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.

Week 3: 2D3D - Continuing Concepting and Layers in ZBrush

This week we continued with our concepts in ZBrush. This was definitely not my favorite thing to do in ZBrush, but I can see why its important to learn.

Building an environment in Zbrush I found to be a bit difficult if the buildings are supposed to be circular or exaggerated.

What was due this week was mocking up and creating 12 concepts of something. I choose to do environment.

Here is my final verions... Below this I will go over my process:

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I was unable to continue the city layouts from last week, so I started over for the most part.

Instead of focusing in on the city, I wanted to build around the city and focus on depth, perception and size.

From the beginning, I took my initial landscape and sculpted four different versions of the landscape that the city could sit on.

To make the city more interesting, I created a new layer of my favorite city layout (the windmill pattern), and warped the buildings into more interesting shapes to give it a looming cartoony feel.

From there, I used the base sculpt and crated two layers to generate a total of three concepts from one layout.

I repeated the process above to get my final results below for the sculpt.

My landscapes are mostly light trees, bushes, roads and rocks, and I represented each of those roughly in the sculpt for me to give my attention to while I paint overtop of each. 

After I laid out these renders, I took them into Photoshop and added in the trees and added small details to the mountains and rocks. This is my final result.

Week 2: 2D3D - ZBrush, Dynamesh and ZRemesher

So for week two we are learning how to concept in ZBrush. Our assignment was to either layout a character and model four different body types, or layout an environment and layout four different layouts. Since I am most interested in environments, I choose the latter.

I began by sculpting a quick flat land with apparent mountains in the background. I learned Dynamesh by using it on the landmass to keep correcting the topology.

After I was happy with the topology, we learned ZRemesher to clean up the topology even more. 

At this point, I decided to start build models of buildings that was taught on ZBrush Central. It was a great and fun technique! Since this piece is only used for a concept piece, I created five different buildings of varying sizes and shapes.

I laid out these five buildings in four different city positions according to my capstone games reference city: Kowloon. For a quick reference, Kowloon was a city near Hong Kong laid out in a square pattern and extremely crowded. Kowloon is on a desert area, but mountains and small foliage can be seen from the city. It was certainly and interesting sight to see! A huge city of stacked buildings on top of each other in the middle of no where.

Our team knows we want this layout of a city in a rectangular shape, so I worked on creating different building patterns inside the city.

To make this process easier, after attempting to use the transpose tool in ZBrush, I learned that it isn't efficient and is quite cumbersome and frustrating for what I wanted to do. At this point, I exported the landscape and the five buildings into Maya and used live trace on the landscape to quickly layout and plan new buildings and city patterns.

After finishing the four different city layouts, I took screenshots of them in their grey state.

This layout is just a generic full layout of a city.

This layout I made more circular and in the pattern of a summoning circle with a star pattern in the middle.

This pattern is a target or a rectangle. All the buildings are laid out in rectangles until the center which has a main building.

The final layout here shows a windmill pattern. This would designate a North, South, East and West part of the city with potential for parks or small ponds inside the city.

All together:

Finally, I pulled all the pictures into Photoshop and tried to color them a bit with colors that will be used. The colors should be muted, with a highlight color here and there. I did two "daylight" shots and two "night" shots.