Saharan Arum -
Getting some advice on the plant sketches i made, i chose the Titan Arum like plant to model next. I was given the advice that "youll just have to show what the petals stem from?", with this in mind i created an orthographic which included a stem like structure at the bottom of the plant of which all the petals radiate out of. On top of this i looked at some flower anatomy sketches and saw that i could probably change the spike like shapes of my original sketch into stamen. This makes the plant seem more believable despite it's exaggerated silhouette. To model this plant i followed the same formula that i have been using for all the models so far, though i had a bit of trouble UV mapping the stem. Luckily the stem is coloured in a solid colour so this isn't too big of an issue, however if i come across this problem again in another model which will need to be textured, i will have to have another look at the UV mapping. The director has offered to fix our models UVs should we need it as she feels quite proficient at this task, which is helpful to know in case i get stuck or need advice. This plant would likely be quite rare to find in the game, and i imagine it to be a focal point of a scene. It's overall appearance is quite different to other plants i have made so far, therefore it does seem like it could maybe be a objective point for the player to interact with. Below i have included screenshots of my modelling process.
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| Final Model |
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| Orthographics and size reference |
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| UV map |
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| Texture |
Plum Tree -
The very first model i made for this project was the Saharan plum, which was initially just a test model to see how texturing and the overall modelling style would look. However i really liked this design and thought it would be a shame to not include it in something. Therefore i looked at one of the design sketches i made for the large plants and saw the red spiky leaf tree looked a little out of place amongst the other trees. Combining some of it's more appealing features with the small plum plant design i created a plum tree that could be the next growth stage of this specific plant. This then meant i could re use my plum model for something whilst also adding some variation in leaf designs amongst my trees. This tree is also a bit smaller than the other two big trees i have made, this is to add some height variation into the setting so that the environments can look both more interesting and more full. I had a bit of trouble with the leaves on this model and transferring their UV's, i found it was easier to just UV map one leaf then copy and paste it, this ensured all leaves had a UV, as the transfer attribute method of transferring UVs was finicky and only allowed me to transfer my UV to one of the 3 leaves. To avoid having to re texture the plum, i just assigned the plum texture and the tree texture to different materials [Both surface shaders however to keep the 2 dimensional look] which saved me a lot of time. I really like this tree and i think that redesigning the spiky red tree also makes it seem more believable to be in a jungle setting. As i had done with the Arum, i have included screenshots of my process below.
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| Final Model |
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| Orthograph |
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| UV Mapping |
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| UV |
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| Tree Texture |
Rigging and height comparison -
To push my skills further i looked into rigging some of my models, I'm not sure if adding physics to our models is a thing we can do but i thought it would be interesting to maybe try doing this so that when the character walks through some vines, the vines will move aside rather than being static elements. I had a look for a tutorial on how to add bones to a model in Maya, and i followed this tutorial on one of the vines of the snakeskin tree. This tutorial is for animating something moving, so i didn't need to follow all of the steps, i just created the bones then bound my model to these bones so that when i move a joint, the model will move too. This is just something i wanted to try out and we might not implement this in the end , but i thought it would be useful to include nevertheless.
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| Here is one of the rigged vines for the snakeskin tree |
If we do decide this is something we want to do, i will have to look into how to add physics to my model.
On top of this i wanted to create a visual representation of the height of my plants so far, i did this by importing all my plants into a scene and scaling them to roughly their comparable heights, this is something that might help us when it comes to putting these models into Unreal. As i create more plants, i will add them to this scene.
Gantt Chart -
The director helped make a Gantt chart for all of us to follow, this was created on google sheets and dictates the timeline from start to the end of the project, currently i am working on the plant 3D models and orthographics which may take me a couple more weeks to fully finish, then i will move onto 2D plant assets, uniform designs, and animal assets for the journal. So far i have been able to create 5 assets in roughly 2-3 weeks. I feel i might be able to get another 2 completed by the end of this week bringing me up to 7 out of the 15 i'd realistically like to create. If time does not allow for this, and i am running out of time at the end of the project, i will make sure all the most important large plants are completed this week so i only have to focus on the 2D assets which will take me much less time as i feel more comfortable in this medium. Overall i am feeling quite confident about this project and what we will have to display at the end of it.
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