I am so close to completion on this environment! Maybe a day or so of fine-tuning and last-minute fixes. I think I will add a few more props, too. Like a bedroll maybe, or some empty cans around the fire.
I decided to light it like a night scene because I like the way the fire light draws your eyes to the focal point of my scene.
I finally learned a bit about particles in Unreal so I could make a little fire, and it took me a while to grasp because I have never actually tried particles in any software. They ended up looking pretty nice for my first try.
I’m having a bit of an issue with some of my plants – form a distance some of them start to turn white1 You can kind of see it in the pics below, I’m trying to figure out why. Also, some of my plant alphas seem to flicker a little when I pull back, a little white around the edges.
I am going to add more plant life to the emptier spaces, and add a root system to the big leaning tree by the nose of the plane (like the tree got pushed over or something and its roots pulled out a little)
I have made a lot of improvements to my scene in the unreal engine so far. Most everything is in already, besides a few little odds and ends that I still need to create (like fallen logs, stick debris, some metal shards strewn about from the wreckage), but for the most part the modeling side is complete. I need to focus on cameras, composition, and lighting in the unreal engine now, which is no small feat!
UDK is actually a fairly easy program, it is user-friendly for sure! Which I appreciate because I am basically trying to teach myself as I go. I am struggling to learn lighting technicalities and shadow settings at the moment, then I really want to do a few cool effects to my scene to make it shine like add some small animations to my plant life to make them move and sway a little. The lighting is probably going to be early evening or morning and I want to add a fire and have that flickering firelight really light up the side of my airplane.
Below is step 1, no plant life.
Below is step 2, a few plants and a better terrain
I’ll keep working on composition and do different lighting,and polish polish polish!
After much procrastination, here is some foliage! I finally stopped putting it off and practiced some game-resolution flora. To go along with my northwestern forest, I modeled a cranberry bush, a devils club plant, fireweed, a large and small fern, and some little 3-leafed seedlings that will be tiny and spread on the ground. I also made some pine tree variations and a cottonwood tree, but I forgot to take a screencap, so that will have to wait.
I wanted to show I can to rocky surfaces, so I added a cliff face in my scene. I build the base mesh in XSI and sculpted in Zbrush, which I am finally starting to get familiar with. The cliff is actually separated into 3 separate modular pieces, which I can use over and over if I wanted to crate a longer or shapelier cliff.
Below is the base mesh (which was not yet sliced into modular pieces when I took the pic), the high poly zbrush sculpt, and the game resolution version in the Unreal engine.
I’ve decided that XNormal is my favorite program to bake my Normal and Ambient occlusion maps,as it is easy to use, accurate, and powerful. I used to use XSI but I think XNormal suits me better.
I am nearly finished with texturing the B-17 in my scene. I’ve been spending a ton of time on the textures, as the plane is the main focus of my environment.
I have learned a TON through the process of creating this plane. I’ve learned Zbrush when I added damage detail, I learned how to best bake my normals, AOs, and other maps, I learned a lot of work-flow stuff through my texturing process, adn I have also learned the basics of UDK, which this environment will be running in. I know I am going to be a lot faster for my next environment!
Ah, I am finally here, in third semester, the last semester! The pressure is on to create a quality demo reel, and I only have four months to do it. In the final Think Tank semester, we are paired up with mentors who we get to see for several hours once a week. Mentors are, like teachers, current professionals in the gaming or VFX industry here in Vancouver, and are usually leads or supervisors at their respective companies. My mentor, who I share with another student, is Daniel Ho. This guy was able to create this amazing reel in only five months working on his own, and was even offered a job at Naughty Dog! Check out his work!
I am excited to work my butt off and create some reel-quality stuff, which will hopefully look a lot like Daniel’s work
Last semester (2nd) was a tough one, we had 11 classes every week! It went well, though it was not quite as well-organized as the first semester courses were, but they were all valuable. I especially enjoyed Maya rigging class (taught by Darren R., a lead rigger at EA games in Vancouver), and Lighting class (taught by Nick, VFX supervisor at CIS Vancouver). Acting was a really interesting class, and the instructor (an ex-Disney animator, I think he worked on Jessica Rabbit too had a ton of knowledge. The modeling and sculpting courses were awesome too, of course. I liked them all, well, except for the game engine course. I found the Unity class to be really difficult, as I had no prior experience of game engines or how they work. Our VFX course has really tough for the first half of the semester when we were learning to use Adobe After Effects, but got a lot more fun and fast-paced once we started learning fusion, and our instructor always had really neat stuff for us to do.
For my modeling class, my final assignment was to create a demo-reel quality mini environment or prop. I tried doing a little oriental market chicken and duck stand, but it looks like crap, so I won’t be posting it. Thankfully I learned a lot off that project and won’t make the same mistakes in my third semester.
My first environment I will be making is a downed WW2 B-17, crashed in a small forest scene of mossy ground, spruce trees and rocks. The pilot survived the crash, and made a small shelter and is hoping for rescue. Below is a little block-out of my rough idea, taken into photoshop and colored a bit.
I have finally rigged my mech! It took me a while because I had never really rigged in Maya before, plus I had hundreds of parts to weight and a lot of controls to make. I’m considering making a little youtube video to show it off a little bit.
Here is a quick little comp of my mech and an explosion, just for fun. Once I texture this guy nicely, I’ll consider doing a nicer comp with actual lighting
