Dungeon Environment Props
Since we had our layout of our locations I decided to go ahead and get started on our actual models for these environments, since they were easy to do compared to the model and I could use them as a cool down before stopping work for the day.
It was a couple days after making the drinks that we decided to split these elements up better between the group as well, me and Tori had worked these out in class and then posted it in the server for people to choose what they wanted. Then I just transferred this list onto the Trello board as a checklist, so that once our props were modelled and unwrapped they could be taken off.
Real Life Elements
I started off making the Wonster can, based on a Monster can. I went and used PureRef to have an example of it as well as having the real life thing next to me that I could manoeuvre around and inspect. There’s nothing fancy with this, just a cylinder primitive that I extruded and bevelled to mimic the shape. Then I went and used the knife tool to cut out the punctured metal, and quaded this area out. I used a primitive cube to make the tab itself, bevelling the edges and mirroring, cutting out the holes and the adjusting before shading both parts smooth. To finish I just used a cylinder primitive to connect the tab and can, changed the sides to 16 and bevelled, joining them all together with CTRL J.
Then I went and modelled the Dorona bottle, based on a Corona bottle, again using PureRef and just using a primitive cylinder and extruding and bevelling to create the same shape as the reference.
Then I just unweapped these, I decided to just texture the real life props for the dungeon together, just to keep them all together. I wasn’t too sure on the bottle’s UVs so I made a note to check on these and maybe look to fix what appear to be warpage on the neck of the bottle, but that is for another day…
The Dorbito packet was the last thing I needed to finish from this UV Texture pack. I made this using Poly modelling, getting the general shape of the packet out and then worked to add some crunchy creases in. Looking at this now I think I will give this another pass, Im’m just not happy with how this has been smoothed over and where the weight of the packet lies.
I went ahead and unwrapped this to put in the same UV as my other props and then I went ahead and exported this ou tas an FBX to take a look using the windows 3D Viewer, adjusting the lighting to see what the surface texture was like and yeah, wasn’t feeling this at all so I went ahead and redid it.
I went ahead and looked up some other models of crisp packets, just to see how they built up their models. I liked the following one the most, and used its wireframe view to help my new approach to building this out.
So starting with a plane I went and built out a similar geometry and adjusted to achieve the crisp packet shape.
Then to match the Dorito bag more closely, I went and added some more spans along the front and back and used these to adjust the volume of the crisps more closely. The one thing I wanted to make sure was that overall it had a smooth texture, and then in substance painter I could add the idea of these creases and edges,
Looking into the 3D viewer I just liked this texture more.
I then brought these into Substance Painter and followed the same tutorial that I did in my practices to get that painterly texture.
Then I needed to go and hand paint on some elements to fit our parodies, for the Wonster can I flipped my reference image and using the artistic sponge brush I made the bold outline in black and filled in the colour similarly to match. I then went and added the blur slope to this to try blend it in with the texture of the can. I didn’t like the harsh black so I changed this to a more maroon colour before sketching in the Wonster Label. I decided that simple was better here and just left out the butterflies for now, but depending on feedback I can easily go back and add to this.
I took a similar approach for making the Dorbito packet. Painting on elements with hand until it could be read as the parody, however I did go and paint on some extra shadows of the packet creases to define these a bit better.
When it came to the bottle, I just wasn’t liking the yellow, so I reached out with two different colours to my group members and had them pick what fitted better. The green ended up winning, and this was actually the smart material that I had created from my practice runs!
Again I went in and painted on a simplified version of the logo, I wasn’t really feeling this at the current time so I just did what I could and noted to maybe go back and either leave it blank or get some help with designing this element.
Anyway, with the bottle done for now, these are my textured props. I kind of like how they came out, this was a lot more fun to me than unwrapping is, and it allowed me to just sit down and paint and have fun rather than stressing over things.
I then brought these into Blender, I will need to play around with the metallic and roughness scales since they do come off as a bit shiny here, but again this can be helped with some of my team members.
I worked out this shiny issue, I just went into the shader editor and turned the roughness value to 5.
Dungeon Elements
The next batch of props I need to make was the bottle cap, the ball and the dungeon doorways.
I started with the bottlecap, since I just needed to edit the prop I created for the previs it was very easy to do. I adjusted the ribbing on the outer rim, as well as the inner top one to mimic the references I was looking at. The ball, was also very simple since it is just a sphere primitive.
When it came to the dungeon arches, I wanted to spruce them up a bit. So, I collected a couple references and started modelling a dragon head that would sit on top on the stone as well as making the bricks for the archway itself.
So I had approached this in a similar way to making my character’s model, just using a plane and a mirror modifier and trying to make it look like a low poly dragon head. Once I had the main form down I went and inset faces to create the eye holes and nose holes, as well as marking some edge creases to get some sharpness of the stone.
I had gotten it to this point, and honestly it looked more like a dog than a dragon, so I knew I needed to elongate out the face and adjust the nose spike and the nostrils a bit to fix this.
With that the head was majorly done, I was a bit worried about the final finish on this, since we were going for this minimally surface textured style I tried to not have too much modelled on this, I think if I were to redo this I would add a lot more texture or even multires on some more detail like cracks and texture. The bricks I just made from cubes I subdivided and resized and scaled, again if I were to make these again I would like to sculpt in some more details instead of just drawing these on. I shared this to my group for some feedback and they all said they liked how it looked so that worked for me.
With this set of props all modelled I just had to go ahead and unwrap them. So, I just set this up like a normally would and marked seams where appropriate, the bottle cap was the easiest, the ball was fine (it does have some stretching on it towards the top but I checked with Tori and she said it would be fine for what we were working on).
When it came to unwrapping the archway, I did find myself having a bit of issue. I unwrapped it as I normally would but when I would check this with the subdiv modifier it really warped the checkers so I couldn’t do this approach.
I had been at it for a bit before I decided to reach out to Tori, our groups 3D master and she said she would check out how to set up these UVs and I sent her the file and she got back to me really quick with the solution. All I had to do was apply the subdiv modifier and then unwrap as I was before and that worked really well.
I ended up splitting the brick doorway and other elements into two different maps. This map has the wireframes from the bottle cap, the ball and the dragon head, as you can see I decided to unwrap this similarly as I would unwrap a character’s face and this worked well enough for me.
These are the wireframes from the bricks, I will admit I got a bit lazy and just used the pack islands and set a decent enough margin,(looking at these wireframes now I’m not sure how I missed that one didn’t get subdivided, I only noticed this after already texturing so that was a big mistake on my part, probably since I was juggling a lot of work at this time- note to self on future projects make sure everything is consistent throughout before moving onto the next stage ;^^).
With all of my elements unwrapped I was able to bring these into substance painter, and as always I do a quick look around to check that I am happy with the model before I start texturing. There were some areas I wanted to adjust here, mainly that there were gaps between the bricks and you could actually see to the other side.
So I fixed these up back in Blender before reexporting the FBX and baking all these again.
I then went ahead and used the same process of texturing that I did before, and applied some nice colours as the base. The bottlecap was to be a parody on WKD bottlecap so I chose nice fun colours. Then the stone I decided to go for a more blue grey slate colour.
The way the light generators applied the colours on the dragon head was way too sharp for me, so I went and fixed these by hand painting on some layers to smooth these out.
Then I thought it could be nice to have some moss on the doorway. I created this by making a base layer and then I had a cloud generator to create some variation on this and adjusted to my liking before adding another layer of some gaussian spots to add some darker spots of moss. Then I threw these layers into a group and added a black mask and painted the areas that I wanted the moss to rest.
Also these were my assorted references that I used while painting.
Again, since this method of colouring is for making statue like models, I wanted to lighten up the back area since that would also be in some shots. I did this by duplicating the initial stone layers, went through and mirrored the values of them so that the same light effect would be on the back, and then black masked it to only affect the back half of the model.
Then I also went and applied the same colours to the ball model, but this time I went and added some gaussian spots to create some discolouration in the rock like the references I was using.
Surprisingly, the area that I struggled with in this texturing process was the linework.
I didn’t relly know how to approach our line work style with the texture that I had wanted. I had gathered a bunch of references and repeated a couple different looks but I ended up deciding on just lining around the moss and then adding cracks and dents into the stone. I had then asked my group for some feedback on this and followed what they had said and I still wasn’t enjoying the look of it but I decided to just export it out anyway for now.
Then I just put these into blender to see how they looked, I thought they looked pretty nice. It is definitely not my best work but I think it really shines when we add the orange lighting onto it.
I then received some feedback from Tori, so I went and decided to give the line art another pass.
I went and tried to make the moss look nice and bushy and even went and added some moss to ball. I also went and darkened up the cracks on both the ball and the archway and added some small adjustments that I thought looked better. I definitely could do another pass on this, but the time constraint is an issue at this point so I will leave it and go back if there is time to do so.
Then I brought these into Blender again, and I liked this second pass a lot better than the first one. If I have time I might look to go and add some highlights to the moss and even use a multires to bake some more texture into a normal map for the moss and cracks. Overall I think these will work for the style that we are going for and the set.
Making the Dungeon
Since I had made the previs models as well as taking on making a handful of props, I didn’t really want to work on the dungeon model itself, but no one else seemed to step up to make this so I went and started on it. I took the previs model and first adjusted the walk ways to be wider, since this was the main feedback that people had when working on the previs. I also went and curved the walls, since we wanted the ball to be able to roll along the wall instead of the bump hit in our previs.
I then shared this model with the members of my team and asked them if someone else could work on it for me, since I had done quite a fair amount of work for the group already. Eoin picked this up for me and then handed the model back after. I will be honest, I wasn’t too happy with the final result of this. I liked the nice curvature on the walls and the added geometry that made it a bit more rocky. I didn’t like that the walls were so thick, he made the set even narrower somehow, even with me telling him to keep it wide and just curve in the walls, and overall it was made a bit strangely so I wasn’t able to cleanly adjusts this. I was just very confused at the method that made this.
I sent a message into our group server about this issue and I didn’t get any concrete feed back about fixing this or changing it, etc. So I left it be for a couple days.
With that in mind, I went ahead and started making up the front cliff face. I just extended out and adjusted the same rocky face I had made for the previs. Then I liked this idea of having a die imbedded into the side of the cliff face, so I just subdivided a cube for that and place it onto the rock face.
I also went and built up the cliff around the doorway.
I went and revisited the dungeon model after I had made my props, and like I expected no one had went and changed or worked on it. So, I wanted to see what my props would look like jus placed into this environment. As you can see, the walls were too thick for my props, the walkways were too narrow for my props and fitting our characters in, and the doorways also didn’t exactly fit (this was partly my bad as I had quite drastically changed the shape of the archways), I think I should have concentrated on making my props first then worked to built up the set around it.
I had went and tried to fix up the issues in this set, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. I don’t know if it was just that I was a bit frustrated or tired from working, or if it was because I didn’t know how to approach someone else’s work and adjust it. Either way, I decided to leave this as is and just work on another version of the file from earlier. This meant that if my group or I didn’t end up liking what I was doing we could still just use the previous version.
So, I went and opened my older file and worked on brining in my props first. I had also went and brought in my model to try and get the sizing of the props and walls correct for the camera. I had went and sent these quick renders out to my group for any feedback (and to ask if I could have one of their taller models to help with this), I didn’t get any criticism so I decided to push forward with making this dungeon.
The walls were a lot wider which would mean we could get all of our characters in the shot as well as be able to navigate around the cameras easily.
There is one issue that I found out where when the light hit this part of the crisp packet it would create this smudged lines, but I think that might just be from the quickly lighting I had set up so I wasn’t worrying too much about it right now.
Instead of making the walls out of cubes, I thought it would be easier to make them with a plane and just add a solidify modifier. So I went and just deleted a lot of the faces and wnet about editing them this way and it was a lot more manageable.
I had also though tit might be nice for the final room to be more like a cave type shape instead of the blocky room we had before. I shared these with the group (my internet had cut out for now so I took pictures of my screen from my phone) and waited for feedback on this shape, and received none.
I did the same with some other elements and did actually receive some nice feedback from Kori.
I didn’t want to go and edit the other walls to be a bit more rocky until I was able to grab some nice sized references (I tried looking some up on my phone but it was a bit hard since it has a small screen). Instead I decided to finish up the entrance way, and I did this by taking the entrance I had made before and just pasted it into the new file. I then went and adjusted it to fit the entrance and to make sure the frame looked fine, I had tried adding a pillar to see how this looked, but I decided to just extrude out the rocky face outward and up. I think this looked pretty fine for now, I will try and adjust some faces to get a more rocky texture, or look to paint these textures on just like I did with the props.
I asked again for people to send me their character models so I could work on sizing, and thankfully one person responded this time. So I went and tried to scale Eoin’s model to fit the dungeon layout so far and then I checked it on the cameras that we had set for the previs to see what it looked like. I then sent these to my group and didn’t get too much feedback so I continued working.
So I went ahead and worked on the front of the cave again, and then I wanted to see how it would look subdivided and I think it still looked pretty good. My plan now was to unwrap this area and multi res in some more detail, baking in the detail to a normal map, (It would also mean that if my team didn’t like this texture that I could just unplug the normal map and it would go back to the original look).
As I was adjusting the ramp entrance came away from our wall so I had to go and adjust this back into place.
Then Kori had also sent me his current model, so I downloaded the file and just joined it to one mesh and brought it into the dungeon file. Since Kori’s is the tallest character I could check the heights of the areas this way. The hardest part about making the dungeon model was probably that my group hadn’t been sharing their model’s progress apart from me and Eoin. So trying to scale the characters and props to fit was left a bit open ended and we really could have used more communication from people.
I then checked the sizing of the entry way, and it was too small for the tone we were trying to achieve, so to fix this I scaled this front section up to fit this idea of the tall entrance a bit better.
I did the same in other locations to check not only the height of the characters but the height of the walls.
I also worked to try make the rocky texture on the walls that Eoin achieved on the other file, curving towards the top and using to proportional edit tool and moving a couple verts around. I think this worked pretty nicely, I have definitely identified that environment work isn’t my strong point but it does the job.
I wanted to add some quick texture to the ground to , and I did this by adding a load of loops to the ground plane and adding a displace modifier and using a voronoi as the texture.
Then I went and finished off the current days work by starting to unwrap the front cliff elements. I didn’t get these fully unwrapped but I did get the majority of the cliff face done so that the next session I work on this it can be finished.
I similarly added these UV checker maps to the other elements in the map. I didn’t rebuild the pressure plate or the hidden wall (but I did edit this to make it a bit rounder and smooth), since I think the simple elements would work better here. As always, I posted all of this work to my group and sent them the file of the dungeon up until now.
Later on in the day Eoin had messaged in about wanting to texture the dungeon and I got really annoyed at this, since I had said I wanted to texture the dungeon and this was supposed to be my original job (since I started the dungeon model originally before handing it to him to finish and then I ended up having to redo it all again to fit our props and characters). So I had went and messaged back and then I felt bad since it seemed like he took this a bit harshly. So I ended up just telling him to make sure that he gets his model done first, to the best of his ability since it was the most important element and then if he has time he could texture the dungeon instead of me. I was a bit disappointed that I wasn’t going to be doing this part because I had been looking forward to it for a while, but since I did end up making the dungeon model it was only fair.
Cliff Face
With this new arrangement in mind I went about sorting out the cliff face. I finished unwrapping it, albeit it wasn’t the smoothest or nicest UVs which would later cause me some issue, and I went to add detail using a multi-res modifier.
I then just baked this multi-res and applied the lowest level of it to get all those nice details and I brought this into Substance Painter to start texturing. Now my UVs come back to haunt me, you can see this clear jagged cut and I decided to leave it for now and see how it would look later as I put some colour down.
I started off with a smart material that I made when creating the doorways of the dungeon, and I thought that it was too dark and lacked the nice gritty paint texture.
So instead of just using this smart material, I went and used the colours to create a new version that had a better light diffusion. I tested this to see if it would turn the same stony colour in warm light and it did so that worked for me.
I then went back and worked on the entrance, increasing the intensity of the blur slope to get this stony appearance and I went and painted certain areas up a bit clearer than the light generators did. I also went and asked about what style of dice I should have and Eoin was really good and got me some references so I used those and sent it for feedback. I also experimented with my moss again to see how it would look on the rock and dice.
Then it came to linework again, which I did struggle with last time on my stone. I gathered references online and applied the two styles and sent these to my group to see what they liked best, on the left is this more rocky clump effect and the right has more line work and cracks (also seen in the reference on my PureRef board).
While I was waiting on receiving feedback on my work I went and brought this into Blender for another look at how my textures were laying, since in Substance Painter they appeared fine. Here I saw there was these very obvious cuts from where I had unwrapped, since we were on a bit of a time crunch I decided to not redo my UVs and instead I tried to think of ways that I could conceal these errors smartly. The best way I thought of was to draw cracks in this areas and then look to go paint around these cracks to make the transition between them a bit smoother. I know that I could definitely have made this nicer and gave it more attention and it pains me to put something out that I’m not happy with but it does the job and that’s all I need at this point.
As I started working on the cliff face I had sent in a clarification about the work, and I’m not sure how to react to Eoin’s response on this. I thought we had agreed that he wanted to texture the dungeon, but the way he reacted to this was as if I was forcing the job on him and he didn’t want to do it? I’m not quite sure but this had me be a bit annoyed.
I hadn’t received any answer to my question since the day before, so I decided to just finish this off based on what I thought fit best. I looked to add more rocky-ness to the linework, adding this dents and hashed scuff marks and lining the larger shapes of the rocky masses. I also went and added some more moss. I am not entirely happy with how this turned out but there is some decent work that went into making this, so If there is some extra time before render I might look to go back and do some finishing touches and fixes until I’m happy.
I then brought these textures back into Blender, and there were these really awful light interactions happening on the mesh. I didn’t know how to fix this so I tried to use some lighting to see if I could diffuse the issue a bit better.
This worked a bit but there were still these very noticeable splits in the mesh and these awful black blobs.
I then decided to try disconnecting the Normal Map to see if this was the issue, and this was definitely the issue. So then I had two options from here, leave it without the Normal Map or look to redo the Normal Map for effect. For now I decided to leave it, but I could always go back to this later on and add some more texture. Since this issue is resolved it would mean that I also needed to go ahead and adjust some of the textures that I had used to work around this faulty map.
I also thought it might be nice to try a cooler light and keep where the torches would sit be this warm light and see how the scene would look.
I went back and fixed up some of the linework the moss since I removed the normal map and didn’t have to compensate for its mistakes and I thought this looked a lot better actually.
This is a final look on my front cliff face, showing off the lighting and the model a bit closer. I did struggle a fair amount with creating this so I am quite content with how it came out and I think it will look well with all our characters and props.
I then went ahead and passed the dungeon file over to Eoin, as well as the texture file so that he could use the same colours (or mimic my textures with a smart material). I can only hope that Eoin is able to easily navigate my file, as I know understand that trying to understand other peoples files is confusing and a bit hard. I do understand that my file isn’t perfect and I tend to build things quite large, so I did send a message over to Eoin telling him to feel free to edit any of my faces as I see fit, since I know we have a couple of different ideas for how things should look or work for our setting. I also made sure I was online to try and solve any issues, (albeit I was a bit annoyed at the lack of communication from my members so I did answer a bit harshly).
I had a lot of issue in this area especially with creating an environment and sharing files with my team members. I will definitely work to improve in my environment making skills, as well as getting some more practice in unwrapping. I had a lot of fun texturing in this new style and I think learning more styles of texture work could benefit me greatly in improving my 3D skills. In future I would like to have better communication with my team members, as I feel like the other members don’t really engage in our server and then due to this they don’t have a great understanding of what needs to be done or to what standard. I’m not really sure how I can encourage people to work a bit better so that is something I will have to look into as well, since animation is a largely team work based venture.