Home Tree - Quetzy
polycounter lvl 9
This year I'm setting out to create a game art portfolio, this is all new for me so any crits, suggestions, help and so on is welcomed. My first project is taking some artwork created for a short film school project that died and making it realtime art presented in Unity.
I'm trying to create a small diorama of part of the environment that contains a tree turned into a home. I don't know what is a reasonable polycount to shoot for, as well as texture sizes and so on.
I'm trying to create a small diorama of part of the environment that contains a tree turned into a home. I don't know what is a reasonable polycount to shoot for, as well as texture sizes and so on.
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In my evenings after work I have been focusing on the rear entrance to the home, it has kind of a hobbit hole look in the concept art. So rather than just using the crummy meshes from the original model I decided to try improve this area a little. Here is how its coming.
Done the retopology on everything now. Is my mesh too dense for realtime? If so what areas would you feel I could afford to lose the most polys on. I feel like the tree trunk could probably be lower. Not sure if I should try get it down or move on to UV and textures.
First pass on lowering the polly count more, few areas (like left of the door) need some topology added back. And I'm sure I can shave more off with another nights work.
Even more brutal polycount reduction, I have now cut the tri count in half of my original retopology. I'm now a week behind the schedule I put for myself to have the meshes done. If I hadn't put a deadline I would probably be way further behind though. Also enjoying getting into a rhythm of working on 3D every night after work!
Next up (if I can stop messing with the topology) the leaves and plants need to be added back in, or I'll UV these and start working on texturing.
I finished up the uvs for the foliage tonight. And started roughing the textures for the tree trunk in Substance Painter.
At first I was feeling that it wasn't going to come out, but I'm starting to have fun now and getting the hang of it bit by bit. The original textures were created by my classmates when I was in school (both of whom are much better 2D artists than I am). Its nice to have theirs as a reference. Besides modeling I really want to get good at digital painting and the painterly texture style appeals to me a lot.
So texturing this took forever, there is lots more I could do to it but its already taken long enough. I'm happy with what I have learned in the process of texturing it, and for being my first hand-painted style texture has exceded my expectations!
Substance painter mac would not open the project file about 1/4 into it, so I had to boot windows (slow old HD instead of my nice SSD) and finish it off in that OS. Even in windows I would crash substance painter about once every hour. Allegorithmic contacted me this week and with a copy of my project they found the bug. It only happens on projects with tons of brush strokes on a few layers (aka hand-painted style stuff). I have been informed the bug is fixed and should be rolled out with the next update to Substance!
I'm having a hard time with the foliage, here is an image of the tree in Unity with my latest test. This foliage (and it needs more but was enough to test the workflow) is a set of 3 planes rendered from a cluster of 3d leaves I put together in blender. I rendered the cluster from the top, and from two sides, then placed the three planes together to try give it some depth. I'm really not happy with the effect.
I want to try a different plane set up next. And I'm rethinking how I will texture the volume object that the leaves are populated over.
I'm not sure if it's the lighting or the texture, but the texture of the tree looks a bit monotone in the Unity render. Maybe increase the contrast of the contrast of the tree texture? I don't have a lot of experience in hand painted textures myself, but that's a common suggestion I see to people's work to get it to read better at a distance.
I created a new leaf cluster mesh, this time using tri's, so for 1 poly more I have over twice as many leaves per cluster. Its a method I saw somewhere here on the forms and I'm much happier with it than my previous test. Here you can see how its starting to look. The portion boxed in white is where the new repeating texture is on the volume object.
Probably too many leaves, I'm liking the result though so will probably stick with it.