Week 7: 3D Vehicle Concepting

This week we used Maya to create concepts for vehicles related to our Capstone. Since our capstone is based in an older Kowloon setting, the vehicle I chose to do was an udon cart. Our colors are extremely muted and there isn't much detail in the vehicles or the surrounding environment.

Here is my final result:

Using Maya was a lot easier than using Zbrush for this! :) This was a fun test to explore using modular pieces to build similar, yet different carts.

Week 6: Toon Shaders / Outlines and Environment Concepting in Maya

For environmental concepting, I definitely hands-down prefer Maya. Maya just makes everything super simple and its easy for me to throw together what I need to have everything I want in my environments.

I worked with my capstone team (Alex and Claire) to generate roughly 15 assets total between us to build our environments. The environment I was assigned was the Warehouse where the main boss will be located.

I definitely enjoyed this assignment more than the ZBrush assignment. It was enjoyable working with my teammates to make sure we were all creating assets that could be seen and feel appropriate in the environment.

I was in charge of Lanterns, Neon Signs, Street Signs and Boxes, but I also helped make some structural things for myself, such as the beams.

Alex did the small garbage heaps, trash cans, lids and wine barrels.

Claire created two sets of doors and windows that can be viewed in my scenes.

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Learning the toon shader was great! I cannot wait to play around and use that more often. I did run into lag issues in my scene with the toon outline however. Even when I turned the Toon Outline off, it created some headache trying to figure that out.

The last part which I acknowledge I need to learn better is lighting. I was not quite sure what was too much lighting, or what is lighting appropriate for a toon-shaded environment since the lighting becomes naturally very harsh.

Here are the individual environments for a closer look:

Week 5: Paint/Over & Photobashing

This week's assignment was to take three renders and photobash them in Photoshop for a better idea of what your concept should look like.

The Results

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The Process

My Capstone Team already had a color palette for this city to choose from, so my exploration in these pieces were playing with what part of the color palette would look good where.

I brought these pieces into Photoshop and started with grass. I found a grass texture and applied it as an overlay across the whole picture. I then erased the grass texture from the city itself.

Following grass, I added in the rock or cliff texture. I placed where I wanted the rocky texture then erased the grass texture from underneath.

The last texture I used was a dirt texture to apply small paths or makeshift roads around the city.

From here, I focused on fleshing out the city. I darkened everywhere there was ground first. Then I started adding in the smaller details, such as the neon signs and lanterns that decorate the city.

I also added small purple wispy ghost people since purple is the color palette for our enemies in the game.

Lastly, I took an overlay layer and added lightning to the city itself and the surrounding environment.

Week 5: Paint Over

From these designs, my art director (teacher!) chose B and D to push forward. My favorite of the bunch is P.

So for this week, I will be taking B, D and P and doing a paint over to make them look nice and more complete to show off my idea of the area.

Week 4: ZBrush - Insert Mesh

While the concept of this tool is easy and super useful to understand, I had major problems with this assignment that I am chalking up to file size.

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For this week, I had to think about my assignment and better align it to what I can use for my capstone projects.

So for this week, I created 16 different layouts according to four different themes.

These themes in order above are: Maze, Shape, Symbol and lastly Windmill .

Following the example of our first week's assignment, I began this week by creating one of each city idea and landscape. Continuing from there, I began to iterate ultimately come up with 16 total different designs.

I sculpted four different landscapes, one for each grouping of buildings.

For the assignment this week, I sculpt a tree and made that a new insert brush.