Casual Bakery

Ashervisalis

Hey friends, here's my newest project. Based on the concept by Mateusz Mizak.

Current block out

Ref

I'm going for the bakery version in the second image. Lots of great direction being provided by the people in the Greentooth Slack chat

Zack Fowler

It's a great start! One thing I'd point out is that there are almost zero vertical elements in the concept that are perfectly aligned with the vertical axis. There are a few straight & level lines horizontally, but almost everything vertical has some amount of outward angle (in some cases even bending), and this is a big part of personality of the piece. This is a style that thrives on being messy and wonky, embrace it!

Ashervisalis

@Zack Fowler  Thanks Zack! I'll be adding a lot of deformers soon, I'll get that bendy look you're talking about 

Ashervisalis

I was kindly advised I should be sculpting a lot. Here is the croissant sculpted in ZBrush.

Tits

Nice croissant

Ashervisalis

@Tits thanks I baked it myself.

Ashervisalis

Retopo'd, mapped, and baked (first time using Tool Bag for the baking and it is awesome). This entire thing is under 3k polys.

Ashervisalis

Current texturing.

Jack M.

Love the sculpts and the texturing is solid too. I think you could stand to have a bit more color variation in the wood, but beyond that, really nice work!

Jack M.

Super quick paintover of what I mean.

Ashervisalis

@Jack M.  Thanks so much for the paint over! I'm working on color variation as per your paint over now. Will post update soon.

Alex_J

Great concept and great execution so far. Those bits of wood hanging off like the flaky crust is nice touch. Making me hungry.

Ashervisalis

@Alex Javor  lol thanks. I'm always hungry

Joopson

So this is what the ever-famous croissant is destined for.

Looks good!

The latest texturing update feels a little too noisy for me, almost like a clouds filter was multiplied over the whole thing. So, I guess it feels like arbitrary dark patches.

But also: the rest of the building is more immediately important. I'd recommend calling this croissant itself good enough, and then maybe come back to it when the rest of the building is complete. You don't want a perfect croissant hoisted up upon a mediocre building!

And you can only scrutinize a baked good for so long.

valociraptor

Awesome croissant sculpt! I agree with Joopson that the wood texturing is noisy, its taking away from the great sculpt imo. I think the concept you're working with is appealing because of how clean it is, its got a lot of focus on color+shape with bigger stylized details. Of course, if you're going for a more stylized PBR look rather than straight toony/handpainted, you'll probably want more texture information than is given in the concept. For the basic texturing process I suggest something like this:



Accentuate your sculpted details with a simple diffuse texture by baking out a curvature map and setting it to overlay on top of your texture color -- maybe make some planks more red, some more yellow, etc. Then emphasize the divisions between the individual parts with an AO bake, on multiply, somewhere between 30%-70% opacity. Use curvature map as part of your gloss to get those specular highlights on the wood planks, to reinforce them in your normal map. This should be a pretty good base for you to work forward from -- I would personally do these "base" textures for everything in the scene, and then you can add complexity, color variation, dings and scratches, gradients etc as you go. Maybe check out SoMuchMaterials for Substance if you want to keep all your texturing in marmo+substance -- it has tools specifically for what I outlined above

I'd also use a more blue-colored metal and boost the vibrancy of the color all around (but I'm more of a painter/do really colorful work so that may just be my own bias showing ). Here are some clean stylized PBR wood planks for inspiration! 

Anyway can't wait to see how this turns out!! 

Ashervisalis

@Joopson @valociraptor Thanks for the critique! I'm gonna move on and maybe I'll revisit the croissant texturing a bit further into the project.

Ashervisalis

Sorry guys, summer has been happening. I've managed to get a bit more done. I'll upload an image of the piece in a bit, but for now, here are some stairs I've sculpted.

Ashervisalis

I sculpted stones for the building's base, as well as the BAKER sign. I was becoming a bit discouraged, but ever since the stones, stairs, and the sign, I feel I'm moving forward again! There is still a decent amount of assets to create, so wish me luck!

Ashervisalis

Hey squad, here's an update!

Thanks to Rodrigo Mizuno for some guidance on doing fuzzy trees. Check out these tuts;

https://simonschreibt.de/gat/airborn-trees/

https://polycount.com/discussion/209623/smooth-foliage-like-in-breath-of-the-wild-europa-by-helder-pinto-mini-tutorial (thanks Obscura!)

I thought I made a kick ass stylized grass material but looked at it again today and it looks pretty bad. Gonna need to have another go at that.

Carabiner

Hey @Ashervisalis this is looking super cute! The croissant itself feels a bit dark to me?

Ashervisalis

@Carabiner yeah it's looking super dark and glossy. I'm gonna be updating that texture pretty quickly. Thanks!

JamesBrisnehan

Or is it toasted and glazed? Anyway great work so far.

Ashervisalis

@JamesBrisnehan I untoasted it for ya! Thanks

OK so I went through and updated a bunch of things, giving more curves and a more toony feel. Spent today doing a lot of (re)texturing. I've created the bench and the ladder, updated the tree bushes, and started working on this mounted mouse for the side of the building.

List of to do;

- Redo grass texture. Create dirt texture.

- Sculpt some rocks for the ground.

- Sculpt cracks and damage decals for the walls. Will also need to create colourful decals, though not going as intense on the graffiti as the concept.

- Complete mounted mouse.

There are most definitely other things but I can't think of them right now.

Ashervisalis

Tried redoing my bad grass, but it wasn't working out too well. Instead, tried a tutorial on a cool YouTube channel I found. Grass is no longer bad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGOJ0KYN_1I

Here are some crack decals I sculpted. A bit difficult to see from far away, thinking I should maybe remake them a bit thicker.

Accidentally deleted the sky sphere and can't find it anywhere in the assets folder. Gonna need to find a way to reimport it. I'm thinking I want to go white background, just like in the concept. I've added the trash can and bag, random rocks, cobble stones, an updated textured mouse (which I'm not going to show yet, a bit far from being done). The character looks pretty small, but I think that's because I adjusted the field of view.

Obscura

Maybe I have bad eyes but I can see very little difference between this grass and the previous one, at least on this screen size. Maybe try using some foliage planes too, to give it some sense of depth. I feel like without those, it doesn't matter that much what kind of texture you put on it because its really small and mipped out. It would be hard to notice even if you would have only done some slight hue and saturation shift on the previous one to make this change. Other stuff is looking nice though.

Ashervisalis

@Obscura Yeah I agree. I'm going to make some foliage out of the grass material for sure. Thanks!

ps. I used your workflow for the trees, thanks for that tutorial

Carabiner

Really liking your roof textures! Agreed with @Obscura 's feedback too  

Ashervisalis

@Carabiner Thanks

Grass mesh added!

So I think I'm not going to use decals for the damage and cracks, as the colour doesn't show up very well from a distance. I'm just going to make some planes with opacity and apply the damage and cracks to those. Will spend next few days working on this. Here's a test I did with some damage decals. Not really well done yet, but gimme a bit and I'll spruce em up a bit.

Also wondering if I should throw down more colours on places like the stairs, akin to the concept, but I'm sort of digging them the way they are.

Note to my future self: there are some straight lines in the middle, where the walls are meeting, which are far too straight for this piece. Gotta bend those up a bit!

Ashervisalis

Stay with me guys, getting closer! Decided to go with fall colors which match the concept more. Next time I post I'll show the scene from the back, as it also looks pretty cool.

All damage and cracks were made in Designer and then applied to a plane with alpha (chopped up to reduce alpha space), because decals just weren't cutting it. Honestly, sculpting the cracks was a bit of a waste of time (though the normal & AO from the sculpt was brought into SD). Might have been better to draw the over all shape of the crack I wanted, throw that into SD, use bevel and slope blur, and just utilize that.

A lot of the advice I've been receiving for stylized items is not to have straight lines. Bend or lattice everything. Not just slightly either; best to bend it a bit too much and have to take it back in the end.

Still to do;

- Smoke for chimney. Gotta have the space lived in!

- Try to bring in frickin sky sphere. Like seriously, delete something and then never be able to find it again.

- Some moss on the rocks? Maybe a few flowers for the ground?

- Finish off texturing the mouse.
- Might try making the stone material more grey, as I've been told it's currently blending in too much with the plaster material.

Then... I guess that'll be it? Woah.

Obscura

Sky sphere can be found by making the engine content visible. Or just make a fresh new level, and copy paste from that.

JamesBrisnehan

The color shift of the foliage has made your grass cards stand out a little too much. You might need to play with the vertex normals a bit to get a softer look like the concept. 

Ashervisalis

I'm calling this one done... for now anyways. I've got a networking event tomorrow, so I needed to have this uploaded for that. Thanks for checking out my work, it means a lot to me. And thanks to everyone on Slack and Polycount for the countless advice!

@Obscura thanks man, that helped! @JamesBrisnehan Yeah the yellow leaf cards aren't as fluffy now. I'm fine with it though. It's definitely the colours and not the normals.

Not sure why the rear view image is not uploading, will try tomorrow. If anybody has any more critiques, it would be really cool.

Obscura

The blending of the grass cards with the terrain isn't smooth enough. Sorry but it fucks my eyes in a bad way Making a smooth transition wouldn't be hard I'm sure. I can try helping with that if you can show the base color and normal pass. I think this is an important bit because it takes the painterly look away and makes those areas of the piece look more game-ish at the moment.

Everything else looks nice though. One thing I noticed now, but this is most likely something that you won't change at this point, is that the croissant is overly detailed compared to the rest of the scene. 

Alex_J

this turned out great. The whole thing looks very tactile. Has a miniature like quality to it that i think works very well with the concept. The lighting and presentation is great.

I can see what obscure is talking about with teh croissant. It's not painfully obvious to my eye but if I have to make a critique I'd agree with that. I'd wonder if making the wood trimmings have similar detail and color/contrast ratio that might even things out? Just an idea.

Ashervisalis

@Obscura Here's the opacity, color and normal. Maybe if I adjusted the color gradient to be more light near the bottom of the grass?

@Alex Javor I see what you both mean about the detailing of the croissant. I believe it's due to needing to use lighter values for the wood, while the grooves/grain remained darker, else the croissant started to look like a poop. I wanted to keep the rest of the wood dark to provide some contrast. I'll keep level of detail in mind for my next project.

ChrisFraser

Love how this turned out man. Great work

Obscura

I meant the world normal pass of the scene.

Tits

Congrats on finishing! Good work!

Ashervisalis

Thanks so much guys!

@Obscura Here ya go!

Obscura

Alright, based on this picture, its obvious that its the vertex normals that makes them stand out that much even when you fully match the color. I'll make a picture of how to fix this, when I get home.

Obscura

Okay, so if you check out the article about the smooth shading on foliage, you mentioned, you see that there is an example for grass too. I can see how somewhat unclear it is of how what to do in the case of grass, but its actually pretty simple. You want the same smooth normals on the cards on the ground, as on the tree foliage. In the case of the tree, you align the normals of the planes to some spherical shapes, or in other words, pointing outwards. In the case of the ground grass cards, you would simply want them to point up. Luckily this is much easier to do with a plane, so just try blending between up vector in world space, and your normal map transformed into world space. For blending factor, you can use a scalar value. This would uniformly smooth the normals. Or you can use the V gradient to only smooth the bottom of the grass cards. This will give you similar smoothing to the trees. If you check the world normal pass after this modification, you will see that now the grass normals looks similar to the underlaying plane's ones. So its purple. So you don't have that harsh shading change on the grass cards. 

Ashervisalis

@Obscura I'm a little lost as to your instructions, forgive me! I've aligned the bottom vertices of the grass cards up, and this is what I was able to achieve with it. When you're mentioning blending factor, is that in the material in engine?

Obscura

by blending factor, I meant the alpha of the lerp. What you did works too but its manual. I was just offering a shader based solution so you don't have to align the normals in dcc tool.

Much better though!
I think for fully smooth result from all directions, with every kind of lighting situation, you would want the top normals too, to do the same thing.