Dwarven Homes

So I've definitely gone beyond the original scope of the project, but it's been a lot of fun to produce this extra stuff and I guess do a bit of world building. It gives the home a home.

Exterior fun

I've begun adding an exterior, there are a few more things to do inside so I'll check them off before I go any further with this

Exterior Test from paul hutchison on Vimeo.

I've been going off on a bit of a tangent today. Using some of the shaders from a weather system I started creating last summer (I don't think I'll ever finish it), I started messing about with a snow covered exterior.

The floor, sky and asset shaders do a bunch of cool stuff I've learnt over the last year, which i combine with other cool stuff i've learnt over the last year. Anyways I'm just messing about and should probably get this darn environment finished already!

Just a few bits and bobs. A simple tiling floor texture in Marmoset, and below with a clean height map and bump offset in UDK. We had to submit an image for the expotees brochure too, so I did what I could but the environment is still a long way from being finished.

Ney sure about this, what do you think?

ZOMG Y

ZOLZORRRZOMG Y HAS I MODERRED GNOMES?!

If I have enough time I'm going back to this and replacing the army of gnomes.

I could have spent some more geometry adding some gravity to the cloth. I did not. I wish I did.

The scene is slowly coming together now with only a few more structural elements needed to fully enclose the room. Then I can begin working on more props and other items to characterise the room and its visitor.

I will also be using some simple Kismet to change the scene from day to night, this will allow me to experiment with two separate lighting schemes.

Croissant

I sculpted the bed a few days back, found a great antiques website with lots of good looking antique furniture and dozens of images of each piece. I simply adorned it with some geometric, symmetrical motifs synonymous with Dwarves in pretty much every IP.
I've had to put the baking and texturing on hold for the mean time, next week I have an appointment with our literary fellow at Teesside to discuss the written side of the project, so I want to have a substantial first draft for her look at.

Anyway this was a blast and I'm quite happy (if i do say so myself - and i do say so myself) with the cloth wrinkles. But the middle pillow looks a bit like a croissant.

I had to rebake this today, had some smoothing errors due to the wooden section sharing one smoothing group. I could have baked it down to a single plane but opted for some extra geometry although it's not silhouette defining (I'm conscious my models are too simple).
To resolve the smoothing issue I made the bevels slightly shallower and split the groups (but not the uv shells) so that's all fixed up and there's no noticeable normal bleeding (huzzah!)

Running Water

Hello again! I do like UDK's Material Editor. This feature and the UE4 demo convinced me to stick with UDK for my project (I was reading up on CE3 over summer). The Material Editor lets you do just about anything you can think of, and I thought it might be cool if there was some sort of leaky water effect on a wall or two. I'm not sure if I'll include it as it doesn't seem consistent with the robust nature of dwarven construction. Anyway, it's fun experimenting and the trickling water can be painted on or off areas of the mesh - vid below!

Running Water Vertex Paint

The map image is from The Witcher 2 enhanced edition box, I tinkered a bunch in photoshop to get this feel. I'd LOVE to make my own version, if I have any time to spare at the end, that's what I'll be doing.

Wiped!

Well, my level crashes UDK every darned tootin' time I start it now. Luckily I'm not SO FAR IN that hours of lighting tweaks and build times have been wasted. Incremental saves from now on me thinks!

I'm poorly too so it's been really slow going. Thanks to my housemate Dan, we're operating a sort of plague ship. But as a house. It doesn't help when he ENTERS MY ROOM AND COUGHS ON MY STUFF INTENTIONALLY, but otherwise he's a pretty sterling chap (and fellow games artist):

http://racebox.net/

Anyway enough self pity and blog plugging, there's a wee candle particle and light function to create the flickering effect, there's also some of that snazzy vertex animation for the cloth the kids are always going on about.

Cloth and Candle from paul hutchison on Vimeo.

 Realising that a lot of these assets are fairly simple in construction, I think maybe more attention is required in the textures. I may increase geometry to produce more interesting silhouettes, it's certainly something I'll be conscious of when creating the rest of the assets.

plod plod plod

More soon

ELLO. I'm just getting the structural elements complete before I move in on the individual assets and sections. The carved motif is getting a little bit repetitive in here so I'm going to swap it out with some variations and plain pillars - to be textured very soon, hopefully I can work out a nice process to use for the stone assets.

Paul's Walls

The walls here use the time honoured method of beating up a few blocks in ZBrush and then arranging them in 3dsmax.
I create the low poly by extruding and chamfering from a flat plane, making sure to follow and adjust the arrangement of blocks achieves that undulating and ramshackle appearance, as though the stones have slowly displaced through decades (or centuries) of load bearing.

GOOD GOD MAN! (and project change)

It seems I haven't posted in quite some time!

After an awful lot of discussion with my peers, about a month ago I decided to change the project significantly. I'm now creating an interior scene using a concept from the Witcher 2 art book.
My reasoning was that using a concept would allow me to better gauge how many assets I'd need to create, and that an interior scene would limit that number to something more feasible in the time frame we have. It also gives me a much more definite foundation to work from, and I value that kind of certainty during my final year here at Teesside.


It's a lovely piece, a warm dwarven room, prepared for a visiting member of non-dwarven royalty.
I appreciate knowing a little bit of the story behind it. To me, environments are really their very own characters with their own story to tell. With any luck, I'll be able to tell it!

Blockout/Rockout

This is a pretty rough and ready block out of the bridge and mountain structure. I need to spend some more time figuring out exactly what's going where without making it all a busy mess.
I got some block walls baked down for the bridge sections but they're not "cutting the mustard", whatever that means. I'll scrap them and put a bit more time into the structure and details.

These walls are from my environment production module last year, I'm working on something in the same vain at the minute so I thought I'd post these too.

Oh my Topogun...

With the tree sculpted, I didn't really know how I'd go about the low poly.

I tried decimating in Zbrush, but the resulting topology was (and usually is) very erratic.

Then Topogun appeared. My housemate, friend and fellow artist Ben Armstrong

http://benarmstrongart.wordpress.com/

gave me a crash course in mouse-clicking, and in an evening my work was complete. The bake turned out pretty well and I was really stoked at how slick Topogun behaves even with obnoxiously high poly counts!

You'll see I've added foliage to the tree but there's some stuff that needs fixing, I need to create more negative space between the leaves and correct the colours somewhat.

Tree Sculpt

After falling out with Xnormal for baking the barrel, I decided to move on for the time being.

Here's a tree!

I created a very simple basemesh using Max's freeform tools and crafted the main form using Dynamesh in Zbrush. From there I worked up the bark's direction at a low subdivision before refining the details at a higher res.

Remember barrel, I created you, and I can destroy you...

Let's begin!

Hey y'all!

Friday was the first meeting with my FYP supervisor, Simon McKeown. He's pretty cool.

http://www.simon-mckeown.com/

After an edifying group discussion and individual presentations, I wanted to get my hands dirty and have some fun in ZBrush.

Naturally blocking out/white boxing the scene will begin very shortly, and I've loosely scheduled out a time frame for the project (we'll see how that goes...)

Anyway here's the sculpt:

 

FYP Post #01

Greetings! Hutch here, I'll be posting my Final Year Project work in here. Due to the nature of works in progress, some of it will inevitably be scrapped, and some of it won't be very presentable, so my apologies there, but it needs to be posted! Let's begin!

(unfortunately won't be posting FYP material here until mid-November, otherwise it can't be marked!)