Production Week 3: Main Hall Deadline

This week marks the first internal deadline for our team. By this Friday we had a goal to get the majority of the Main Hall completed. Although there are some things that still need tidying and tweaking, (we are of course all still learning!) we pretty much made the deadline! See our results below! This was our first major benchmark to see if it was possible to achieve all we had planned for our level and at the moment we are feeling quite confident of what we can achieve with our remaining 7 weeks.

Soon we will be spreading out to work on smaller areas including the balcony and ocean view to finish off the main hall

Willow

Due to having worked on a mass amount of things in order to help populate our main hall last week this week I wanted to take the time to carefully start to refine areas. For example I worked a bit more on the newsstand to bring this up to a higher quality as well as taking the time to re-texture with better resolution. It is also now wider and closer to what I originally wanted from this asset. 
Throughout this week I have also been slowly chipping away at making my relief for the back and front facing wall of our main hall, I have tried multiple different methods to try and achieve this but now finally feel I have found the right workflow for this asset. This has mainly been made in zbush thus far, which has been a enjoyable process as I haven't been able to really sculpt anything up to now. This asset is currently at the stage where I am able to add the final stages to the main mesh, hopefully meaning that soon I will be able to move onto the re-topo and texturing phase.

My main focus for the whole week is trying to get my lighting to really match our reference images. This has involved trying to get the right contrast of shadows while also making sure everything is still visible while also getting the contrast between the warm lights and green sea light. However this is slowly improving due help from tutors and unreal documentation on lighting so I am aware of all the tools I have available to me.  

Viktor

Modular pieces:

After finishing the curved walls and floor last week, seeing the whole area raised a few problems. With the team we've realised that everything is too plain, and simple on one side of the hall, while the other side is full of details and interest, so had to come up with an idea, to break the monotony of the walls.

With the help of reference pictures from Surbiton station, the new toilet entrance is done. Still need to make a nice tile material for the walls, but other than that, it's a nice improvement of the scene.

Hannah

Re-Visiting Floor Texture

The roughness has been fixed now. I was asked to add a dirt parameter so that whoever used it could adjust the intensity of the grime on the tiles. It was also important to add more variation in the tiles; however, I was also asked to make the tiles bigger so they didn’t lose quality, but because there is not as many tiles to see in the texture square the variation doesn’t work as intended. This will need to go back tweak again. 

Broken Floor Texture

This is still a work in progress. I did manage to figure out some things I was struggling with and now I need to make sure the under concrete looks like concrete plus get the cracks to make more sense. 

Foliage: Hydrangeas 

This was more problematic than I anticipated. I started with research to precisely figure out what I need to create a ‘’Shade garden’’ an environment like this with no direct sunlight. The plants I chose including my ferns are all companion plants found in British gardens.

 

I tried and tested many methods to get my final result including making planes for the branches and leaves in zbursh, but this didn’t work either as at certain angles the branches disappeared due to it being a plane. Other methods were far too high poly count. I also lost two days of work due to lost saves.

At one angle it looks like floating plant heads. It is a shame because I quite liked my leaves made in zbrush and designer.

I struggled to find information on how to tackle this kind of plant as most tutorials are for large leafy jungle plants which isn’t what I wanted. Finally, I stumbled across this Flowers and Plants Nature Pack .Through the video I spotted a couple of hydrangeas and from the snippets I could just about make out the shapes used and felt like I was on the right track. 

I decided to make just one variation. I gave the usual treatment with gradients to keep it in line with the art style and figured if I change the size of some of the placed plants and make sure they are scattered from each other it wouldn’t be as obvious it’s the same mesh.

Final result with varied height
This is a test scene from home using a set I made for a smaller module.