Foliage Ref

Through my research on the web I found an interesting website about different sort of branches types. Although those are artificial leaves it gives you and idea how to build up your foliage in regards to what tree are you making.

EARTHFLORA

Enjoy !

Polypainting

To texture the tree I used Zbrush's polypainting and then baked the vertex coordinates into my diffuse map. This saved me alot of time with texturing the bark. After I applied all the maps I took the bark down from 20k polys to 4,7k. Will need to add a bit more branches and the rest of the stuff.

Tree Bake

I have sculpted and baked the new Tree. Although I have got some normal map seam problems I need to resolve. Also I am not quite sure about texture density on this one. Its a huge asset and when very close to it you can barely see the pixels.

Old used Cars

Was browsing on the web for some reference and this page popped up. You can find on it quite a few interesting reference photos of used cars. Might come in handy in the future :)

USED CARS

Enjoy ! :)

Tiiiimber !

I wasn't happy about my last tree so I have cutted it down and made some furniture. The reason for that is becouse it didn't fit properly. It was too straight forward and its branches didn't look natural. This one I've made today looks more twisted and bent, more natural. Will be working with this one..... now sculptin time.

Quick Paintover

Thanks to Dan Hoang who did a quick paintover for me I know what changes I have to make to and add to make the tree more natural and interesting. I did one quickly myself using his paintover as ref.

Test Bake

So after a whole day of retopoing ... (yes a whole fuckin day !) I have managed to unwrap the low poly and make a test bake. The Tree itself is at 5000 Tris atm but I can surely Decrease the ammount of tris by maximum of 1500 but then I will be spending the same ammount on additional roots, vines, vegetation etc etc. Here are some screenshots.





And the Uv Unwrap. You can see that there is quite few polys which I can get rid off easily.

Nearly there

Finished the Tree Trunk Sculpt. Now I have to retopo it, bake down, add branches,vines and some roots in 3ds Max. I am nearly Half way through with it... slowly getting there.

Tree Sculpt W.I.P

Slowly started sculpting the tree using reference I found. It's fun but it's hard as hell to nail organic sculpting at the beggining. Will keep pushing forward with this and see how it turns out. I plan to finish it today so I can bake it down, add more branches, vines and vegetation on the trunk in 3Ds Max and slowly texture it.

Tree Basemesh

I realized that most of the stuff I need to do right now (meshes, foliage and other stuff) strongly depends on how the tree will sit in the middle and how will it look. For example I can't fit the tree to the modular stone floor. It has to go the other way around so that I know where the roots will push the stones.
Anyway I wanted to do the blockout in 3ds Max but then I realized that it will be easier with Zspheres inside Zbrush. Concidering I have to nail the silhouette. This way I could make instant changes to all the branches by just selecting the spheres I need to move.
After some time and making a whole forest I sattled on one and kept pushing it forward till I got what I wanted.

The Tree itself will be slightly bend over so that all the horizontal and vertical lines of the modular architecture will be broken a bit which will give it more interest.

This is just the basemesht for the trunk with Roots. All of the smaller branches and leaves will be added later on in 3ds max. I just need to sculpt the trunk and roots for this one inside Zbrush.

Sculptin'

I have took 1 pillar and resculpted it to fit it with the modular vines that will go around it. So that underneath the vines will be a mossed bumped background instead of clean stone.

Texturing Started

So I have spend the whole day yesterday on texturing so I have the base idea down. From that I can work further and spot mistakes quite easily rather then texturing it all in the end. I Still need to dirty it up a little bit more and decastate some geometry.
Once I have done the tree it will form the middle floor.

Change of plans

After getting some crit on my environment I've realized that it is a bit boring. In the first stage of planning the environment I wanted to create a huge tree in the middle and make the palazzo sort of a garden. When I was sculpting my assets I was very carefull not to overdo the damage to the architecture. Now I can go all out and create something interesting. A mix of old damaged architecture with foliage where nature and time did their part in destroying something beautiful. I decided to recreate alot of assets and replace some with new ones. It's good that those will be just cosmetic changes and will only involve few swings of a brush in Zbrush. I will have to devide some modular parts so I can create more damage and rubble variations. Here is a quick concept what I have in mind :

Tommorow I will spend most of the day planning out the level again and gathering proper reference for that. Most of the changes will involve also rebaking the maps. I should be starting the changes Soon so that I can start texturing.



Will post some more info soon ! :)

Main square

The main square will be needing some variations of cobblestone. I have been thinking about it quite a bit today and I can't come to a decision on this one yet. A bit overworked with materials I think.... So!... I did a quick paintover and a frew variations of the middle square. I'll come back to it propably tommorow when I will have some fresh ideas.

In this one I used a quick multi sub object materials to devide the cobblestone variations. Each color represents a different cobblestone pattern.

Materials continued ...

I have nearly finished making the tilable walkway floor. Would have finished it yday but Zbrush was being a bitch with its undeveloped Clip Tool. Had to figure out how to cut my floors without loosing the inbetween polys. Finally I managed to pull it off and found a way around it. Took me some time to do that.

Here is the Zbrush render


... and a low poly with the maps baked on and a temporary texture



For this I have created a specific mesh so that I can flip some polygons for less repetition. The whole mesh also works better with lightmapping.

Tilable Floor

Quick blockouts for the walkway tilable floors. This one will go on the walkways first and second floor.

Roof Tiles

This week I have been doing alot of baking. Mainly baked all the maps for all of the modular pieces. I had a week off before that so now I have to speed up a little bit.

Here Is an Material I created today for the roof in my environment. Fully tilable texture created from scratch. Just got basic color and dirt overlay on it. Still need to work on the Diffuse for it a bit and the Specular map. I got couple of more that kind of materials to do mainly for the tilable floors.

That is the Zbrush sculpt


And a render on with the Low poly baked:


This week I want to start texturing all the modular pieces so I have it all textured by the end of the weekend. That way I can start on my planned Hero Assets.

Palazzo - Progress

Past weeks I've been learning some new stuff and trying to apply it to what I am doing now. After that I came back and started continueing on my Palazzo environment project. I had to compleatly rebuild my meshes to fit the exact scale. I also had to create couple of new meshes for the blockout purposes.
The main focus will be an old fountain in the middle of the square. This will be my "Hero Asset". I will also add some foliage to make a contrast between the architecture. I am still going to make it as a swiss guard garrison. Flags and symbols will indicate that. I still have alot to do. I am mostly spending time on polishing stuff so that it looks to a certain standard which I am happy about. Here are some screenshots of how it looks :








I have also created an animated skydome with a dynamic sun. Just need to tweek a few settings to make it work better.



Here are the modular pieces that I have made for all my architecture. I had to make them twice and redo them a couple of times to fit the purpose of "multitasking". First time I made everything too small. Unfortunetly scaling them up did not work becouse they are fited so that each one of them refers to the other and so on....
Anyway those are still need to be retouched and baked. I can say that those are just a W.I.P for now.





Doors and Windows were sculpted in Zbrush and baked down to a low poly in 3ds Max.

Will post some updates soon. Now I got some more sculpting becouse I am creating my own materials for this environment... well Most of them.