Game Production - Backyard #1

 

For this first 3D project, we got the brief of creating a backyard with specific requirements to enhance our PBR material making skills and our workflow with high poly modelling.

From the brief I started thinking up ideas as to how to fit the requirements but also make something fairly unique and landed on the idea of creating an Italian style alleyway, like something you'd see in Tuscany. Immediately I started gathering references to see how to approach this and collated them into a starting moodboard.

When initially thinking, I knew I wanted lots of greenery to cover the scene. Whether this is achieved by creating vines/ivy that can be painted onto walls or by just having many flower pots I'll need to figure out considering I need to stay within a specific tri limit. However this first reference image I found met the image I had in mind of what I want to achieve in terms of amount of flora around the scene.

I also thought having stairs someplace in the backyard would make it more interesting to look at and explore rather than just having a single narrow alley. I'd need to plan out how to break up additional smaller assets along the alley as to not make it look too symmetrical or repetitive.

Also lighting would be important in an outdoor scene! I thought having fairly strong lighting, like the sun being really bright and casting heavy shadows, would look best in a scene like this- much like in the last reference image. I may need to create my own skybox additionally to accurately depict the weather I want.

With all these references I'll move on to sketch out some ideas of procedural assets and what the overall scene could look like, and use that as my starting point before I begin creating any models.

Game Production - PBR Materials

 During this first week I experimented with PBR materials, getting to grips with what different maps do and how they all function together.

With the task of creating some materials, I used some royalty free textures from ‘textures.com’ and then edited them in photoshop to create the roughness, normal and metallic maps. I simply altered the tone curve of the original images to get the black and white results I needed to make the varying materials.

Importing them into Unreal Engine 4, I plugged in the texture maps and arranged some basic lighting to see how the material would look. I could’ve packed some maps like the roughness and metallic into the RGB of the albedo but for the sake of visually understand what goes into a PBR I left them as individually maps.