Games Proposal Blog - SFAS Environment Art 2023 - Week 2
Updated: Jan 28
23/01/2023 - 29/01/2023
As for the update of the spreadsheet, here is the compiliation of all the work I did within the last week. As you can see I have now comfortably moved onto the production stage. It would be ideal to have more conceptual work, but I don't think I can prioritise it within this short timeframe.
Tuesday 24th Jan
Today I finished the sculpt for my tentacle! I finished it at around 1.6 million points in ZBrush.
Here I drew along the line of each cut so it is easier to see. I am honestly quite proud of how I managed to UV a difficult shape such as this, given I don't tend to model something with as many twists and turns like a tentacle. So, my approach with these cuts was trying to place them not only where they would not be seen from the front (where the camera/viewer will be) but also where it would give me a nice unfold with little deformity. You can see that I ended up placing these cuts on the insides and bottoms of the mesh.
As you can see from the above image, you cannot actually see any of the cuts from the front. This was really important to me because I know this prop will mainly only be seen from this angle for the scene. Of course, if this asset was going to be in a full game and animated and attacking etc, I definitely would have to rethink this approach. But I think it is suited for my purpose.
w
Wednesday 25th Jan This week I found out that I actually made my block out within a 3x3x3 meter radius instead of a 30x30x30 meter radius that is suggested on the brief. So I've had to go back and amend this in UE5! Luckily I don't think it changes too much of my scene composition since a lot of the assets are packed quite closely together, but I definitely feel the difference here. 😂
On the left is my original (wrong) scene radius and on the right is the new one I should've been working in. I think I made this mistake because I just could not for the life of me find any advice on it. I think for future reference it would've been ideal to have the specifics on how to get this radius in Unreal on the brief, as I did notice a lot of other people's confusion on this in the SFAS Discord too.. Unfortunately for me, I think I just blindly trusted someone else's screenshot I found from a fellow participant that seemed to be as lost as me :(. It's not a big setback, but for some reason I felt quite disappointed about it.
I think even with this difficulty I encountered, thankfully I based my scale of my tentacle based on the Unreal default mannequin, since I imported that mesh from Unreal to Maya when and used it for scale reference while modelling. So in conclusion I don't think it ended up making a huge difference for me, I suppose I just have more space to fill up the radius with cute sea plants and clutter which is a plus :)
With this project, I'm choosing to get all the models done first within one phase and texturing in another phase. I feel like it's a lot easier to approach it that way and stay within a consistent style since I won't have to keep jumping between programs and losing my flow. Next I started modelling the barrel, one of the smaller props in my scene. I really wanted to try a new method for the planks. I didn't want to just use a cylinder for the base as I have before.
Here is the barrel with lots of variation before it goes into ZBrush!
Thursday 26th Jan
Friday 28th Jan
