Month: December 2023

Colourful Cliffs!

The last week of term, and learning from my process of texturing my main terrain plate, it was time to do the same for the cliffs that surround the baseplate where the gate is! Making a fully closed area with layered cliffs I feel helps add to the depth of my scene, so now it was time to texture those cliffs.

I followed the same process as I did for the terrain and made use of the same colour palette, did layers for each base colour then painted over it with similar or equivalent colours of lighter and darker proportion and used smudge to blend it all together, top if off with some canyon markings and lines, a bit of height map and a stylized rock mask, and boom, cliffs made.

As you can see, they all look pretty similar, and follow the same type of pattern as the terrain does, considering I was quite happy with how the terrain went, I felt more than comfortable replicating that for the other surrounding cliffs. Now to view them in blender!

Skybox!

As you can see slightly in the image showing off the terrain, the background is sorta purpley, and that is for a reason! I decided to make use of a skybox I had previously created for a commission, as it never got used in the final product and it was a perfectly good skybox that I could use! An amazing feature with blender is that you can use painted .exr files or pngs to control the lighting of the scene in rendered view, therefore when it comes to me planning my final renders, I would already have the world lighting under control!

It can be seen more thoroughly in this screenshot!

I may see if I can try and adjust the scaling of it to fit better overall, but if I am unable to thats fine. If you notice the Strength option near the bottom right in my world settings, that is the bar I make use of to control the light influence my skybox has on the scene, its incredibly easy to adjust so it allows me to explore a bunch of different lighting settings with ease when it comes to my renders.

As this is the last week of the school year, I will see you in the next blog, starting January 2024, and Week 12, merry christmas and happy new year!

It’s time for COLOUR!

Finally! Its time to get into Substance Painter and make my assets; textured assets! My approach on this will be entirely a new experience for me, whilst I did sorta mingle with it last year in character creation, I had no clue what I was doing there, and in the end resulted to doing it in Blender, but not this time! Blender cannot provide what I need for this project. I’m going with a heavy stylized look, that I can only perform in Painter, whilst I tried Designer, it was not worth the 2 weeks I spent trying to learn it in the end.

For my basecolour, I was going with a pastelle colour palette, and I also wanted it to be heavily painted, so I sought out for some colours. Any other colours I use will be derivatives of this palette, as I am planning on making use of the smudge tool to blend the terrain together. I am heavily inspired by desert canyons and their use of intertwining oranges, yellows and pinks.

Now to give insight into my painted process for my stylized look!

From this, I decided to add lines running across the main crevice of the terrain, to help signify the colours and add to the look that I was trying to achieve of desert canyon. As well as this, I also brushed over a height to make it feel rocky, surprisingly I made use of a tree bark brush I found, and surprisingly it delivered the result that I was looking for!

After the painting process, it was time to import into blender! Now for optimisation reasons, I’m going to have 3 folders for textures, a 1080p res, 2k res and 4k res folder, as I cannot slap a ton of 4k textures into blender and expect things to run smoothly, so having a variety will help my project actually run so I can render it for the finale.

Now to see how it looks in blender!

With the biggest part of my project textured, I feel so excited to see colour in my blender project at last! Its such an incredibly refreshing change and I learned so much using substance this week, I am very very hopeful for the last 4 weeks of this project to make a ton of textures and have fun with it, till week 11!