It's a pretty crazy thought but I've just started 3rd year of my BA in the Art of Video Games at Escape Studios! It's been a crazy summer, I started projects then failed to finish them due to moving house. Now I'm settled in a new place and its back to the grind!
What better way to start the final year by dropping us in the deep end with a 6 week specialism project!
After the Bioshock London Project I got a little bit of a taste for the love of creating foliage for games. However I also have heavy interest in the diversity, world and story building of environment art. Starting a couple of projects over the summer made me realise that an environment can be a huge under taking, I know I still have a lot to learn and for college I don't want to leave something unfinished.
It's taken me most of this week with a lot of back and forth with tutors about what I should specialise in. I know Environment Art keeps me diverse and I need to brush up on my architecture knowledge, prop art allows me to focus on something really highly detailed and also a chance to work on something stylised, and then there's foliage...
Foliage Artist positions don't often come up in the job hunt, whereas environment artist and prop artists do seem to appear everywhere! I was even advised by some recruiters that I should focus more on environment art that leans towards foliage, if that's where I wanted to end up in the long run. This was such a tough decision for me. Eventually I got to the point that maybe I was putting too much thought into this?
It came down to the fact that for this project and for my portfolio I really want something that looks super awesome, realistic and is a challenge. My previous quick experiments in foliage were HARD but also so rewarding. I know I can always come back to modularity, there is a lot of info out there on it and I can practice my prop skills with future projects. Foliage seems a little harder to research, to me at least it feels like a mysterious nymph hiding lots of hidden secrets and knowledge with gorgeous sculpts, textures and fugly UV maps.
For now I think the best decision for me is to focus on foliage and make use of the awesome resources and people I have access to through the college! My intention is to make these pieces over the next few weeks the very best I have created so far! No pressure.
Justin Kimball will be my idol for the next few weeks all because of the stunning realistic foliage he created for Days Gone.
So.... what the heck am I doing?
For the few of us specialising in foliage, our brief requires us to create 3 things... (ok so maybe 4).
- Grass
- A Plant
- A Hero Tree
- (and then re-create that tree in speed tree!)
Grass
Here's some deja-vu, a little while back in one of my previous blogs I talked about how I loved the grass in Red Dead Redemption 2. (Here's hoping I can do a better job now than what's seen in that blog!)
The texture is rich, the models are diverse and there's a lot of different colours in this. I now have the opportunity to create my own!
Using my own references I'm planning to spend the first week of project work getting my head around realistic grass. Check out an awesome reference of my own garden which has a similar vibe to what we see above, albeit with a little less weeds and a bit more tame.
A Plant - Roses
Right off the bat I had a pretty good idea I wanted to do Roses for my plant. They are my favourite flower and the flower head itself will be a great challenge with the shape and volume. It lends itself to many different breeds, colours and a lot of delicate detail. I think this will be a great addition alongside my grass and tree.
Squad goals are these beautiful flowers by Yannick Gombart for Dishonored 2.
This weekend I went to Wisley Gardens to their cottage garden area where it was just chockablock full of all sorts of roses. It rained a lot when I was taking the photos... but apparently rain/dew drops is something we can look into! I was taking consideration not just of the flowers but the leave formation, how the roots connected to the ground and the iconic rose thorns.
The one thing I really want to achieve with these roses is to create a material instance in unreal 4 where you can change the colour of the flower. There are so many different colours of roses I will be silly to skip this out! So I'll need to be clever with my texture and alpha's for this to keep it looking believable.
Tree - Chestnut Tree
More specifically the American Chestnut Tree (we think!). Initially I was looking at creating a willow tree as the idea of those big long branches would be a great challenge to create the weight and volume of those shapes. However I was advised against this by our Head of Games department, Simon Fenton! Probably all for the best! I was already concerned the only willow trees I could find were utterly massive in scale.
Taking an afternoon off to scout for the perfect tree I stumbled across this beauty in a local woods. After double checking with our studio assistant Wiktoria, who is a foliage wizard herself, she seemed to agree that this was a manageable sized tree in scale but also interesting enough to be suitable for a hero tree. I'm glad because I really loved the tree trunk that's been split into 3 and how it seems to lean to one side as it chases the sun!
The following day I went back in better light to take a lot more photos. I want to experiment with Photogrametry for the trunk base and at the very least this skill could help me create a realistic texture for the bark. However once I got home I didn't have the appropriate graphics card to get a textured high quality render done. I'll have to try again at college.
In the mean time I'm making a branch map of the tree to get an over all idea of height, and how the branches bend and twist and interact with each other.
The Wordy Bits
Along side the hardcore decision making and research gathering, we also had to write a detailed individual brief going into our technical restrictions, poly counts etc. I'm still not very confident that I've calculated these all correctly but I'll have someone check through these with me on Monday!
Tasked with job hunting our chosen specialism we were to create a skill audit to see where we were lacking and implement a way for us to conquer these pit falls during this project. I decided to rate myself out of 3, 1 being poor, 2 being good and 3 being excellent. All 3d modelling knowledge is new to me so I haven't rated myself over a 2 in most instances, where I've marked a 1 is usually just because I'm not very confident in the software or my skill set, I am aiming to change that. The whole point of this is to get better!!
+ = Extra skill bonus to application
Finally a schedule! This was a bit of a tough one as I know there is a lot of back and forth in foliage creation. I know I personally went through a lot of trial and error to get things to work.... I'm not 100% happy with the below schedule but it's a start and there are areas where I'm pretty sure it will take me less time than I've planned and others that will take more time... they will balance out!
