Week 8

I finished the Orrery’s data holograms, and added an asteroid belt made of low poly shapes to flesh things out a little more.

The plan was to move on to the freezer next. I modelled it very basically and imported it in to my level to preview how it was going, and found that it actually didn’t look too bad as it was with just basic materials. The parts that would need proper modelling/texturing would be the workings at the back, and that would be in shadow anyway. I do still intend to return to this asset, but fleshing it out is very low down on my list of priorities.

I decided it was time to set aside the interior and put more focus on the exterior. I started with some small tweaks, like adding a small amount of illumination to the trees to slightly cancel out the strange shadows near their tops. I also arranged the grass planes I had made previously into actual clumps.

Because I had only used two branch variations for the trees, their UV map had a fair amount of empty space. I decided to use this space for another piece of foliage. Starting with the basic shapes, I began a heightmap for two clusters of leaves. I had used this method to create leaves before and found it to be effective, but it took a lot longer this time around as some of the leaves were overlapping on this map. I made the albedo after this- I was not quite satisfied with it but with how long the normal map generation took I wanted to spend time on other assets.

The slope below the building was looking very bare- I originally wanted to cover it in foliage but the potential for overdraw was too high. The other option was to make the surface rocky. I quickly made three simple shapes in Max, imported them to Zbrush and began working. I think something I need to remember in future is to break up the shapes more, because flattening off edges on large rounded areas isn’t as effective as doing the same on smaller ones. Using brushes like Orb Cracks and the noise feature I got a passable shape, and then I did some polypaint. Of course I had forgotten that I couldn’t bake polypaint in Max, but after some hasty research I found I could use Xnormal. I still had to create the lower poly version however, so I had a play around with zRemesher. I got a half decent result, exported and unwrapped it, and ran everything through Xnormal to generate the maps. Unsurprisingly the result wasn’t fantastic, the topology zBrush had generated was far too rounded, and I had subsequently done a very rough unwrap. I had to do it manually.

The retopology took an entire day due to the size of the assets but it allowed me to create much better seams and gave the rocks more defined silhouettes. I received some feedback on the level so far while I was working on them and one suggestion was to create a bit of an overhang with grass to sell the cliff face idea. This is something I will most likely make next week along with more foliage.