I built vertically in Unreal, and I made banyan tree placeholders that I adore. I tried to get the ground plane in here but had some issues so that is coming up next. There is going to be water and waterfalls, plus many plants. I just finished watching the instructions for adding foliage to the canopy and I'm very excited. I love plants. I love this.
Unreal is so easy to use, I may start using it to create mockups for 2D pieces.
Well then, Unreal is magical. I finished lowering the poly count on the trees, softened all the edges, UVed and then exported as an OBJ before importing the mesh to Unreal. I'm working on rock placement right now, but I got too excited and put in some of the banyan trees. I'll have ground around these in today as well. I focused on that single camera angle shot, but looking for my next and it might be something more vertical, panning up the mountain perhaps. I need to figure out water in Unreal, that's pretty key to this piece.
Okay, not for days, just today. I've done curve based extruded plants in the past but this one by far has gone the smoothest. I was expecting the banyan tree to be a bit harder than it has so far. Good tree.
In other news, I acquired the Unreal for Engine 4 for Design and Visualization book. It is copyright 2018 and Unreal 5 being teased means I'll be getting another book pretty soon, but I don't mind. I know there are hundreds of hours of tutorials out there, and I'll no doubt check some of those out, but I adore a quiet morning with absolutely no screens. Me, a happy cat, coffee (lately tea), and a good book. It's my favorite part of the day. Lately I've been reading about orchids, Japanese gardens, color theory, brain science, productivity, fashion, succulents...cacti, Indian contemporary interior design. My other recent book purchase is GUN. Yes, it does steal the show in the photo.
I am reading a book on Japanese gardens and one of the oldest forms is based on a view of mountain and pond. (this is a rough beginners understanding of the symbolism) I find the intentional use of relatively permanent features such as rocks, evergreen trees, and moss...to highlight the passing of the seasons and our part in it, inspirational. I was thinking of doing something similar in my vegetation piece, though primarily by making most of the scene green/blue, eventually the contrast will be either a floating lantern or perhaps anthurium blossoms on the water. Either way that color pop is going to be there.
Here is the video of me streaming uploaded to YouTube in the level builder. I got from where I was at my last blog post, to where I'm at now which is showing good progress. Follow me on Twitch and we can chat next time. Yes, I like Star Trek.
Here's the latest progress shot for those who don't want to sit through me pushing rocks back and forth.
So, I'm guessing at the next steps with some help from a classmate Logan Medved. He's an excellent environment artist, and I was happy to see we were both going to be rockin' the vegetation course.
I already finished creating, baking, and importing the low poly rock into Unreal, and so that left only the tree. I watched the beginning of the videos guiding us on how to do it but didn't get a chance to watch the rest. I'm planning to do a Banyan tree so I borrowed some meshes from an earlier class and deformed them into the rough placeholder you see below. I believe we'll be sculpting it in ZBrush after the scene is laid out in its most basic form.
I hope I'm on the right track here, will check with the instructor, Jared Sobotta to make sure.
Note for future reference, CGMA responds the quickest on Discord. I shared my struggles with Steve from tech support and my instructor and almost instantly chased down the issue.
Finally! I made my own maps from a mesh I sculpted! It was pretty easy. I used XNormal because that's what was demo'd in the lectures for the class, but I imagine I could do this with Marmoset which I hear has fabulous baking functionality.
I'm happy. I'll take my baby steps out the door rock maps as they are. (Right into Unreal.)
I spent the better part of today dropping skillpoints into ZBrush. I've been going through the Intro to ZBrush free coursework created by Michael Pavlovich. They are an excellent teacher, yet I feel I'm barely scratching the surface of what ZBrush can do.
Here is my progress to the Anthurium. This is sculpted and polypainted in ZBrush using Dynamesh.
I often tell this to frustrated kiddos and I find it also works on me, "Just keep trying, you'll get better." I'm starting to get the hang of ZBrush's UI now, the sculpting is starting to feel more natural. I believe you can see it in my progress below.
This is a big improvement from my first ever ZBrush sculpt. :)
Good news, I'm going to be fully vaccinated in two weeks! Bad news, I got hit by side effects and spent most of today ill. Fortunately I slept through most of that, and still got in a bit of modeling.
Latest stream from my twitch account, uploaded to YouTube.
My connection got terrible about 30 minutes into the stream, so you may as well skip the space between 30:00 and 40:00.
Hope your vaccinations go better than mine, or at least, just as well. Cheers.
