Day: November 14, 2021

During the concept phase, I came up with the idea of adding Irish moss or creeping thyme to our environment as i felt they would help accentuate the magical essence of the fairy realm, but i wasn’t really sure how to even go about starting to make either of them since my concepts were just like drawing textures. On the weeks of deciding our assets, we settled with the creeping thyme instead as it had a nice purple colour to it and gave some texture variation to the grass rather than tiny white flowers. I started gathering real life reference images to study as well as looking at other peoples 3d models to give me an idea of how to go about modelling this. I noticed that the flower itself was a cone like shape with petals branching off four sides and stamens protruding out the top. The very basic shape of the cone popped out to me and i realised i could make this with a square by elongating it and scaling down the bottom, so already i had an idea of how to make this. Starting up Maya 2020, yes i need to update my software i know but my internet is terrible, i created a polygon cube and switched to vertex mode, grabbing the bottom vertexes and pulling them down to make my cube more of a rectangle, then used the scale tool to scale them down in all axis, creating my cone shape. From this shape, i selected the top face and bevelled it slightly to create 4 new faces on each side of the square face, these would be the start of my four petals which were made by then individually extruding each of these four faces and pulling them up with the move tool then individually pulling them apart and off to the side to resemble the real life counterpart. Selecting the face in the middle again, i gave it another bevel and moved it down to the bottom of the cone, selecting the vertexes and scaling them down to fit inside the outer cone, much like whenever we were tasked with creating vases for our homework in first year. Going back to the petals to give them more shape and definition, i added edge loops to the bottom of each so that when the object was mesh smoothed, it would keep it shape. I decided to also add edge loops to the top and bottom of the cone as it wasn’t really giving me the shape i wanted when i pressed 3 on the keyboard to preview the mesh smooth, it was folding in on itself and acting more as a spike than a smooth cone. This made everything look nice and neat and is already quite close to the end product i was working towards. Starting to create the details of the flower, i went inside the cone and went into face selection mode, using the multi-cut tool to cut it into 4 even squares. I selected each face individually and extruded them, using the scale tool to scale down the vertexes at the top of these extrusions in all axis, then added an edge loop to the top of each to create a more rounded shape. Soon I realised, this wasn’t the best way to go about it as my shape had distorted into itself and they weren’t even, so i undid these actions and gave each square a second cut before extruding them all at once, repeating the rest of my actions, giving a far better finished shape.

Using the vertex mode, i pulled all the extrusions apart from one another and diversified their heights to make it seem more like a natural flower. The smooth preview was my best friend in these times to check my progress, helping me notice i needed to tweak it a little from there until i was happy. Once finished with the mesh, I selected the whole model and smoothed the mesh two times to give me a nice rounded and softer look.

Next i had to UV unwrap my model which was somehow a lot easier than i imagined so either I’ve done it wrong or I’m learning and getting better.

Firstly, using the edge selection i selected the edges running along the side of every petal and made a cut so each petal would have a front and back, then went along the bottom joining lines of each petal and made cuts to separate the petals from the main cone body. I moved these to the side and dolly’d my camera through my model to see the inside where i then cut along the edges of each stigmata, then cutting a seam into the underside of each of them so they could lay out flat when unfolded. Finally, i moved on to the outside cone and cut a seam down the side, selecting all the UVs and unfolding them before using the layout tool to fit them all nicely in the box.

Exporting my flower as an FBX, i opened Substance Painter to texture my model with fairly straight forward fill and paint layers, just adding on colours and designs with the smudge tool i thought would fit the flower both for realistic believability and the magic of the fairy realm.

Once i exported the textures from substance and plugged them in in Maya, i duplicated the flower and decided to then make a simple stem from a cylinder which i just scaled up, adding edge loops on the top on and bottom to create a more rounded shape. I then decided i wanted a leaf so i used the multi-cut tool and bevels to create a little face on the side of the stem where i then extruded and pulled out the face to make a little arm like shape which i then cut edges into and shaped into a leaf. I realised this wasn’t the best looking thing so for some reason i went the long way around and duplicated the stem, used face selection to select only the leaf from one of the models and delete it, patching up the edge with a target weld tool and deleting the edges then using the fill gap or bridge too cant remember which, but main thing is there was no longer a hole in my model. I took the leaf from the other model after deleting the stem and closing the hole in the end of the leaf with a bridge, refining the shape then adding a stem to the leaf and rotating it round my original stem model, duplicating the leaf and placing it at various angles to create the leaves. I was going to add small buds to these but felt it was over working myself as you wouldn’t be able to see that amount of detail in the scene.

I tried to texture the stem in substance but felt it looked too weird so i binned it and just used a flat colour in Maya which still worked well and helped draw the eye more towards the flower which i placed on top of the stem after combining the stem with the leaves, then combining the flower with the finished stem, duplicating it a few times in different sizes and angles to give a variation of a natural growing patch of creeping thyme.

I brought the final version of the thyme into unity to test in the foliage painting and thought it actually tuned out quite well, and i was very happy with it. Here is the finished product alongside some earlier tests when i just had a single flower with an uncoloured stem, and a few other tries at getting bunches.

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These pictures let me get a better understanding of how the flower looked so i could model it more accurately and it helped me find out the patterns in which the plant grows and how to clump it together for a more realistic way of portraying it in my environment.

To go along with my ideas, since i was tasked with the foliage, i had to create some grass for our scene. I was a little confused at first on how to do this so i went to Discord and messaged my tutor Henry for some advice, and as always he was quick to respond with some very helpful information and some examples, as well as a tutorial he recorded himself specific to my question.

I opened Maya and after looking at the Maya files he sent me, studying the way the planes were shaped and positioned, I created a plane with 10 height subdivisions and started to make my own attempt at grass.

I’m not going to lie, this really frustrated me because I’ve always found grass a challenging task whether it be in just drawing it or modelling it like now,  just don’t understand how to make it look natural yet still appealing.  had to look up a lot of different reference images of real blades of grass and 3d models just to get an idea of the shapes i wanted to go for, while also flicking back and forth from Henry’s examples.

Using vertex selection mode, i started to scale them down in the x axis to make the grass thin, tapering the top, then up in the y axis to give them length and duplicated my main blade of grass so i could create different variants. Using the soft selection tool quite a lot of the time, i was rotating the planes in directions i thought would look interesting, coming out of it a few times to precisely select vertexes and move them one by one, rotating them so they didn’t go out of shape. I placed each blade of grass slightly apart from one another, trying to get appealing overlap but my first attempt didn’t look very good to me so i started again.

My next attempt i did basically everything the same, but i tried to think of it more as a 3d object than 2d planes, and this resulted in something i was much happier with.  I took the blades of grass ,using D to move the pivot point to the bottom of the blade, and rotated them but instead of rotating them left and right, i rotated them outwards, curving like a real blade of grass, then positioned them in a more circular formation to give them a sense of volume and fullness rather than 4 blades in a straight line.  Since some of the normals were reversed which could be seen by a black surface, i used the reverse tool to flip the normals back to face the outside where my texture would later be displayed.

Once happy with my model, i UV unwrapped it using the create planar tool on the z axis of each grass blade then unfolded it and used the layout tool. There was no need for creating cuts as this as a 2D plane and not  3D object with multiple sides. Before exporting, I selected the clumps of grass blades and combined them, creating three different clumps of grass so it would hopefully help make the landscape more interesting.

 

I took each grass clump object into substance painter and textured it by using a fill layer to begin with for my base colour then using paint layers above that to go over it with different shades of green, yellow and a cyan colour to make a stripe down the middle of each individual blade for detail.

I exported the textures from substance and applied them to my models in Maya, the exported the FBX files from Maya and imported them in Unreal, using the foliage mode to plug the grass objects into so i could turn up the density then start painting on the landscape to see how the grass would look, and it didn’t look too bad. Below are the many different attempts i had at making the grass and painting it onto the land, the first three screenshots just have a placeholder lambert texture for the grass, while the rest are the textured materials.

Updating after ive finished all assets: I created a small scene with the grass and I’m quite proud of how i seems to be turning out.

refs:

Looking at these pictures helped me understand how i could model my grass and position it to make it have more volume and look more realistic. I also looked for 3d models of other creators to see how they approached making grass.