffuse will be decided later.
I only have some preliminary work but I wanted to get this thing started so I'm a more accountable, cause this project keeps getting put on hold as it is.
I colorized the concept and planned out some really general pallete guidelines and a list of potentially necessary textures, which I'm sure will grow.
Got things generally blocked out, though some proportions might shift as things go. It's to scale of a base Unreal first player character. Which in this case means oversized for said character, Wes intended this to be owned by ogres so it's intended to dwarf a human sized character somewhat.
And some of the early sculpting, I'm going to sculpt 3 different stumps and use them interchangeably for the 8 I need for the fence, the rope will use a tileable strip on the same texture. If it's not painfully obvious I'm pulling heavily from Orbs stumps that he sculpted for Heroes of the Storm for my shapes (https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/002/379/978/large/michael-vicente-58.jpg?1461036983)
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Definitely plan to update frequently, I tend to get around 2-4 hours a day to work on, before or after work, so it'll be slow going
Replies
Crits so far: Building seems more narrow in your blockout than concept. The front door may need to be larger than it appears in the concept to help sell that it was built by ogres, unless that little figure is an ogre.
For the scale, talking to Wes earlier the figure in the doorway is intended to be an Ogre, if you look really close he's actually got a tiny loincloth and a bare chest. So I'm operating under the assumption that a human would stand about 2/3 of that height give or take.
Got a decent amount of time over the weekend so I established some early, fairly flat tileables for the bare rock and dirt. The thought being these can be used for areas of rest and then more details stuff will be blended in where needed. I sculpted them with Wrap mode set to 2 so the thought is that the tilable itself will be pulled from the middle of these tiling sculpts.
And some object work, the stumps are pretty close to being called done, I put together a tiling rope to be tied between them, and then I started on a super simple stone block for the pile of them out back to get back into the groove of sculpting stone. Definitely would appreciate any crits or general pointers on getting the stone feeling good and for getting the level of detail that Fanny and Orb etc seem to get into their stone surfaces because I feel like mine are still lacking
Gonna probably paint a bit and then I'm going to try making a set of sculpted Alphas for my rock surfaces, based on some tutorials from Jacob Gavelli
Went back to the stone this weekend and started trying some alphas for quick consistent surface detailing. Some are working better than others, and I probably want to make a few more considering how much stone is in this piece. But it's a start. C and A have been the most successful for subtle details and they're easily smoothed out into unrecognizable shapes after the fact. B works for detail patches, but it'd probably gonna be more useful on one-to-one sculpts than tileables. D isn't very successful thus far, the thick double lip makes it recognizable and hard to use in a variety of places. I played around with adding them to the flat rock tileable and I'm already much happier with the result.
Definitely getting happier with the use of alphas, it gives some good detail to start with, most of it gets knocked way back with some polish, flatten trim, etc. but it should get picked up with some edge highlighting in the bakes and give me lots to work with in the painting.
I laid out a trim/detail piece sheet to handle most of the repeating elements and smaller details and jumped into sculpting.
The left side has the models that'll be used to sculpt, the right side was to help me visualize how the unwrap will lay out in the end, since I wanted to catch upper and lower planes for most of the rocks so they have a contiguous UV over the corner where possible. This should cover most of the repeating elements of the building itself, larger pieces like the crystals etc. will get their own sheets/sculpts.
Added a quick shot in UE4, getting used to the interface changes, I use UDK at work still, but I wanna keep checking scale and see what needs adjustment. There's a pair of basic UE characters on the steps by the door, the smaller is 1.0 scale for a human, the larger is 1.5 scale and I'm working on the idea that he represents an ogre, so any object scale discrepancies should fall in his favor.
These pieces are gonna be used for the center diamond, the upper stone slabs (the middle ones not the pillar pieces, those will be done separately) and the stairs respectively.
I keep jumping between MatCaps, which I know is good for the actual process of sculpting, but does anyone have a favorite presentation MatCap? cause I feel like I run into issues where the surface detail is either lost completely at most angles, or is blow out of proportion.
Looking back at them all together, I might add some more detail to some of them to match the style I ended up gravitating towards the end (ie getting the upper bricks more like the lower bricks)
Looking forward to baking these out and applying them to the actual model, should start actually looking like something soon
The biggest issue was that the trim sheet style bakes we're allowing for depth between bricks which limited how most of them could be used in unique situations.
I've FFD'd my decimated bricks into one to one shapes for the arches on the front of the building and I'll do some test bakes tonight. trying to avoid distortion where I can by using similarly proportioned bricks where I can.
hopefully I can minimize lost work this way, though I think I'm going to re-sculpt the pieces related to the corner pillars.
Got those arch/window pieces baked out too. Definitely intend to thicken up the stair rocks width wise, and clean up the arc so it feels more like the concept.
Probably gonna do another pass on the upper and lower trim stone sculpts and bake those out to another sheet. Then I'll readdress the tilables so that I can drop the majority of the building into editor with bakes applied.
I'm going out on a limb here and going to say that this is just rendering the normal map
My plan is to get things all baked out before going forward with color, so I can adjust values/colors all at once before committing painting time. Similar to the Magical Girl Shop thread that's going on currently.
That said I can understand the confusion with the painted stumps in the render, I took those to near finish before I decided to take a step back and deal with the scene holistically.
Got most of the shop itself baked out now, though there's still some clean-up or re-bakes to consider on some pieces. definitely not happy with the current stone tileable. Probably going to re-work it and then start focusing on the ground/prop elements. That and I want to start throwing things back into editor so I can evaluate them more properly.
Did a whole bunch of sculpting over the weekend to get the roof crystal to shape, and started getting some shards built out to make the area by the ground dip as well as the collection of them on the landing in front of the door.
And finally current progress within UDK. Again, the yellow figures should represent scale, the taller one is meant to represent an Ogre, who built and use the building and the smaller on is a human/UDK player character for whole the structure should feel a bit on the "too big" size.
Critiques, Tips Hints etc very much appreciated!!!!