With the deadline of the project fast approaching, I'm now considering if the overalls scope of the project is manageable, and if I can reach the level of detail I'm trying to reach. Overall, I think my project is in a good place; considering the amount of time left there is only a few key things for me to include. After this I can focus on some very last finite details to polish off the overall composition and look of the scene.

The Current Scene:

Lighting:

One of the key things that have come from gathering some feedback from other students and participants in the competition, is the current lighting scenario. For example the white light feels out of place (with no real source), so creating a cracked piece of ceiling where natural light can spill through will create a nice contrast from all the orange lighting coming from the fire pits.

Stretch Goals:

After talking with a few of my peers, someone suggested adding some floating lily pads on the water planes that have subtle movement, this could be something very quick and appealing to make for the scene- a form of organic life will really help bring the scene to life. However, it's currently more of a priority to get the main statue done first.

Reuse:

To save a lot of time I wanted to make a really high quality asset and reuse parts of it in the scene. For example I created this Buddha statue, then took the head and turned it into a large head decorative piece, as well as making it a part of a large wall trim.

What I'm aiming for from this project:

I stated this earlier in my project development and In my art bible but to come back and reflect upon it mid project is a helpful way of keeping track of progression, am I achieving my vision for the project? things do typically change through a project so It's interesting to see.

With this project I want to create a Ganesh statue shrine, Inside of an ancient temple. Looking at games like uncharted for quality of asset reference and art style guide, as well as a lot of Hindu temple references. This has helped me get to the result I'm currently at.

There is certainly still quite a bit of work to do. But working off of priority basis, most of my priority 1 assets have been completed. There's a little left of the architecture to be done/ refined, and the hero Ganesh statue is completed in it's sculpture, I just need to create my low poly and texture the asset now. 

What is next?:

Currently in terms of interactivity with the project, I'm writing myself post it notes of things I want to complete each day with anything from 1-4 tasks (depending on the scope of the task) This is a good way for me to reflect on productivity and I'll be using this method for the rest of the duration of the project. Furthermore, I've found through doing this project that I'm slowly wanting to add more complex features (more props) Like little Buddha statues in the large wall trim, or giant heads on the walls. I've decided to add these to the projects schedule. These only just fit into the time allowed left for the project so have been given a very low priority. 

LOD's:

One of the key things I'm starting to think about is in game use. So LOD's was one of the first things to consider as I'm striving for a really high end budget for this environment (AAA)- I still want this to be playable. So using some in engine tools like the triangle reduction tool and the LOD systems I have been able to take more control over the expense of my Vert Count.

Here's an example of one of my Architectural Piece's LOD's:

Having the LOD's set up simply means that when I'm looking at the mesh from different distances It is replacing the mesh the further away I get with a lower tricount of the same mesh- This makes the overall project larger but will run a lot more efficiently in game.

So with now less than a month left until the deadline for grads in games, It appears I'm in good place to complete the project that I originally set out to do which is always great. One thing that has been giving me an awful lot of trouble recently is my large pillar structure in the environment. I've never tackled an object this large so it certainly has posed some troubles. 

The Pillar:

Modular breakdown

When being imported into engine, an object too large will require an enormous light-map which isn't good, and to add to that if I look at the bottom of the mesh it will still be rendering the top of it. So to prevent that It can be cut into sections. Here is a little breakdown of how I've thought about breaking it up so it isn't in too many little pieces.

Using a mixture of shadow box, array mesh and a little kit bashing of other assets I've already made for the project. I have been able to create the architectural pillar. Just to polish everything off I added surface noise on a few different layers to ground the realistic look.

  Efficiency with UV's:

As it stands I've done a quick automatic unwrap to do a test back; this will  ensure that the quality of the texturing will be to a high standard. I've also cut the whole model in half, this will give me a better opportunity to get the most out of my texturing and the first pass test was successful!

So recently I decided to make some minor changes to the overall layout of the scene. Now in doing so it has made the scope slightly more challenging but not unreachable. The environment is heavily based off of large architecture. Which can be significantly more challenging to look good in comparison to doing a project on a much smaller scope.

Development of the scene:

Initial blockout:

  Refined blockout:

The difference between the two is enormously different, and overall I'm happy with the development and the scope seems achievable. 

Tilling Stone:

Very quickly in substance designer I decided to make a basic material that I could then use in substance painter. Or even for tilling materials in engine. But using a base material will keep everything consistent inside the scene in terms of colour and readability in the materials of my mesh.

Pillars:

One of the biggest assets in the scene are the architectural pillars leading to the shrine area. Since their first iteration I've gone away and got some better references with incredibly detailed trims that could fit really well into the scene.

Zbrush Sculpt:

I feel that these have a lot of visual interest in them that can be really key to the scene, making the environment feel very grand. I also created one trim piece that could be repeated a few times, but it's interesting enough that it still reads well and looks visually interesting. Despite being repeated 4 times on the one mesh. 

I'm pre planning the best way to UV this for good texture resolution. These pillars stand at a huge 6 metres tall, so braking them down into modular pieces using 2 materials and ontop of that splitting the geometry in half, UV one half of the mesh and mirror and weld the mesh back together afterwards, That way I can keep a better resolution for the mesh.

Tilling Floor:

Since learning about tilling geometry, I wanted to also use this for my floor as I found it to be a much faster process for me.

I wanted to break away from the straight rows of slabs, so creating a higher variation of different sized and placed slabs. Next step will be to UV and texture them- as they're beneath the players feet, it will be important to make sure they are very high in quality.

  

Since my last post, I took some time to seek some feedback and get some ideas of ways to go about technical process's- one of the primary things I've looked at is how to go about creating some of my larger architectural pieces. One thing that was introduced to me was tilling geometry inside of zbrush using array mesh. Which I have found works well for me due to that it works within my comfort zone, meaning I can get it done in good time after giving it a try.

Creating tilling geometry- using a mixture of array mesh and insert mesh. I've created one master stone slab and rotated it into different positions to break up the repetition more.

Normal Map:

Generating normal maps in zbrush BRP rendering. I can take this into substance designer and create some higher frequency normal details.

Substance Designer:

I'm using this to create very fast procedural noises for the normal map and generating height map that can then be taken straight into substance painter

Substance Painter viewer
 

  To summarise this, It;s a massive step forwards into creating my modular assets. Once I have this wall done I can start to visualise how the tiling wall will look in engine.

Engine Test:

Tilling geometry is successful! Having these tiles as geometry means I can have a good interesting amount of different details in the height of the mesh instead of using tessellation on a plane which would be more expensive anyway. This will be the cheaper and more effective solution. Texturing may be a challenge however. due to one of those sections being 5m in length I need to find a way to get a high quality texture still. 

Since my last update, I've spent the last few days catching up with my schedule a little bit due to other projects taking up a lot of my time. In doing this I've spent a lot of this time in Zbrush; reviewing my centre piece and the decorative elements around it, how are they going to look in engine? I decided that the current backdrop in engine seems a little too empty and a flat wall wasn't going to be visually interesting enough for the scene. I done some more research and found some fitting references that have decorative back pieces that could potentially work really well with the Ganesha statue centre piece. modelling and sculpting this directly into Zbrush allows me to keep the scale relative to the statue. Basically meaning it's designed to fit the statue in a certain way. Personally, I find this method of working really quick and efficient for creating high res models. I'm now pleased with my centre piece and decorative back piece so I'll be looking to now implement these into the engine so I cant get a better look at an in game scenario.

Current Centre Piece:

Centre Piece (With decorative elements):

Project Asset List:

Creating this asset list has allowed me to get an idea of how much I need in my scene to have a complete project. There aren't many assets there, however, they are all to be rich in detail; meaning it will be time consuming. I've left enough time on the end of the asset list so that if an asset takes longer than anticipated I have room to spend more time. Alternatively, If I decide to include another asset that could work well in the scene, I will also have time for that too. 

Looking at art bible and reference:

Using references is incredibly important, so whilst working on my project I'm also developing my art bible: I created a basis understanding of it prior to starting the project. But now I'm further into the development i'm finding some elements aren't working whilst others may be good to include into the project; therefore it's a slightly living document for the next week or so whilst elements of this project aren't set in stone.
  

This Week has been incredibly busy for me with a group project at University, so investing major time into the grads in games project over the week has been incredibly difficult. Since the time has been limiting I invested a little time simply refining my Centre piece; Sculpting in some more of the main forms for the statue and checking the silhouette before doing a final high sculpting pass.

Asides from working on my sculpture I wanted to set up a schedule for the next few weeks, so I can best manage my time with the project and ensure that in my free time I'm still meeting the time constraints of the brief.

To conclude I will be spending primarily my weekends for the next few weeks on the project, as well as a few hours on some days through the week to ensure I'm making enough progress to complete the scope of the project

So continuing from my previous blog post about my grads in games environment art challenge; this is the continuation of the project I'm working on. Some of the biggest changes I've made is in Scale. The brief states to use no more than 30m x 30m x 30m. Now that is a massive scale in a game environment and to make all elements feel visually rich in such a big space (that of which I originally had) I saw to be a big challenge for the time I have to spend on this project. So I've cut the scale down from it's original: 30m Length, 5m width, 15m Tall, to a now more reasonable; 15m length, 5m Width and 10m Tall. This drastic change in scale will make the scope of this project significantly more achievable to the quality I want to reach. 

Current Blockout: 

I find the easiest way to blockout levels, is to stay within the engine as much as possible for architectural layout. Simply using the basic primitive meshes provided in the unreal content browser allows for quick dynamic changes, this is instead of going back and forth between modelling software and engine. Once happy with the blockout pieces, I can directly export the pieces I want and import them to Zbrush, Maya, blender or any other modelling software and have the correct scale I want. 

After reduction of scale.

Centre Piece progress:

The centre piece is an incredibly important element to the scene I'm working on, using multiple real world references, extracting elements I like from each and bringing them into my own statue. This is providing to have some challenges but very rewarding to work on: I recently added the decorative back piece. At first read it seems to be complicated, however, it's simply one piece sculpted and then using Zbrush Array mesh function; I was able to create a perfect circle with the sculpted elements, and control how many I wanted; a very useful and effective technique.

Modular Pillars:

To get the scale for these pillars exact to the environment; I've used a process of extracting the blockout pillar from unreal engine, straight into Zbrush, from here I use a mixture of sculpting techniques and using primitive meshes to blockout the rough shapes and forms for the pillar out. Once I'm happy with the scale I'll dynamesh the pieces together, and save a duplicate in the event of any issues that could occur with the mesh.

17/11/2019

So now begins my journey; from here on out i'll be taking part in the grads in games 'search for a star' competition. Now here are a few of my initial thoughts; firstly, how am I going to manage the project? It's certainly a challenge, meanwhile i'm working on group university projects, this could pose to be a challenging obstacle and will most certainly challenge my time keeping skills. I spent a day or two toying around with some ideas of what I could do, and I cut down on my ideas until I came to my conclusive decision on what I was going to run with. As it stands, I'm organising my work into a trello board so I can watch my progress and set up deadlines for myself with certain tasks to ensure I stay on track throughout the project!

To conclude it's needless to say I'm excited to get started with this project, and I cant wait to share my journey throughout this solo project, as well as to take part in an awesome competition!

18/11/2019

Today I've had very little time to work on project. However, I did invest a little time into it! Primarily around setting up good blockouts for my environment; I want some very strong features in the scene so making sure in terms of composition it's sensible and not overly ambitious. Yet, still interesting enough to stand out compared to the rest of the submissions for the challenge. 

So far this is my blockout: I'm aiming to create 'The shrine of Ganesh' the setting is in desert temple ruins. I think this can be a really interesting challenge to face, and it's a project I feel particularly engaged with.

21/11/2019

Production Process Is really important, and structuring a project before starting it, can make the whole process much easier. Before starting anything I made myself a brief art bible that I can refer to throughout the project: Using this is good practice and it also shows a good understanding of preproduction and art direction; both of which are incredibly important in game art projects, and taking the time to do this myself made me think deeper about what it is I am aiming to do with the project. 

Ganesh Statue:

So with this environment I really wanted a unique and stand out centre piece (Hero Asset) I thought a good fit for the environment would be a statue of Ganesh. Gathering lots of different references and extracting different features from them means I can create a really rich visually interesting statue with different unique details.

The Statue as it stands is still in a really primitive state. However, There are some good base forms from me to work from; putting the mesh into engine has allowed me to get a rough idea of scale compared to the rest of the environment, and how much it stands out as a centre piece.

Regarding composition I'm pleased with where the scene is so far; setting in a sense of lighting mood as well so I can begin to visualise the colour and atmosphere of the environment. My next steps now are to literally extract the stepping stones (haha), and begin a high detailed pass, I'll then move on to do this for the rest of the environment with the modular assets so they're to the exact size I want.

By the end of the project it should end up around 7 assets in total including the statue; I'm challenging myself to get the most out of modularity and still create a rich environment.

23/11/2019

In preparation for making my pillars and tall temple structures, I'm sourcing out some cool patterns that I could use as nice sculpted details in the scene. Using these images and taking them into Photoshop, converting them into alphas, then using them in Zbrush as high pass textures to give nice height information can speed up the workflow massively. For me being efficient here is very important as this project is very short in the scheme of things

 

Image taken by myself; then put into photoshop to take out lighting information- balancing this is important for an effective highpass.

High Pass applied- edited some of the exposure and clarity. This helps sharpen the forms, then moving to Zbruh to test it's effectiveness.

High pass Test 1- For a quick 5 minute test the result is actually very strong! However, slightly grainy so I can go back and do some noise reduction inside of Photoshop to reduce the amount of noise and have a cleaner result in my alpha

24/11/2019:

starting some of the modular pieces is equally as important as starting the centre piece of the whole project; I started sculpting some of my stone slabs (a kit of 5 slabs) that I can use in the scene. By exporting the blockout mesh from unreal I am able to immediately get the correct scale I need and start sculpting in Zbrush. Here are some of the results,

once 5th slab had been added

Creating the additional slab will help breakup the scene a little more and avoid the likeliness of spotting repeating patterns. Once the sand based landscape is in the engine as well, this should also help break up more of the flooring.

  Week Before submission:

For the last week I've been incredibly busy; Refining my project ready for the presentation coming up next Tuesday, and to say in short, I'm very happy with the quality I've managed to achieve in my work in this six week project. To add to this, I think it links back to learning better how to create a model from reference and be more picky and self critical of my own work to push it further, personally I believe this has helped me to increase my skills as a prop artist. To add to this, feedback is essential, through this project I have become a lot better at seeking feedback from peers and tutors, where I then act upon it a lot faster to improve my work under the tight time constraints.

Photogrammetry

Overall I've really enjoyed the process of learning photogrammetry; the process is tedious but gives incredible results when done correctly, in terms of production it will be super useful to perhaps use this for group projects and even in industry as it saves a lot of time and the quality of work is incredibly high for a relatively simple and quick process. It simply takes a little bit of patience to get it done right.

My boot has also now been rendered in unreal, the presentation of my work has drastically changed over the course of the week and I'm very greatful for it- learning new lighting techniques to show off my model, with a very simplistic set up you can get really great results.

What to do for the next few days?

I really am a strong believer when it comes to 'nothing is ever perfect' There are always areas in which you can improve on. For me, I could have probably been more efficient in some of my UV's to squeeze out more resolution. So I feel that I could still make some good adjustments over the next few days if necessary. However, I have made my own soft deadline for today and have just managed to wrap everything up to a standard where I'm happy with the results I've achieved. Over the course of the next couple of days I will just make sure I got all of my deliverables ready for the deadline next week. 

Day Before submission:

After some thinking over the weekend, I wanted to go back to my project and just try to do some minor tweaking, especially with my photogrammetry; 10k triangles for the singular boot seemed a little higher than I wanted. It's still well within my budget, however, There may be some duplicate faces that I can go through and remove just to try make it more efficient for in game use. Apart from this, I'm going to get some feedback today on my project just to see if there are any last minute tweaks I can make to push my project that little bit further.

Through a little bit of tweaking, I've already been able to crunch down my poly-count by 2k triangles, and optimize my UV space a little better for some of the smaller shells to get a little more resolution in my textures.

After receiving some good feedback from my tutor- I also looked to reduce the poly-count of my Budai Statue, at first it seemed like not a lot of time was left and slightly daunting (due to the time factor of only having one day left to have all work submitted. However, I'm glad I acted on this because the difference in the visuals is next to nothing. But, the difference in poly count is nearly 6k Quads! One of my own goals for the entire year was it improve on my optimisation for in games assets, and I believe having to act on this gave me some good experience of how in the industry this would also have to be done and acted on immediately. More over, I'm more pleased with myself now being able to reduce the poly count and still retain good form.

Presentation day:

Today I presented my work to the rest of the class and tutors, to say in short, I am very pleased with the work I have produced and feel I have improved significantly in this project especially with my attention to detail. As pleased as I was, my tutors still pointed out some little things that could have been improved on; with my Budai some of the colour on the base seemed a little flat in one particular area, my topology could have also been slightly lower to be more efficient for in game use. With my Boots, I feel there was more room to make improvements- With the references from my art bible, I showed the boot to be considerably more dirty, however, due to the unique colour information and rich detail in it; I ended up not adding as much dirt information. I remember the other day one of my tutors suggesting I could make a slider with two colour variations (one very dirty, and one cleaner version) that way I could also give control in engine to change the dirtiness of the shoe in material instances; this is still something I can come back to. Furthermore, the shoe ended up being more high poly than needed. I still kept under my poly limit, but there could have been reductions made for in game use. Overall, the feedback given on the project has been great because it gives me something to focus on improving in my future works.

Overall Thoughts of the Project

I would say to reflect and conclude on this project; I'm very happy with the quality of work I have been able to achieve, when I compare the quality to that of my previous work I would confidently say that it has been some of my best work yet. Looking into the future, I would like to do some more projects like this, as I think working really hard to recreate a real life asset and playing spot the difference between my work and the real life reference has challenged me to improve my attention to detail and create higher quality work. 

Seeing as this project was based around being able to make assets that could fit into the world of some Ubisoft games, such as; 'For Honor', and 'The Division 2', this being in regards to subject matter and asset quality. I feel that In the overall assets I have been successful in reaching my benchmark and the challenges that I set myself.

I do believe I still have a lot I could still learn; mainly around making sure I'm being efficient with my UV maps, and even cleaner with my topology. I certainly feel that I made good improvements along this project in this area of game development; I quad drew both my props to have complete control over my edge flow, I'm now going to include this as part of my normal process so My understanding of topology continues to get better; this in turn will be beneficial in portfolio. To conclude my thoughts, this specialism project has been an awesome opportunity to refine my skills as a prop artist, which I feel can will apply well in future projects.