So Appendicitis.... That happened. An operating theatre wasn't quite where I expected I'd end up on Friday night but that's the hand I've been dealt. At the worst possible time. Well that's what it first felt like, but after the Saturday or Sunday after I calmed down and looking back it was probably the best point of the term for it to happen. If it had been at the end of term around hand-in that would've been a totally different story. But still it couldn't have happened over Easter. I'm now at home recovering and I'll be back in ol' Leicester on Sunday. In the mean time since my strengths back I can get on with some work, of course I expect that I will fall behind in areas, if not everywhere. Before heading up the road I grabbed my portable hard drive so I have all my assets and programs for 3D but it's in Visual Design that I'm gonna loose most ground in although I was able to pack a sketchbook I don't have any paints or inks or anything. I also thought I'd knock out a blog or two while I was away as well.
Back to the main event, the titular tree project. This was, again, an organic modelling project which we had over Easter to get through although it was suggested we try get it done in the space of two weeks which I did mostly follow. So after having the first week after term two hand-in as a lazy week I jumped feet first into the project. I began as always with the research side of things, I went for a daunder along the canal taking photos of different trees, textures and leaves to add to those I already had earlier from when we were at Bradgate in the first term. That took a day total to organise those photos and decide on the two I would be basing my model on.
With that decided I moved on to modelling and was given a really interesting tutorial for not only modelling a tree but putting it into UDK and adding elements such as wind effects and lighting. Unfortunately I didn't get to experiment with it in UDK but over summer I'll hopefully be able to play around with it. So I began by creating a cylinder and then constraining it to a line, what I mean by this is when a piece of geometry, in this case the cylinder, is constrained to the shape of the line. You can see this in the image below, the trunk and branches are all following the shape of different lines. This allows for easy modification of the branch shapes and so you can produce a number of branches all different shapes but very quickly. This was probably the point I made my first mistake, and while it didn't have a negative affect on my model it did have a big impact on my timing, i.e. I ended up spending too long on something not necessary. What that was was making all the individual branch geometry a part of the trunk. Uh, it's kinda hard to explain but rather than having the branches all merging and cutting through the tree trunk it'd be physically connected making the whole tree one object.
Does that make sense or have I just confused you all?
Sorry if it has but let's continue shall we. To create the canopy of the trees it would be unrealistic to do it with geometry so what I had to do was create a texture instead of different smaller branches which would be built up to create the canopy. To do this I first needed to create branch and twig geometry that I would then make into a 2D alpha texture to use instead of geometry. If you thought the paragraph before was bad it's about to get real messy here. I followed the same technique as before to create the branches and twigs and I thought it created a really nice effect but to get the best effect for the bake ( baking is when you kinda imprint an image of one piece of geometry to another), the geometry had to be one physical object as opposed to a ton of separate pieces of geometry. So I began to stitch all the twigs to the branches and the branches to one another but it dawned on me that the shape was far to complicated and there were too many individual pieces of geometry that it was unrealistic to continue along the path. So I started again. I followed the same steps but I kept the amount of geometry I was working with much lower. That went fine and I was able to render the geometry to become the texture I needed to create the canopy for the tree.
From there I created the textures for both trees, it was a pretty standard affair. What was tricky though was creating a believable infinite bark texture that didn't have any noticeable recurring patterns. Other than that there's nothing else to really mention, I created a specular and normal map to accompany the diffuses. This was also the case for the branches except and alpha map was also required. The normal map for the canopy were created by rendering the canopy geometry to a texture in an identical fashion to creating the alpha and diffuse.
Then it was only a matter of creating simple planes for the canopy texture and building up to create the canopy itself, keeping within the budget of course. After that the trees were pretty much done. After this the only other thing we needed to produce was an LoD, a level of detail, which is a really low poly model used in the background to save using a fully 3D model in areas that players wouldn't have access to or in the distance. To create this was essentially the same technique used when creating the canopy, that is rendering the tree geometry to create a texture. taking one from the front and another from the side. These are textured onto two perpendicular planes to give the effect of a 3D model.
While I'm happy with how the models and textures turned out I'm slightly disappointed with how my timing and focus were skewed for parts of the project. I feel I spent too long on elements that weren't important or were unrealistic in the time frame I wanted to finish the project in. I realise that the last few blog posts have been on 3D projects and that a backlog of Visual Design work is building so I'll be tucking into that over the next couple of weeks as well as any assignments that Mike throws our way.
No comments:
Post a Comment