Sketchbook: Esselle
Hello, I decided to start a sketchbook thread to keep track of my progress, to keep myself accountable to finish what I start :D and of course to welcome critiques and feedback!
While I was looking for references and tutorials for the subject of bi-monthly environment challenge (sep-oct 2022), I got very very distracted by the amazing concept art of Mists of Pandaria and I had to try and make one of the pieces in 3D.
This is the WIP so far, everything is still in lowpoly blockout phase, but I added some color and lighting to get a better sense of it:
Whilst blocking this out, I got distracted as well by something else (at least this time it was related!) and decided it was time to make a nice roof texture. I started by sculpting the base, trying to give it random variations whilst keeping it seamless. I also added filling in order to make AO more consistent, but ended up adding too many tiles trying to fix weak AO in the upper tiles, but didn't manage to.
Then I baked some textures (curvature, color mask for color variation in the shader, AO, normals). I haven't made a diffuse/roughness texture yet because for now I am building it in the shader as I only plan to use this in blender. I realized too late that I did not make the sides of tiles with an angle less than 90 degrees. I think this would have made normals, AO and heightmap nicer on the sides. Seamless was also not exactly right unfortunately, but I hope that from distance the seam won't be noticed :)
And final result (where seam is fairly visible, also I should spend more time setting up nice lighting for material renders)
