After prepping the mesh to to into Zbrush from Blender, I began sculpting on the mesh, following along with the sculpting renders on ArtStation. I unfortunately was only able to do one pass for each mesh, and missed a couple along the way while doing so; such as the hinges on the back. Here is my BPR render for the current state of the chest:
Once I was done in Zbrush I then transferred the mesh over to Blender for retopology with retopoflow. Generally trying to establish silhouette first, I then made smaller cuts along the mesh to capture any smaller details. I also was unable to finish the low poly, and was unable to get to uving. The current triangle count for the retopology is 4,272 triangles, here is how it looks thus far:
For my animations I chose to use the gladiator rig, also pulling a character from Mixamo along with him to add animations to. I unfortunately was unable to get the Mixamo character to use my ROM animation I had made, however I did manage to retarget the gladiator to use the animation from Mixamo.
Here is where the rigs and re-targets are located in the project:
Out of the props list my team had made as potential props for our later level, I decided to go with a bonfire/large campfire. I first gathered some references of stylized wood, and also gathered references of various campfires. I then began sculpting, where I created 2 variants of logs, arranging them in a pyramidal formation. Here is my final render from Zbrush:
Once I had sent over the BPR render from Zbrush to Photoshop, I then went into photoshop, laying over a base color over the entire prop, as well as added a base color overlaid over my prop. I colored in the grooves, added fire, tweaked the shadows and the light of the fire (since fire seems to emit light in every direction), eventually adding grass for a finishing touch. Here is the final piece:
For the prop assignment, I decided to take on the challenge of one of the wayfinder chests. Picking the chest that had a creature on it that resembled a bear, I began by breaking down the chest into parts. I sorted out what was mirrored, what wasn't, and noted other specific elements on the chest.
After I finished my breakdown of the chest, I jumped into Blender, first establishing the scale of the chest, and importing any references I wanted to use. After that was done, I began to block out the chest, disregarding good topology for the time being as I plan on doing retopology once I am done sculpting. I modelled out the basic, large shapes for each part, making sure I was matching proportions correctly.
After finishing up my blockout, I set up my fspy camera in Blender, matching the perspective of one of my references.
Once my fspy camera was set up, I began to prepare the chest for export into Zbrush, adding a subdivision modifier and creasing edges to maintain sharpness.
Going off of designs that were circled in the previous assignment, I decided to remake my previous design from the last round for little Red Riding Hood. First I started off with line art again.
After finishing my line work I moved onto doing the values and shading before adding color to the piece, ensuring it was fully shaded in black and white before I overlaid any color onto the piece.
Finally, after my shading was done, I experimented with using gradient maps to add color to the piece. I was quite satisfied with the result after some tweaks to the colors. I went for red and gold on the cloak, as I felt it would fit best with Red Riding Hood as a character, and make her very recognizable.
As always, here is where my PSD file is located in perforce:
Before I began sculpting, I started gathering references of stylized rocks on a pureref board, shown here:
Using various brushes such as clay buildup, trim dynamic, trim adaptive, orb flatten, and orb pinch, I sculpted my stone. I think if I had to point out one major flaw in the process, my stone came out a lot more rounder and softer than I had originally intended, and should've been made sharper overall. Here are my final pieces in Zbrush:
Moving onto exporting my meshes from Zbrush... I had some issues when exporting directly to Unreal from Zbrush, as the meshes imported in incredibly tiny, almost invisible. Noting that there was a scaling issue, I instead took the finalized and decimated sculpts back into Maya to scale back up to their proper sizes, freezing transforms after I was done. Then, I imported my blocks into Unreal. Once my meshes were at their proper scale in Unreal, I began working with the sequencer and cinematic cameras in Unreal, setting up two to take shots with. I also set up a fade track to fade between the two, and moved their positions/rotations to set up my shots. In addition, I set up the level blueprint to play the sequence on startup, and then let the player play through once the enter key was pressed.
After I finalized everything I wanted in my sequencer, I moved onto creating the settings for the movie render queue, following the settings in the video.
Before rendering everything out, I decided I would do some of the bonus content, and went through creating the grid pattern and circular pattern with my stone.
Then, it was time to create the grass in the scene. I actually deviated from the main video for this part, choosing to follow a tutorial by Viktoriia Zavhorodnia instead. I have looked at this tutorial a few times, so the process went pretty fast. Once the grass was finished, I painted it in using the foliage brush.
The last part of the bonus video I chose to do was the rocks. I had actually not placed rocks using physics simulations before, so I was curious to try this method out. Previously I've used the foliage brush to place rocks, but that can be tedious.
Wrapping everything up, I adjusted my blueprints for the stone grid, adding rotation and height variation to my blocks to make everything look more unique/less repetitive. I also added additional structures on top of the one I had already built, adding to the visual interest rather than making things look flat on top. Following up on the critique about light sources from the previous week, I created lanterns to add as light sources on the inside of my structure.
For the introduction to blueprints assignment, I decided to create a "magical" table, and a lamp that activates when you step into its trigger volume. Starting off with creating the blueprints, I decided I was going to use the desk from the modular fantasy house pack we've been given. In the construction graph portion of the blueprint, I created the dynamic material variable which would eventually allow me to change parameters within that material.
After this step was done, I moved onto the event graph, adding a keyboard event for when "g" was pressed. When "g" was pressed, the color of the table material would be hue shifted by a random amount. Additionally, I added functionality where the table would return to it's normal base color a short time after the "g" key was released.
For my next blueprint, I worked on my lamp blueprint. In the viewport I added a lamp mesh, a point light, and a trigger box. The point light I set to initially not be visible.
Moving onto the event graph, I added functionality for the light to become visible when the player stepped into the box. After finishing that, I moved onto making the light gradually fade away when the player walked out of the box. I did this through utilizing a timeline and the set intensity node in order to fade away the point light's visibility.
Once finished with all the blueprints, I set up a small scene with some lighting to make sure the items made a bit more sense in the scene.
Starting off the contrast assignment, I sketched over each of the two designs that were chosen from the previous round, and then sketched out a third design that was a revamp of one of the other red riding hood designs. After I finished my sketches, I went over them with clean lines, making sure to add variation and weight.
When I was done with my linework, I moved onto blocking in my values underneath the lines. Later on in the project, I realized that my shading wasn't showing as well when printing, so I added a contrast layer on top of things to make it all pop more. Here is the original values layer:
Once I finished blocking in my values, I started shading, using a multiply layer and an eraser to block in where light hit. When that was done, I softened some of the shadows, attempting to add textures to the shadows. Then, following the requirements of the assignment, I added a gradient starting from the bottom of the characters up to the top. This is the original shading layer:
