Author: Sam Payne

Normals!

Starting off Week 9, making sure all my normals on my objects are facing the right way! If they’re not, it makes texturing in substance painter an absolute nightmare, so its time to make sure they’re all facing the right way to make the texturing process that much easier.

Now from this perspective, everything should be blue, because we are looking purely at the outsides of objects and not the insides, blue = outside, red = inside, heres an example of an object I flipped normals on this week.

Note how all the red is inside, and the blue is outside the faces, this process is done by me selecting the faces and using ALT+N to recalculate the normals inside or outside, depending on which one I select. This process needs to be applied to every object that has red on it. Usually I wouldn’t know where to start, but blender has a viewport option that allows you to see the face orientation (normals) of all the objects.

More UV’s!

Since I spent last week UV’ing terrain, now it was time to make sure my models were fully ready for texturing by UV’ing my polymodelled assets.

For some of my models, I made use of smart UV ONLY, as some models were too expensive to my time to fully UV, for example the flats, as I could’ve UV’ed the base one before I copied it over, but I didn’t do that, so Smart UV was my next best option, having models ready for Substance was the goal of this week, so next week I aim to start texturing assets! See you in week 10!

The Final Modellings!

Week 8 is here! Currently I am looking into trying to finalize my models for the environment, as time is coming on short to texture and impliment all that I have created into engine, I may outsource furnatures and objects for the interiors of houses, as I am running out of time, or simply close off all the homes with doors. This week, I made sure to enclose my entrance of the environment, so that players cant essentially walk off the map or go anywhere else other than the main source of the map, and added one more building/flat design, akined to current day london flats, but modernised and way more square.

Heres what they look like when incorportated with the rest of the buildings made from previous weeks.

A problem I have just realised is that I didn’t UV any of the houses or objects before copying them into the scene, so as a result of this I’ll probably have to adjust the scene and remove the objects so that I can UV them and have those UV’s copy over when im placing them in the scene, as to avoid having to UV the same object multiple times. I also realise this is a problem when it comes to the main building, as it is a mirror of 4 quarters. I’ll look into a way of which I can try and transfer UV’s across objects.

UV Progress!

During this week I also started working on UV’s for some of my objects, including the gate and terrain. Terrain is something that is a bit harder to UV using seams, but I plan to separate the canyons into 4 parts, essentially quartering the whole mesh, so that its easier for blender to decipher how to UV it. I made use of both Smart UV and Regular Unwrap to see what worked best, personally I feel that the regular unwrap outclasses the Smart UV, despite the fact that it doesn’t fill the uv map.

Reason I say that the regular unwrap is better due to the detail it captures on the faces of the canyons, as supposed to the assorted details that the smart UV catches.

You can see all the verticies and its in one combined block, and there are 4 of them to display all of the faces and their details, as supposed to the smart UV taking bunches of the canyon and spreading them out, this is more uniform. There are also no faces on the underneith of the object so thats what the gap makes up for. The mountains at the start of the terrain however are a different case. Those have to be just smart UV’ed with no seams, as its hard to detemine where I would need to seam due to the Z axis scaling needed to make them mountains.

This is all the progress of week 8! Next week, ill be focussing on objects and discussing my plans for texturing, I also realise now I have the duty to make sure my normals will be facing the right way in preporation for taking my models into substance painter, see you in week 9!

More Buildings!

During week 7, my main focus was to design more buildings to put towards making my environment feel real and abandonded. To do this, I wanted to create buildings akined to future accomodation, but have them merge in with the canyon to give that display of wreckage. I designed 3 base buildings, making exclusive use of poly-modelings and face extrusion to keep the blocky-sleak feel, also making use of bevel to give edges more oomph.

The building on the left most is essentially a garage-one story house combination, the middle is a set of flats (4) and the right is a standardised house, with power supplies attached to the side of the house. All of them feature a top where its essentially an X, to try and give it some branding ideology. I had scattered these around the base terrain in front of the main travel hub to give the space between the gate entrance and the travel hub feel populated.

Substance Designer!

Also at this time, I wanted to prepare for the texturing process, so I took on a tutorial for substance designer, as I wanted to learn the node like approach to textures. I mainly wanted to do this due to the fact that I can import them into designer as smart materials, making application to my models much much easier than if I was to just paint it by hand.

The most basic tutorial I had on it, was creating cracked tiles, so that I was starting to understand features such as edge detect, and tile generators so see how I can adjust and mess around with things to get to a result.

This was a good start for me, however I don’t feel ill use this texture in the final result, my next texture however, I can argue otherwise.

This is also a tutorial texture I was following, however I have decided to take the normal maps and the height maps from this texture, and just create a paintover mask in substance painter, considering the colour palette im going to follow would be quite hard for me to achieve in substance designer, so I feel its appropriate for me to move to painter to continue on this texture.

This is all for week 7! im going to look at UV’ing my assets and doing a bit more research into texturing methods. See you then!

More Landscape!!!

Considering I extended the landscape further across, i wanted to also scale it width ways as well, considering if I needed to take a high level shot in the sky, there could be the chance of more gray-space, killing the sense of immersion in my environment. So what I did was copy the two landscapes as it, then sculpt and proportionally edit them to look different. Originally I had tried generating new onces and combining them, but I was struggling with the scales as I couldn’t remember them and it caused a lot of chaos with my verticies and objects.

If you look close enough as well, you may also notice some buildings emerging from the sides of the canyon, as well as some pillars pertruding out from the tunnels, lets take a closer look at these!

Building Improvements & Details!

As you can see, they are quite big structures that create more general connection to the central hub building, but don’t actually look as big in the terrain. Im quite happy that this is the case due to the ideology that it really can give the essence of abandonment to the scene that im picturing to have for my final renders. Now a difficult feature of the process is I don’t necessarily get to look much into making stuff look abandonded until I reach texturing stages and engine stage.

Within the next week or so, blender’s 4.0 update will release, and i’m hoping to make use of features such as geometry tools (creating custom tools out of geometry node trees) to help with modelling, and maybe even adding detail to my structures.

Week 6 was quite tame in comparison to other weeks, but its ok that its like that every now and then, I look foward to showing you more updates in Week 7!

Buildings Rise!

Following on from the construction of the gate, it was time to create the main building, the massive tower in the middle of the canyon that was meant to be the travel centre. I created it using a really simple process, and it saved me a lot of time overall. I had made executive use of blender’s mirror modifier. This was achieved by me cutting a regular cube up into quarters, then filling the faces, as when you split and object and delete the other quarters, blender still recognises it as a mirrored mesh and allows you to edit it all at once. As you can see there is only one set of real geometry, but 4 rectangles.

Using this process, I was able to create all the individual details of the tower once, but have it replicated 4 times by extensive poly manipulation, here is what the tower looks like!

Alongside this tower, there also was the creation of tunnels and paths that directly link up this travel centre and the main gate at the front of the terrain, whilst also adding some more terrain at the front gate to more accurately represent the levels of structure and height that these buildings have, almost making them intimidating, as they deform into the canyons and rock structures around them.

It was also at this time that I had decided to generate another canyon to try and attach to the current one, as the singular canyon could be seen to the end from camera angles I was looking at, when invisioning my final renders, so I generated a new one, and painstakingly combined them with use of vertice merging and face dissolving. You can also note and see the new mounds/mountain rocks at the front gate from the image above.

I feel I managed to achieve a lot this week, and am very proud of the progress I made towards this project so far, but there is still lots more to come! Till week 6!

Terrains! Part 2

So essentially, the terrain was not going to plan, so I did some research into terrains, and found out that there is a plug-in on blender that makes use of procediural noise textures to generate landscapes based on presets. Different presets make use of different types of noise textures and modifications to generate a landscape, also coming with random-seed feature for variety. This is A.N.T Landscape.

The difference this project made to the scale of my terrains as well as the detail and quality, completely overrun any need for experimentation with my modelling style, and gave me full control of my terraining, considering its a high-poly plane it means that if i wish to change or edit parts of it, I can sculpt it easily or make use of blender’s proportional editing feature to make slight adjustments.

Gate!

As you can see on my new terrain, there is a gate, or massive wall-esk looking thing, in one of my thumbnails you can see I tried to create a slipstream, modernised gate, and this week is the time to start making my assets! Considering the whole problem of a terrain has been sorted out, I can focus solely on the assets that I need to create, in order to make my environment immersive.

Currently that is all the updates on progress that I have for my fourth week of developing my environment! I am very satisfied with the current progress on my project and will continue to keep this pace running! Look forward to week 5 of this journey.

Terraining!

To start off modelling my environment, I need to establish some terrain so that I can correctly proportionalise all my buildings to fit within my environment. I wanted to try and poly-model a terrain to see what different functions in blender I could make use of to build my terrain instead of being restricted in engine or in sculpting. Unfortunately, the work I did do was quite unsatisfactory to myself, and I was not happy with it.

To create this, I had made use of a thumbnail as an empty and I sliced up a plane with the knife tool to replicate the edges of the terrain, from there i made sure the topology was clean and extruded it out to make it 3D. However, doing this completely ignores the fact that there is a lot of dynamic elements to a cliffside, and also that it was incredibly baren. As a result of this, I decided to try and make use of curves, and random transforms to create random rocks that ran alongside the cliffs.

Whilst I think this is a technique I can use in the future, it doesn’t prevale in the case of these cliffs, whilst it does add to make them look better, I can imagine down the line organising these rocks and preparing them for tasks like UV and texturing would be much harder than if I was just to create a height or bump map, but I am happy with how these looked. These are all my developments for Week 3 of Visual Immersion, I see it more as an experimental week, stay tuned for week 4!

Thumbnails!

Now that I have an idea and a ton of reference and images to work with, its time for me to start designing some possible thumbnails for me to work with when it comes to blocking out my environment. In total I have created 5 Thumbnails ranging from panoramas above the canyon and utopia, to up close and perspective views of different features.

For now, none of this looks abandonded, because the way I want to create this and my process specifically, is to create everything in a working state, then start to decimate and break stuff down to a reasonable level, as I find it hard personally to imagine damage and destruction without being able to put a hand on it myself in a model, especially with a large scale project such as this one.

With all the planning complete, it is time for me to start blocking out the basics of my environment, and also look at terraining in unreal, considering that this will be the engine of which we will be rendering out our projects in at the end!

A new year begins!

After quite the uneventful summer, I am now back at university for the year (woo!) and I am incredibly excited to kick things off with this 3D environment project, labelled Visual Immersion. Essentially we have 14 weeks to go from concept to an AAA quality environment, making use of all the processes and pipelines. Our brief, prompt and plan have already been layed out for us! All I need to do is get started and ready to tackle this project head on!

A Plan? Where to start?

Before starting any project, I need to know what I will want to make for the assignment based off of the concept and themes. We had a wide selection of themes for this project, from post-apocolypse to modern day retro. In the end, I decided to go with the option for an abandonded utopia, as the concept of having a utopia fall to nature and natural causes seems appealing to me. Aside with this comes the process of moodboards.

Alongside with my moodboard and project specification, I need to make sure that I also plan out the amount of time that I have for the project to make sure that I stay on track throughout the production process. I also intent to keep this up to date by marking the colours in the weeks appropriately based on my progress, much like an asset list of some sort.

With this I also have a project proposal document, informing my lecturers of all the details regarding my project, such as risks, progress, and inspiration.

But for now! This concludes Week 1! In week two I’ll be looking at thumbnails so I can start to get a general idea of what my project is going to look like.