For this week I was focusing on the foundation for my building and the surrounding props I would need to complete. These props included a pile of logs and a work table outside. The most difficult part I expected would be the rock foundation, as it would be one of the first organic environmental 3D models I would have made for a very long time.
First I looked up some reference of outdoor environments with rocks that I liked, along with the reference for the original building, here is some examples of reference I gathered.
These reference images were from games I enjoyed or directly from the game I am building off of. In most of these images I noticed lots of moss and foliage helping to cover rocks, as rocks out in the natural landscape, especially a forest environment, would most likely not be barren. This was going to play a big part in how I presented my rock.
I also cleaned up some textures on models worked on since last week, for example, I corrected some stretching that appeared on logs. This was an easy fix and just had to do with how the textures were projected onto the mesh in Substance Painter. Here is a before and after:
In the first image the log looks like licorice, which of course is not the look I'm going for. The second image displays the fixed log.
Here is my final mesh for the rock foundation, it stays flat around the center for the building to sit on top of, and it features a carved stone stair set for the owners to use. These stairs are aligned with the map that was drawn at the beginning of this group project. I extruded some faces to give the rock a jagged and eroded look, but stayed away from large details. This was to conserve space and polys since this scene is meant for a game. I will be relying on texturing to display the closer details, and hopefully plan on adding foliage in Unity afterwards. This rock presented some difficulties in unwrapping it, it takes up a lot of space for it to get a decent resolution and it also had to share its UV space with the other props. Eventually I managed to unwrap it decently, but had this not been a school project and one of my own, I would have unwrapped this by itself to maximize its space for resolution.
I also made the table and logs in a fairly short amount of time, they were not difficult props to make or unwrap.
I made an ID for all of these assets and exported them together. I textured them in Substance Painter and with some time I ended up with this product:
I am very happy with this look, I like how the top of the rock features moss and the sides expose more rock, this idea I got directly from my reference. I ran into little problems for this section other than unwrapping the rocks and achieving a nice jagged look. While the texture applied well, it took some searching before I could find a nice rock texture to interact well with the jagged shape I gave it. I ended up mixing multiple rock textures to complete the underlying rock shape. Using the normals and alphas of one rock texture and layering it over another grainy rock texture I achieved the look I was going for, this is what it looks like without the moss:
While I think this looks good, it doesn't look very realistic for a natural environment scene, this type of rock would most likely only be found in a quarry. By covering it in moss and painting some forest floor and puddles onto the rock I think I was able to achieve a more messy, organic look.
Finally, I really wanted to see what this would look like, so I went ahead and threw my assets into Unity just to see what it might look like in the future with my groupmates assets. I was not disappointed:
I think I managed my time well for this project, especially because I had many other midterms and classes going on during this week. I am happy I was able to get this done without rushing it and turning out a product I am proud of. For the future I hope I can keep this steady time management to finish out this project with the same quality.
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