Interior with Hero Asset WIP Thread

MetalGearLeo

This is for an assignment on my University course, 3D Games Art. (Thread taken from my own post on our Uni forum).

For this brief, I am creating a cave interior with my hero asset being an ancient building ruin inspired by Cambodian temples such as Angkor Wat and Ta Prohm. 

I created some greybox models in Maya first to import into Unreal so I could block out my scene, with the intention of taking them into ZBrush later to define and refine my models. To get a sense of the scale, I set my camera low with a FOV of 120 and began blocking from there. I also created the models at a very large scale so the cave would feel very open with the focus immediately on the hero asset.

My first full greybox test (including a decimated rock model from a HP ZBrush sculpt) to test. Initially I wanted to choose a statue for the hero asset (hence the cylinder), but after a while I changed my mind.

After deciding on a temple building hero asset, I enlarged the cave area in height to increase the sense of scale to make it more dramatic.

Went through another iteration of the cave as well as scaling. Manny looks very small on purpose as I want the cave and temple to be a large, lost civilization environment.


Added Ultra Dynamic Sky, sculpted all cave rocks and pillars, blocked out main temple area (hero asset). I've yet to add a few more Cambodian-inspired models to the temple area, so I may add some statues.

I've taken a modular approach to try and get the most out of the least amount of models. My next section of progress will be focusing on sculpting my temple models to very high detail. Once all of the sculpting and decimating has been completed, then I will move onto UV unwrapping the low-poly before baking.

I have all the current decimated low-poly models set up in Unreal, with the Ultra Dynamic Sky set up in position too. This will probably get tweaked here and there as I progress. 


Some small improvements so far to the overall scene, including adding a small plane with a water material, low-poly asset updates, and position refinement to add a bit more life to the area. Will add some placeholder foliage too.

Currently working on retopo and UV unwrapping the low-poly assets. 


Displayed my assets in a more professional way to get some practice.

Bonus pics of my high-poly sculpts that I have since decimated in ZBrush to get my low-poly models

Eric Chadwick

Looking nice so far. I would suggest adding some variance in detail, adding some lower-frequency areas for the eye to "rest". For example not using the same rock models everywhere, but having some differentiation. The roof opening looks a bit odd with the same high frequency rock as the lower walls, like it could cave in at any moment. Here's a good example of mixing lower-frequency meshes using tiled textures, with higher-frequency detail meshes: https://polycount.com/discussion/128792/assassin-039-s-creed-4-black-flag-and-ac3-liberation-artwork-by-tihomir-nyagolov/p1

We have more stuff here:
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Game_Art_Examples

MetalGearLeo

Thanks for the suggestions, I didn't think to add a bit more logical structure for the roof opening haha. Makes complete sense! I will be adding some foliage to break up the scene further so the focus isn't too heavy on the rocks.