Sculpting Rocks

A big percentage of my level it made up of rock formations that surround the water and waterfall.

The reason i am using zBrush is it is much easier to create deformation detail to the rocks by using alphas that can be downloaded from the pixologic website. 

These are just some of the free alphas i could find to use for my sculpting detail.

One of the method i have learning when creating rocks that is it easy to get a noisy surface to create the rough and unsmooth surface a rough rock would have. This can be easily mimicked by a tool that is readily viable in all current versions on zBrush.

The tool is listed under Surface on the right side of the screen, by clicking it it will display an editor in which you can manipulate the curve and add points to create interesting variations of noised across the surface area.

Once the surface noise is done it must be applied as the preview is only a representation of the geometry could look like, this highly depends on the subdivison levels and the amount of polygons able to take on the detail.

Creating Normals, from zBrush is important to transfer the high poly detail to a lower division level.

There a multiple ways of creating a lower resolution of the higher geometry. It is possible to just simply use the lowest sub division although this doesn't give you much flexibility, another method is zRemesher a tool that will calculate current geometry and will remesh it to a low resolution using four sided polygons, this method doesn't preserve UVs so they will need to be created after, which can also be done well using UV unwrap in the tools pallet. The last way is to use decimation master which can preserve you're UVs and transform the object to almost any amount of triangles desired, the downfall of this is sometimes meshes can look very jagged and edged which with a bit of smoothing can fix.





Bibliography: http://pixologic.com/zbrush/downloadcenter/alpha/

Week 8 Alpha Presentation

This week i present Alpha to my lecturer. I showed my recent cinematic for my level as well as my character and d the scene it inhabits which is my diorama. Overall I have receive good feedback for my alpha presentation .

My rate of progress has been good and my lecture believes it has been a improvement since I last saw him the week before .

I went through challenges I have came across and mentioned the development of my water materials.

Looking ahead for my work i need to focus on some key areas of my level. 

To work on the rural environment

Improve the texturing and rock work.

Textures for my character the rest of the body mainly 

the skin and focus on sculpting cloth into the geometry of the dress 

Wind and water material needs tweaking as it is a little harsh at the moment and is quite rough and needs to be smoothed out like i made for the hair.

Cinematic is good will need to tweak the angles of it so it doesn't cut through the leaf geometry on the trees. 

Jon pointed out that even if i wasn't able to make the character completed well before i can still make a good environment if i polish up the foliage and the rest of my scene enough.

Some screenshot of progress for my Alpha presentation.

Character texture that i showed for my presentation.

Here is the water i have been working on that i showed for my presentation.

Week 7

http://phill.inksworth.com/tut.php

This week after some feedback from my lecturer i need to work on my scene and water more to breakup my water intersecting with the ground more using rocks and foliage.

One of the the most beneficial comments this week for my lecturer to look more at reference of rivers and water and to identify parts that i should be including into my scene.


Below is some reference that i found from quickly researching google images.

 This one here has a nice rocky cliff that drops down sharply, if i can replicate this in the coming weeks it will be massive improvement to my scene.









This one here shows how much the land slopes into the water and that shape of the river











This one shows how rocks intersect with the water as they slope down and how the colour changes.

It is also useful for mossy rocks reference.

Week 6

Week 5 - Looking ahead

This week i want to make sure that i can execute my plans for my environment.

This is starting off by looking at different materials inside of UDK. As reference i have been looking at level already available in the editor.

This map that it supplied by the Unreal Development Kit is heavy in foliage and rocks, it has the majority of the elements that i want to include into my scene.  As this is a showcase level it is of a good high quality in a small space built to specifically show of features.

I am also looking at tutorials on 3dmotive.com for how to create a water materials.

I found that there are many ways of creating water in UDK and it depends on how you want to your water to turn out.

I hope to take aspects of what i learn and apply a range of different methods towards different assets.