Production Week 4
Week Ending 5th April
After a weeks worth of working at home due to Covid-19, we are stating to settle into the groove. Communication has been really amazing for most of us and it's like we're still in college with discord chat and slack to aid us. Memes and posture checks abundant to keep up morale!
Viktor - Art Director & Environment Artist
The week's progress was mostly targeting to act upon the feedback we've been given by the tutors, Tom and Juriaan.
I've spent monday to tweak the architecture. I've flipped the orientation of our Vista opening and fountain, which makes the scene more interesting and let's some crucial light in by having a larger opening while giving more emphasis to the fountain.
Once that was done, I have spent a lot of time double checking what's in the scene and what's not, as it turned out we have had a handful of assets that has been shared inbetween the team, but didn't make it's way to the project scene, so a lot of uploading and material setup.
After everything was up to date, I could start detailing the columns of the ground floor.
First I've created a base mesh for sculpting, then added fine details to the sculpt in zBrush.
Then for texturing, I have experimented with a new workflow. I have taken some material reference images while I was at the British Museum to do photogrammetry and used the marble images to import into Substance Alchemist. Such a great little software! I don't know a lot of Substance Designer, but in Alchemist I was able to create something useable and authentic looking in an hour or so. It has a very intuitive UI and simple to use, but it has some limitations which will still needs workarounds. For example I can't export parameters from Alchemist, so I need to tweak roughness and colour tint manually in Substance Painter afterwards. Once this was all done, I've created a smart material that I can use as my base for the whole object.
Urim - Prop & Vista Artist
This week I mainly focused on the vista as that's quite an important part of our scene. After receiving feedback from tutors that the vista doorway should be thicker and allow more vision through it. We as a team realised that the vista needed more attention too. So I stepped up and wanted to start messing around with what we can do.
I firstly blocked out the landscape to see what type of architecture we want to go for. According to the artbible, we wanted to go for what is actually true to this courtyard, which was that it was placed upon the mountain hills. So a simple stone slab walkway with dry stone as the walls. Then in the distance would be mountains and some sort of building. This would give the impression that the persons high up in the mountains. Then after these elements were placed, it was all down to the set dressing and making it look pretty with foliage and reused assets i.e. chair, table etc.
Adrian - Prop & Environment Artist
This week I've mainly been stuck battling the workshop door, for some reason this assets has felt like walking through waist deep snow! But thankfully it 99% done just need to chuck it into the scene and get make tweaks based on feedback.
My workflow this week has been to;
Finishing the retopo and texturing of the dust sheet.
Retop and UV the Workshop door and Ironmongery.
Fixing baking errors (the high poly and low poly some how became badly misaligned.
Go back and retopo door hinge bracket the low poly I had was causing weird baking issues.
Once everything baked correctly, begin texturing.
Hannah - Foliage & Prop Artist
Getting stuck in with the orange tree! With only a week left on my speedtree trial licence I was panicking to get this finished. This was a lot of small iterations to get the balance of branches and thick bushy leaves. I was practically inhaling as much speedtree tutorials as possible as I struggled to get this bushiness with a sensible poly count. In the end the feedback I recieved was "Just make it look pretty". I experimented a lot with the textures as well which meant I did go through a phase of glow in the dark oranges as I was trying to give them a bit of subsurface texturing.... it's fixed now I promise.
After that I actually managed to get the speedtree wind to work in engine! Now we have a wind sock VFX in the unreal scene so the team can change the wind speed to be as strong or soft as they like! It's so much better than horrible simple grass wind node!
Shay - Material Artist
This week I started putting the finishing touches on the floor. I added some grass and rocks in the material to help break up the repetition. I then set up Vertex painting to break up the material even more. I set up the vertex painting so that it uses a packed grudge map I made it designer. I subtracted this grunge map on top of the mask so it breaks up the vertex painting. Also added Sliders to control the contrast and the colour of the dirt. The second half of the week was spent doing the second floor as my eyes were burning from looking at the cobblestone placeholder we had. Got through it pretty quickly. I got feedback on slack and made adjustments to it.
Willow - Lighting Artist
After a weeks worth of working at home due to Covid-19, we are stating to settle into the groove. Communication has been really amazing for most of us and it's like we're still in college with discord chat and slack to aid us. Memes and posture checks abundant to keep up morale!
Viktor - Art Director & Environment Artist
The week's progress was mostly targeting to act upon the feedback we've been given by the tutors, Tom and Juriaan.
I've spent monday to tweak the architecture. I've flipped the orientation of our Vista opening and fountain, which makes the scene more interesting and let's some crucial light in by having a larger opening while giving more emphasis to the fountain.
Once that was done, I have spent a lot of time double checking what's in the scene and what's not, as it turned out we have had a handful of assets that has been shared inbetween the team, but didn't make it's way to the project scene, so a lot of uploading and material setup.
After everything was up to date, I could start detailing the columns of the ground floor.
First I've created a base mesh for sculpting, then added fine details to the sculpt in zBrush.
Then for texturing, I have experimented with a new workflow. I have taken some material reference images while I was at the British Museum to do photogrammetry and used the marble images to import into Substance Alchemist. Such a great little software! I don't know a lot of Substance Designer, but in Alchemist I was able to create something useable and authentic looking in an hour or so. It has a very intuitive UI and simple to use, but it has some limitations which will still needs workarounds. For example I can't export parameters from Alchemist, so I need to tweak roughness and colour tint manually in Substance Painter afterwards. Once this was all done, I've created a smart material that I can use as my base for the whole object.
Urim - Prop & Vista Artist
This week I mainly focused on the vista as that's quite an important part of our scene. After receiving feedback from tutors that the vista doorway should be thicker and allow more vision through it. We as a team realised that the vista needed more attention too. So I stepped up and wanted to start messing around with what we can do.
I firstly blocked out the landscape to see what type of architecture we want to go for. According to the artbible, we wanted to go for what is actually true to this courtyard, which was that it was placed upon the mountain hills. So a simple stone slab walkway with dry stone as the walls. Then in the distance would be mountains and some sort of building. This would give the impression that the persons high up in the mountains. Then after these elements were placed, it was all down to the set dressing and making it look pretty with foliage and reused assets i.e. chair, table etc.
Adrian - Prop & Environment Artist
This week I've mainly been stuck battling the workshop door, for some reason this assets has felt like walking through waist deep snow! But thankfully it 99% done just need to chuck it into the scene and get make tweaks based on feedback.
My workflow this week has been to;
Finishing the retopo and texturing of the dust sheet.
Retop and UV the Workshop door and Ironmongery.
Fixing baking errors (the high poly and low poly some how became badly misaligned.
Go back and retopo door hinge bracket the low poly I had was causing weird baking issues.
Once everything baked correctly, begin texturing.
Hannah - Foliage & Prop Artist
Getting stuck in with the orange tree! With only a week left on my speedtree trial licence I was panicking to get this finished. This was a lot of small iterations to get the balance of branches and thick bushy leaves. I was practically inhaling as much speedtree tutorials as possible as I struggled to get this bushiness with a sensible poly count. In the end the feedback I recieved was "Just make it look pretty". I experimented a lot with the textures as well which meant I did go through a phase of glow in the dark oranges as I was trying to give them a bit of subsurface texturing.... it's fixed now I promise.
After that I actually managed to get the speedtree wind to work in engine! Now we have a wind sock VFX in the unreal scene so the team can change the wind speed to be as strong or soft as they like! It's so much better than horrible simple grass wind node!
Shay - Material Artist
This week I started putting the finishing touches on the floor. I added some grass and rocks in the material to help break up the repetition. I then set up Vertex painting to break up the material even more. I set up the vertex painting so that it uses a packed grudge map I made it designer. I subtracted this grunge map on top of the mask so it breaks up the vertex painting. Also added Sliders to control the contrast and the colour of the dirt. The second half of the week was spent doing the second floor as my eyes were burning from looking at the cobblestone placeholder we had. Got through it pretty quickly. I got feedback on slack and made adjustments to it.
Willow - Lighting Artist
For myself, this week has primarily just been taken up by furthering the change in lighting that was done last week.
Taking this into its second pass means there has been more of a emphasis on adding highlights and shadow to stop the scene from looking too flat and actually draw the viewer in. This took the form of a lot of small changes to toe and slope values in the post process. It was also a lot of work with finding the correct soft source and source radius for main central lights. In order to do this I have been mainly focusing on lighting through some screenshots I set up for myself as our submission is mostly going to be in this form now.
I did stumble into a issue this week with hardware as my computer has no longer been up to the task of building lighting as this is extremely hardware intensive. Therefore, after a conversation with tutors I have converted all lighting to be dynamic and have adjusted the lighting to fit this new mode. However, this does mean the team has more of a opportunity to add moving objects into the scene such as foliage as it would respond dynamically to light. It also allows me to learn to adapt to a new workflow which is a great skillset for myself.
I also worked at finshing the hanging plant pots and introducing them to the scene so we can further dress the environment with foliage.
