Honours Blog - Mushbutts - Week 2
Updated: Oct 12, 2022
04/10/2022 - 09/10/2022
This week I started off making a little pack of rocks I can use to populate my scene. It consists of 7 small rocks, 4 medium, and 2 large. I find it a lot easier to go from Maya to ZBrush rather than vice versa, since it was important to me to be able to get the base shapes I wanted.
The highpoly sculpt in ZBrush! I ended up at around 16 million points!
Showing the bake in Substance Painter
Here is the same smart material I put on the mushbutt statue on the rocks, and I feel like it works pretty well. I am going to do some variations without the moss as well so I can use them underwater and such, and just have more options.
Here is what the scene looks like currently with updated lighting, grass variation, and my new water material I did this week! The water material was something I found very daunting, as a lot of it was me self-teaching and gathering information from multiple sources online and putting together my own thing. A video that was a big help was this video from PrismaticaDev and also this article by Adam Homoki, and finally this twitter thread by @heyitsjosh3D.
Above is the material, and material instance. As you can see in the material instance, I am able to change every parameter on the fly without permanantly messing with the original material and committing to any change. My main inspiration for this water was Genshin Impact, pictured below, but I did want to change it a bit to match my scene. I wanted my water to be a lot louder, and more looking like watercolour than realistic water. You may notice that a lot of the shapes in the water are quite round, and I wanted this because I do also want my scene to feel quite rounded and fluffy. For example, my grass mesh is very rounded at the top, compared to a lot of stylised grass nowadays being very thin and pointed, especially in the Genshin Impact style as well.
Also, I made the actual grass mesh and foliage tool last week, but this week I figured out how I wanted to actually assemble it in my scene. As you can see, I have different minimum and maximum values to try and make my grass look a lot more natural. It was a lot of playing around to figure out the values I liked!
At this point in the week, I was feeling like my scene needed another element of life and movement. Yes, my grass and water material is somewhat animated and moves within the wind and such, but I thought fireflies would be a great touch as well, and make everything look just that little bit more whimsical. This was using UE5's niagara system, something we touched upon a little bit last year, but not very in-depth. As such, I sought out some tutorials, and found that Rosie Jarvis' video would be a good starting point and I could mess with everything a bit more afterwards in my niagara system to make it fit my scene more.