Week 12/13

From what I understood, my diorama project from Christmas was due to be resubmitted at the end of what would’ve been week 12, so I spent almost all week polishing that. However, at the end of the week we did presentations to the tutors and small groups of our peers so as to receive feedback.

The main issue was my lighting inside the house. I desperately needed more light to highlight the assets I had made as the light from the skybox wasn’t enough. One of my peers gave me some good advice and even fixed a problem that I was having with the Orrery casting strange shadows.

Week 13 I mostly decided to dedicate to improving the foliage variation, as I had been given feedback on that previously. The first day I spent creating a piece of terrain that you would see in the distance. I started by creating a simple mesh, then I decided I wanted more detail so I brought it into Zbrush to create more mountainous-looking normal map for it. Unfortunately this wasn’t really visible, so I decided to use the normal map to make some ambient occlusion instead. Combined with the textures I used for the rest of the terrain and some LOD trees, the result was passable but not great.

I decided to make a variation of tree that would feature less than the main ones, adding a little texture and colour difference to the scene. They would be around the same height but very slightly greener than their more common counterparts. The leaves I created using photographs of trees against very white skies so I could edit them easily. I put a vertex in the middle of each clump and pulled at them slightly with soft selection so they wouldn’t be perfectly flat. Arranging the leaves took the longest time. When I was done I edited the vertex normals in Maya and when I was finished I was pleased with the result. The texture map I used had some left over space, and I made a rough flower to experiment with.

I made another tree too, this time shorter and a more purple colour, using the same techniques. However the clumps of tree branch I used this time were too big and resulted in the planes being too easily distinguishable from each other. I am considering going back and adding more planes. The only other option is to remake the leaves entirely.

I finally got around to baking down a better rock texture to fade out my cliff, arranging the high poly rocks over a plane in Max. I also made a darker grass terrain to blend in shadowed areas alongside making a more illuminated version of my grass plane texture to place in areas without shadow.

I roughly textured the patio as it had been left blank…

And finally, at the end of the week, I managed to fix the lightmap on my building! At some point the instance of the mesh had been set to override the lightmap resolution to be smaller.