Model Troubleshooting 2 [WEEK 11]

Original sketch

 

Orthographic

For this tree i've simplified the leaves down a bit just because i am unsure on how i would be able to model them. This is something that would probably be much easier to do in Z brush, but as i 1- don't have access to this software at home, and 2- am not as comfortable working in it than i would like to be, I am going to try to do this in Maya. I do like the more simplified look, i feel it reflects more on the Day and night jungle pieces by Micah Lidberg as they're overall more abstract than his other pieces.

I spoke to my team about my concerns about this model and how i plan to overcome this to maybe get their opinions on how they would tackle this, and what they think about my more simplified model. This is the conversation i had with the director:

Niamh : "Yea I quite like the look of that I think it’s translated over quite well from the original drawing, Since we are low poly models we can kinda get away with obscure model shapes. Can always experiment a little bit. See if there are any tree low poly tutorials? "

Myself : "ive had a look for some low poly tree tutorials actually and I'm not sure i really like how they look especially with fitting into our game, i did find one cool one but its for nomad sculpt and not Maya :("

However i did find a very interesting video on how to make leaf textures in Nomad sculpt, I love how this looks and i think it would be really cool to have this in our game, unfortunately i could not find anything online on how to replicate this in Maya, neither on forums or YouTube, most of what i found was just simple blocky trees which, whilst look quite nice, arent quite what we are looking for for this project.

This is the video : https://youtu.be/-8PmMZoiuGk?si=RTzclBRH9-kP7esm 

As i really like how this looks i might try replicating the videos steps in Maya to the best of my understanding, I am unsure on how this will work but i think it would give a lot of texture to the tree if i got it to function correctly. It is also a lot more efficient than modelling every leaf one by one. I figured that if i UV mapped and textured the model in a way that i drew the leaves on the top of the hemispheres and left the bottom transparent, it would look like the leaves in the Nomad sculpt video, I didn't put too much effort into the texturing in this phase as this is just the equivalent to a quick sketch.

I found that with this method i followed, Maya did not like the transparent elements on the texture and created this very weird effect as seen above. I have had this happen before and i was determined to find a way to fix it, as such i looked at a tutorial that suggested to edit some nodes in the hypershade tab to toggle my texture as being transparent, this did not work and ended up just making the entire texture transparent. Below, these were the test textures i did, i thought maybe deleting the bottom of the leaf clump polygons might help fix this problem but instead it made it worse and just made the bottom of the tree pitch black. Feeling overall pretty stumped and frustrated i tried to think of another solution that would give a more natural look to the leaves whilst stepping away from the flat and man made look of my orthographic.

I took inspiration from other low poly trees and how they model the rough shapes of the clumps of leaves, overlapping shapes to get a more natural look, I tried this method out just as a 3D sketch and showed my team who liked this idea if i couldnt figure out how to get the transparency on the leaves to work. I came back to this the next day and was completely stumped on what to do, i sent the model i had done in the chat in case Pantelis or Niamh might want to have a go with this as they have more of a knowledge of 3D than i do, instead i decided to go with this low poly clumped leaves look and figured i could probably imply a lot of texture in my texturing.

Here is this model fully textured with the vines added to it, I used the Acrylic sponge brush to imply the presence of leaves and make the model more visually interesting. Whilst this isn't as effective as the Nomad sculpt tutorial is, i still really like this and think it is still in-keeping with the overall art style of our game. I handed this over to the director for her input and she explained she really liked how this looks, as well as this she might try to have a look if she can make the leaves from the tutorial as she has a bit more experience working in 3D softwares. I hope we can either get this to work or find a way to make the more leafy foliage more visually interesting, I am very happy with this model below and i do think it is one of my favourites, but i think that extra little bit of detail with more defined leaves would really take this to the next level, Below is also the texture i used in the final product which shows a bit clearer how i created the abstract leaf textures.

I also remembered to scale my model using the grid settings, delete the history, and export as an FBX to bring into Unreal.

Gantt Chart -

I now have 7 Models made for this project, I did hope to have 2 done this week but figuring out how to get the leaf tutorial to work took much longer than expected and left me feeling a little unmotivated in general, This does mean i am slightly behind on my work but i am going to try to make this up on thursday by getting at least 2 or 3 animal sketches out the way so that i don't have to stress about doing them after the 3D modelling. Initially i wanted to leave the 2D aspects until last but honestly as they take me the least amount of time to do i think getting them out of the way and done is the best option. I did create an additional piece of work, that being the Map which wasn't on my gantt chart but since i was making maps in my free time i thought that this could be a really nice thing to add. I do think that despite the setbacks i will be able to stay on track and get everything submitted for the deadline.