22/02/2016 - Experiments

Week 07

Experiments

Today I have been experimenting with how I am going to create my cave, I wasn't sure if I should go for a modular approach or try building it all in one. The downside to building it all in one is that its not really efficient inside Unreal, doing modular though means I have more control over the collisions. My plan after all my experiments is to basically make modular pieces and place them together in Maya so that when I export them all then the whole cave will import into Unreal but still leaving me the flexibility of editing each modular piece on its own. below I will go through all my screenshots for the days work...

Boulder

My intention with this approach was to make various rock faces like this and then possibly place them together to create my cave (I wasn't too hopeful for this approach)

Soft Selection

To model the boulder I used soft selection to get my random bumps on the surface.

Textured

The texture for this rock came from (http://www.imageafter.com/image.php?image=b17danmarsh004.jpg)

I'm not focusing on the texturing at this point but rather the modelling, I have just put a texture on to give it some context. 

Unreal Test

Here are the lovely boulders in Unreal. As you can probably tell, this approach hasn't really worked that well...moving on.

Rock Panel Modelling

After the above approach, I thought about have modulated piece of rock walls.....so a panel rather than a boulder. Below is my first attempt. Again, I used soft selection in Maya to get the random bumps. I deleted half of the model then change the left side of it then mirrored it over...this means that theoretically it can be copied multiple times with not modelling seam. 

Rock Panel Texture

This is the panel with the same texture as the boulder.

Rock Panel Unreal

And this is it in Unreal. I have used the exact same process really for the panel that I used with the boulder.

Rock Panel Duplicated

Here I have duplicated it inside Unreal, which I wont be doing for my final environment. close up you can see where the seam is. This has only happened because I didn't use the snap to grid feature in Maya meaning that I couldn't place them exactly next to each other without some sort of gap or overlap.

Rock Panel Seam

This is that seam. It would be more noticeable if repeated down a cave wall. I have already addressed this issue though and I just need to build the cave in Maya first.

Boulder hide Seam?

This was me attempting to use the boulder to cover up seams/make the walls more interesting....this was not successful. You can clearly see where the boulder intersects with the panel.

Boulder Shadow

This was me trying to add some sort of shadow to the edge of the boulder but of course that didn't work to cover up the intersection, That would only work if the shadow could be put on the panel in that exact place but then I have myself way too much work to get that right.

Irrelevant Model 

This was me remodeling the boulder...which I haven't used now.

New Seamless Panel

This panel has been created like the first one I created (seen behind with the texture). I have halved the model then edited the left edge then mirrored it over, giving me a complete panel that should be repeatable. My plan with this is that I can repeat this several times in a row, then I can edit each individual panel in the middle portion to quickly create a more interesting cave system with minimal repeating elements.

Seamless Workflow

The polygons below are the ones I can edit...if I edit the ones not selected then the edges will be altered and won't match up to the next panel. The results of editing these forbidden polygons can be seen in the image below.

Seam

This is the result of moving those polygons.

Seamless!

Panel duplicated once...

More Seamless!

Panel duplicated four times!

Full Process

This image below shows my rough full process in a short segment, Here I have duplicated the original panel from above four times...this leaves me with the image above...I then edited the polygons in each of the four panels to quickly generate a wall with no seam...next is the textures.

Summary

Today I have managed to get down my process for actually modelling my cave...I will move onto texture in the coming week, I also aim to do a moodboard and some concept art for the style of my textures.