Hey, Happy new year to you!

To start off the year the right way, I've been working to get some decent progress made on the diorama- A lot of the last few weeks, I've been planning, and taking the time to think about the best course of action moving the diorama forwards. Then, over the last few days, the pieces began to fall into place and I can say I'm starting to see the diorama come to life!

Main shot

This is a big step forwards since the last update: I've been working on the overall composition of the scene, and stripping back some of the components that I Originally intended to include and focusing on fewer elements. I find that this is helping me keep the focus point on the main feature of the piece.

Water

So far, this has been a challenging element of the project to get right- something about the water just hasn't sit right. So after some iteration, and digging about on a few different tutorials- I've started to build a simple water material that I feel fits the style of the project.

Zbrush sculpts

These are two of the recent zbrush sculpts I have done for the project. This has been great for capturing details and breaking up the silhouettes of these assets. For example, the imperfections of the steps, and the subtle surface changes around the boulder.

To achieve a good level of detail, I primarily sculpted using 3 brushes: The DAM standard, clay build up brush, and Trim smooth border.
However, for high frequency details, I use the layering system with the noise generator and masking; this combination allows me to quickly create high frequency details.

Mossy Surfaces

I really want to create this idea of an unkempt and un maintained area, I though moss might be a great addition to this, pretty much the idea that wild life was left to do as it pleases without much human interference. Plus, being surrounded by water it would make sense that moss would be growing in these damp areas.

These Jizo statues, are a great example of the moss taking over these stone sculptures. It truly looks beautiful and spiritual: Exactly the type of visual language I want to capture in this diorama.

So now that I have the reference in place, I just got to make it work right?

To get the ball rolling, I've set up a material that uses a world aligned blend, to bring the rock material properties, and the moss material properties together. This is still certainly very early stages and will require further iteration and improvement, but the basic tech is there. Furthermore, to help sell the idea of moss forming on these surfaces, I add an extra layer into the base textures of all the assets that are intended to have moss on them, and then use that layer as a 'Moss base' This little extra detail to me, just helps further blend the transition between the materials.

Lighting

Lighting is still very early days, although I feel I have an idea of the direction I want to take this in. I'm hugely inspired by Ori and the will of the wisp- Its rich and bold lighting, makes for some truly emotive environments, and I want to translate this into my project, using similar tones to the lighting mood board I threw together. Of course this requires a little more thought and experimenting with different colour schemes. But, I do believe this would be successful in making a truly interesting visual.

 Until next time!

MORE CHANGES?!

Always and absolutely! As much as I enjoyed the idea behind including the large mystic wisteria tree, I felt that it detracted from the original idea of focusing on the deer creature sculpt. That's not to say the work is necessarily for nothing, I learnt a bunch about foliage creation through the process, but ultimately the composition needed to change.

So I basically stripped everything away, and re-thought how I wanted this scene to look.

I went all the way back to the basics, and planned more heavily around the piece; different components, ideas, all in all what every piece meant in the scene and why it was there. 

Miro board planning

A quick screenshot just to show the broad overview of the planning. What I like about using Miro, is that it allows me to treat it as a live document, so I can go in and continue to flesh out the planning. In addition to this, I treat it as a digital whiteboard, where I can take notes, thoughts, feedback, pretty much anything that springs to mind and leave it there to be revisited at a later date!

Now that I've done a bit more work in the scene composition, I'm starting to enjoy the overall look of the diorama more. However, it's far from done and will need further polish before moving onto getting some textures in the scene!

Test renders

With a huge focus around the creature sculpt, it's important to me to get a few test renders in along the way, this is really just for me to check how all the forms are reading, outside of the Zbrush doc space. Plus, it's a bit of a bonus to see something a little more polished when you're blocking out loads! 

Until next time!

So another week, another blog post...
and you guessed it, it's just more blocking out and rough lighting iteration. I feel like this week I've seen a good amount of progress with the scene and I'm starting to get a better sense of the space in the environment.

  But before this, I put together a small Pur ref page, just little points of inspiration that I can draw from whilst making this project and also gathering some ideas for general props I can bring into the scene for story telling

There's currently nothing to extensive with these references that make a coherent style guide for the scene. But as it's still a loose blockout, It helps me think more freely and without constraints.

And for purposes of demonstrating iteration:

Day_01

Day_02

Day_03

That's all for now; but I'll be updating more progress on this over the coming weeks until I eventually finish the scene! 

I had recently felt very inspired by the alien films as well as resident evil 8 after a great few hours playing and exploring the game.

So with this quick project I'm trying to use that inspiration and influence to craft a small scene that focuses on high fidelity in a small compact space.

So here's the last few days progress in blockout modelling and lighting;

The lighting has been an interesting one, using the power of Lumen inside UE5 it has been really quick to make changes to the environments lighting.

Now what?

Well once I spend a little more time detailing the blockout and feel happy with the general composition, I'll make some concept art for the scene as a style guide and gather some more references to inform the direction of the scene.

That's all for now, with more to come! :)

Day_01

  Day_02

Since the last update, I've made some relatively big changes, I've begun  to flesh out some of the larger materials in the scene, in an attempt to improve the overall usage of colour. I'm really looking to make this diorama have a very strong visual language with great story telling within the space. To do this I've started fleshing out some basic particle systems that in the long run will help support the idea of this being a crash site. At this moment it's very early days so it's all quite primitive, however I still think it's good to start iterating on these particles early on in the project as it will be extremely additive to the story telling of the final piece.

 Sand update:

One of the primary elements in the scene is the ground surface; Sand has always seemed to be quite an intimidating material to create; however with a fairly straight forward process of going through some tutorials and playing around in substance Designer, I was able to get a first pass result that I think works really well; One of the elements I'm using here I find particularly effective is displacement; utilizing helps define the shapes made in the sand texture much better. 

To top it all off the node set up is super simple!

  What's next?

Well there's still plenty of work to be done; everything as it stands is still very blocked out and quite primitive, I aim to get some of the other basic blockout shapes in the scene to have some more definition and begin to work out what their materials will look like, from there I'll be able to get a better idea of what is and isn't working in the scene, then adjust to get the best overall result I can achieve!