Snakeskin Tree [WEEK 7]

 

In our game the main 3D assets will be the large plants that make up the environment, coupled with the buildings in the main city area. I imagine these 3D models to fit with the 2D elements being quite flat looking but a lot of detail in the patterns and colour variations, similar to how the artist, Micah Lidberg works in a vector graphic style. For this model I chose the snakeskin tree to create as i thought this would be the easiest of the 15 and allows me to test my method before solidifying anything. I made this model solely out of cylinders that i extruded to the shape of my orthograph, of which i also included a height reference so we can scale it properly when we put it in unreal.

Here is the aforementioned orthographic, i did not feel like i needed to include a side view as all of the vine like leaves fall in a line, i imported this as an image plane that i could then model atop of. I heard a tip from one of my tutors that UV mapping as i went would help me keep my UVs more organized, and also save myself from the gruelling constant of having to do my UVs at the end of the modelling process. I found this tip really helped me stay focused on modelling and i made a lot less errors overall, this is something i will definitely be trying again. Then, once my UV's were finished, i downloaded them as a PNG and brought them into my drawing software alongside my original drawing and style guide for reference on how to texture my model.

These are my UVs within Maya

These are my final textures

Finally I tried something different to my previous model which i decided to leave as just a test model, I used the blinn shader on the plum and i found it made it very shiny which stepped away from the look of the artist so instead i tried using the surface shader instead which gave a much more cartoony and flat look. I showed this to my team to which the director came up with a really cool idea for us to maybe try creating that black outline look within unreal when the time comes for us to import our models into the engine, this would really solidify that almost 2D look and would definitely match my vision for the game resembling my chosen artist's style. The director has had a look for some youtube tutorials for us to have a look at, i think this is an excellent idea and would really help make our game look more unique. For now i was able to take some screenshots of the snakeskin tree model and the new edited plum model both using the surface shader material, i am so happy with this slight change and i definitely will be doing this for the future models. I also intend to make another turntable for the tree, however my personal version of maya has issues with the Arnold software that i seem to be unable to fix, so this is something i am going to have to do in the library or in confetti.

Snakeskin Tree

Edited plum

Kanban Board- 

For these next couple of weeks i will be focused mainly on 3D modelling and working on 2D plant assets to put in our game.