Leaves and Lighting

Another full week of work hasn't left me with much time for this unfortunately. I would have liked to get some vines done, but I would also like to get to bed at a reasonable hour. I'm nearing completion, so that will likely be next week's job. This week was the arranging of last weeks wall leaves (I don't know what else to call them. I think they are vines with leaves on them, but I'll be making more viney vines next week so I've reserved the name for those).

I had to be careful not to go overboard with these things, or it could look lame. I hope I've struck an acceptable balance here but I'm afraid I won't know until I look back from the future with judgmental and more experienced eyes.

I like this part. It was tough to get the flat textures turn the corners but I think I was able to make it look acceptable. It was more tough to make the rectangular shapes to blend in and not look like a few rectangles next to each other.

Here are a couple of shots of the front of the house. In the second image, behind that tree, is where I first started adding in these leaves. I can't tell if its a tad sloppy or if there are just too many in one area.

I don't have a before and after shot, but this is the new lighting I set up. Before the shadows extended too far behind the house and off the edge of the platform. Now the fences have their own shadows and aren't shrouded in darkness. It is a little too dark in those shadows though. I had to brighten up a couple of these images in Photoshop slightly before uploading them here. Of course I plan to rectify that before the end.

Farewell!

Curses

Curse real world activities like work and sleeping at a reasonable hour. I can't get much work done!

Just a quick update today. I wasn't happy with the grass last week because it was too obvious that they were made with long 2D planes. I made some smaller grass tufts and surrounded the grass I had to hide the more visible areas. There's a lot of grass now, but I think it works. I definitely want to put it in a game engine now so I don't have to look at the ugly shadows.

I also made some leafy things to put on the walls. I haven't yet arranged them in the scene, but I have these four variations to mix and match with. I'm not sure if they will look OK, but here's hoping. My main worry is that they are too dense. Shouldn't be too hard to rectify that though.

I gave them some depth so they don't look like 2D planes. I may need to model some special shapes for certain areas around the house. Let's hope I don't have to make lots of different textures too because that will take a very long time.

That's all for this week. I'm working a bit more now, but hopefully these leaves will be on with some vines as an added bonus. Goodnight.

Trees and grass

I made some trees and grass this week. The trees didn't start off very well. The green I used was too saturated and the dark line made it not fit in with the rest of the scene. I also had some trouble deciding how much realistic texture I wanted as opposed to how much abstract colour. This is the first batch of trees I made:

But a couple of days later when I opened the program I realised they wouldn't work and went about changing them. I didn't have to do that much though. I knew I wanted to get rid of those black lines and make the edges less circular. I put a very faint spiral thing on there to break up the even texture. I ended up with these, and then made a couple more slight alterations seen in the last few pictures.

I then started on duplicating the grass I had done earlier. I made a few more sizes so all the tufts wouldn't be the same length. Also shown is the final tree, one that is a slightly bluer green so they aren't all exactly the same.

The shadows don't work properly in Maya (most likely fixable, but I don't need to worry about it at this stage), but I'll work on setting up proper lighting at a later date. I plan on importing the scene into a game engine and lighting it there and seeing how it looks.

One thing I need to figure out is how they make grass in (recent) games look good. Mine are far too obviously 2D planes arranged in a star shape from above. I think I just need to add a heck of a lot more, but maybe more importantly, make the radius smaller so the star shape isn't as obvious.

It probably shows in my explanations that it's 2 in the morning which means it's time for me to sign off. Until next time, chaps.

Small Things

Everything in the scene now has a texture! Technically.

I still need to make one for the edges of the ground, and I've been having some trouble with layering two textures onto the same mesh. You see, I want dirt under the pond because it will break up the grass texture so it doesn't look like it's the same texture repeating infinitely (which is what's happening). When I add them both together all sorts of bad things happen and the ground mesh basically breaks and doesn't render properly. This might just be a glitch in Maya (the 3D program I'm using) and when I export it to a game engine it might work. If it doesn't I have a few more options so fret not.

But all that's for later. Now we see the last of the models that were textured:

The lantern is a simple model and it came out pretty much how I wanted. I was a little restricted in fitting all of the texture into one image and had to recycle some of the pixels. This is pretty common, but I don't like the vertical lines on the circular base for the candle. But it's a small object so it doesn't matter.

I was putting the rocks off because I knew it would take ages and ages to put detail onto each one, but I ended up combining them all into one mesh and making one texture for it. This made it far more simple and easy because I had the rocky detail recurring over the texture and all I had to do was paint the white lines. Finding quick and effective solutions to problems is one of the reasons 3D is so fun for me. :)

And here we have the grass texture. I went through a few iterations, each one less detailed than the last. The problem with grass is that because it has a lot of small detail it is very easy for it to look realistic from a distance. Considering the style of the scene, I chose to go with a very simplified texture (though not 100% simple). If I zoom in all the way and you look closely you can see a very faint grassy texture that's set to about 3% opacity. It might seem too simple, but once there's a lot of grass and bushes it will (hopefully) blend in rather nicely.

And I'll leave you with a nice shot of the front of the house. If I was lazy I'd call this complete and go play some games, but I want to push this as far as I can and really make it something special. I hope I have it in me.

See you next Sunday (which reminds me, we're back on schedule)!

Triumphant Return

Wow, it's been a while. Too long in fact. I was working full time for a few months and had some projects I wasn't allowed to put up on here, but I should have started updating this place about a month ago. I've been working on the (what I recently decided was definitely a) wizard's house lately, and once I do the grass texture it might start to look almost finished. I have quite a few objects I'd like to add in though. But I won't get ahead of myself. Here's what I've been doing:

So I've mainly been working on the textures. Here are the two swords. The one of the left is much cooler than the one on the right. I might even change that later, but I doubt it will ever be shown in a close up to see all the detail.

...Except for right now. I'm definitely happy with the one on the left, but for the second sword I had trouble finding a good colour that was different to the cool sword. I originally planned to have a silver/metal hilt, but it looked too similar to the blade like it was a mistake. I suppose it's not so bad, but if I were heading into battle I know which one I'd choose.

Here we have some small bushes. There are four slightly different shades of green, and I've been rotating and slightly changing the size of each one so they don't all look the same. I'll also add in lots of grass like in the next picture. I want heaps and heaps of grass and plants all over the place.

I really like the axe and tree stump. The tree stump took a while to get right but I eventually got it. I would have liked some more green on there (maybe some brighter moss) but once I surround it with grass it should be exactly how I imagined. The axe looked too real until I added the black outlines and now it fits right in.

I added in some supports for the roof. I don't know if they would be effective in real life, but that's what I like about 3D work - it only has to look cool (most of the time). But check out that window! They were exactly what the building needed. I wasn't sure about using the stone texture for the walls, but I went back to it and did the windows and really liked the colours. Greens, browns and blues really go well together I think.

I started off with two windows, one with light glass and dark metal and the other with dark glass and light metal. The dark glass one looked much better, but I wasn't too sure about the light metal so I combined them both so it was dark on dark, but made the metal more bronze coloured and made the glass a more greeny blue. It was still a little bit too realistic, so after adding the black outlines it was perfect.

I believe the door is the only thing I haven't talked about yet. There's not much to say really, its made with a reddy/brown version of the wood texture but with door like features painted on. I think it works well.

I think a good place to end is here. Maybe on Sunday I'll upload some new stuff and stick to Sundays. I uploaded today because I had waited far too long. That's just less than a week to get some other work done. See you then!