Finishing Sculpting + Modelling the Shop Front

 28/11/21 - Week 8

This week, I modelled the shop front for my scene and then finished the modelling as a whole by sculpting the foliage.

The shopfront was modelled from my references and concept that I drew at the beginning of the project. I decided that I was going to make a high poly so I can bake a lot of this detail on as this is much more realistic with the restrictions on the cart. The low poly count for the cart also made me think about the items in the shop front and how I was going to approach this, after some discussion and thinking I have decided that I will be texturing the items as normal in painter and then baking the base colour map onto a plane so that the shop front window is not more than 1-3 planes rather than many tris which is unrealistic in comparison to the cart. If I get time I would like to make this a LOD, having the planes as the lowest LOD and then make a low top for the shop items for the highest poly LOD. As you can hopefully see in the shop I made a bottle, a tin and a box/pot to populate the windows.

Moving on to the rest of the week, this was spent sculpting the foliage. I created a small amount of leaves that I can build into a tree for the plant outside the shop front and then the citrus leaves to go onto the fruit cart amongst the fruit. As you can see I sculpted these in Zbrush. I am considering taking the tree foliage into designer to create a texture to go onto a base model then add some planes onto this to add the illusion of depth, you can see this done in some games like Bugsnax for example.

Lastly, I finished the pineapple from last week, I'm still not completely happy with the overall shape of the leaves on top and I'm not too sure why it's not working or looking as I wanted it to but for the sake of moving on this will be my final attempt. If I am really unhappy with this further down the line I will have to see if I have time to do anything that would provide a better outcome.

Overall, this week I made the progress I needed to but I feel in some cases that I could have made some things a bit neater and given it better quality, a lot of this is down to the fact that I made progress a bit slowly this week and I tended to rush things once I was doing them. I think this mostly shows in some of the details on the shop front, if I had a bit more time I could definitely perfect this a bit more.

Sculpting the Cart & Fruits

 21/11/21 - Week 7

This week I progressed further with the cart, including sculpting the fruits, creating the baskets and sculpting into the high poly cart I'd created.

I first started with the fruit baskets and crates. I decided to do these in Max and will use Designer and Painter to give them the wicker or wooden texture that they each have.

I am pretty happy with how these look, though obviously these are high poly variants so I can bake on the detail later and still get a reasonable looking basket. I wanted to make these first before sculpting into the cart since I was concerned with the width and size of the cart with the amount of crates and baskets to be placed on. I am glad that I did this as I ended up making the cart a bit wider to fit the 2 fruit baskets in the front and also a bit longer for the same reasons. I was still trying to carefully compare this to an average height human and also an average sized orange so that it would still be realistic in proportions.

After completing the crates, I moved onto sculpting the 8 different fruits. I made a pineapple, apple, orange, plum, kiwi, lemon, pomegranate and a kaki. Some of these will be used as a variant such as the orange which I can texture into a grapefruit and the apple can be textured to the 2 different types of apple shown in the reference picture, this also goes for the kiwi which I made without hairs so that it can be made into the golden kiwis and using designer/painter I will give the regular kiwi the hairs. I wanted to try to give these fruits as much detail as possible as they are one of the most important factors of this project, I didn't overdetail as a lot of this will come through in the texturing, so I focused on getting the shape and surface correct.

One issue that I have encountered was that of the pineapple, it would have taken me a very long time to individually place the skin onto it so I instead decided that I will make the skin in designer and then have it placed onto the mesh when I am texturing. The problem though was the leaves, I did try these in zbrush but it looks not very realistic and overall not very appealing so I think I will try to either sculpt this again next week when I am doing foliage or hand paint it as I think this might have a nicer effect. If not, designer is also an option.

Finally, I started working into the high poly cart I created last week in zbrush. This was mainly to help my texturing process to be a bit easier as I can much more easily get the wood-like edge if it is already there instead of manually drawing this on. A lot of the wood that I can see on the reference pictures is quite worn down, the edges are no longer sharp and there is a lot of wear on it. I also noticed a wavy pattern on some of the planks that I tried to recreate by using the flatten edge tool. The result of this looks a lot more authentic and alike the reference image as it isn't as flat and generic. I think this will really help my cart to look much more realistic and more precise replication.

Overall, I made good progress this week and I am ready to move on to creating the props and background for my scene. I feel as though I am on track though I am becoming aware that perhaps I have given myself too little time to texture so I am hoping to get through low poly and unwrap for this project quickly so I can get on to texturing for each project quicker and with more time available for it.

Cart Scene Plan & Blockout

 10-12/11/21 - Week 6

To start the next project of the Professional Practice Briefs, I wanted to try to get a plan of the scene down first so I would know everything that I would need to sculpt and model.

I sort of wanted to mirror the initial reference by having the cart outside of a shop as I thought this would make for a nice story and had lots of potential with lighting. I started looking for some references that I thought would be suitable for this.

I went for some Victorian shopfronts which I thought matched the style of the fruit cart, I especially liked the bottom image that had the groceries in the window and it already has a bench in front so I could really envision the cart being in that spot of the window. I also liked some of the curvature from the shops as it added a lot of depth to them and I wanted to include this in my scene.

Here is my current plan for the fruit cart and it's diorama. I have a couple issues with it that I will need to ask about after reading week, the main one is if this idea is possible as it does make it so you can't easily see the back of the cart which I understand should be the main asset here. I will probably make one without the background as well and hopefully this will make up for this. I would just like to show my hard surface modelling skills a bit more than just the cart in this project. Feedback will be important for this next week but luckily it is still very easily changeable in its current state.

I also blocked this scene out in max to get an idea of what I was working with and also to work off of in the coming weeks. I plan to quickly get this into unreal next week and put some basic lighting down to test this too if my idea is acceptable.

Since the cart is an unchangeable aspect of the project I started working into this in Max. At the moment I plan to go into Zbrush with the cart to get some of the specific details in such as the degrading wood, especially on the corners which have become smoothed down over time. Hopefully this will make the project look a lot more authentic and an easier job when it comes to working in substance painter.

Overall, I made some good progress this week but with it being reading week I was a bit cautious not to take things too far yet as I want to get some verification with some of the work I have done and the ideas I currently have.

Unwrapping

 08-09/11/21 - Week 6

These past couple of days have been used on unwrapping my character so that once I revisit it in the coming weeks it will be ready for texturing straight away. With the texture limit of 1024 per meter, I decided to spilt my character into 5 maps - 6 if you count the eyes; Skin - 512, Hair - 1024, Clothes - 1024, Clothes 2 - 1024, accessories - 512.  With these texture maps this should create just under 2 x 2048 which I'm hoping is reasonable, from what I've read this should be alright though I am prepared to further reduce these if necessary. I decided to split the clothes into two different maps to fit the textile density since they would have needed a 2048 to fit the resolution - but splitting it into two means I can get enough resolution on all of it to have two 1024 which is much better space wise.

Retopping

01 -05/11/21 - Week 5

Retopping was quite a long process but I felt a bit more confident with it than before.

Sculpting the face was probably the easiest thing for me as there are clear animation loops to follow since most humanoid faces have the same features in the same places, so to find reference for this it is very easy. At first, I went very lop poly with the face but then using open Subdiv I made it a bit more to the poly count I was thinking, obviously the face is the most detailed part of the topology in general so I was free to go a bit more dense here. I'm happy with the topology though I'm really hoping the feedback that I get from the hand in will tell me if there is things that I need to adjust since I still feel quite inexperienced with retop and some of its rules.

Moving on to the rest of the body, I did start to struggle a little bit as this is where topology can really vary and it is ultimately decided on the clothing the character is wearing. Thankfully, I found some very helpful topology references (mainly Wattson from Apex Legends, created by Sam Sun) that somewhat mirrored the type of clothing that my character is wearing and used this to help me. The waders was probably the hardest here as obviously this was not something that I could find reference easily so I just had to follow the rules I was noticing from the sculpt I was mainly basing my topology from. These were, have more topology near a seam/edge and if a fold is very prominent, add some more topology for it to have more effect on the silhouette.

Something that I have decided to do that is different from my second year character is to only retop what will be visible by the player, such as the fact that the chest waders don't have any back etc. I think this is reasonable but I am again hoping that if it is not that it will be noted in my feedback.

The hair was probably the most time consuming and difficult part of the sculpt. I decided to make it mostly one mesh, separated at each hair tie. The top part of the hair was probably the most difficult as I decided to make this part asymmetrical due to the difference in fringe. It took me a long time to figure out some of the pieces to retop since they were so varying in size, shape and depth. One thing that I think did play to me was the fact that they are so angular as this meant that each strand only had to be 2-3 polys across each. 

One thing that is really frustrating is that I felt that by the end of it my topology doesn't look too clean and there is a lot of rectangles. The hair is definitely the most high poly aspect of the whole model by this point so I'm not sure whether to add in a few more loops to make things more square and neat or if this is just adding topology to areas where it wont show. It was also very time consuming in the first place and to add more time fixing this may be a problem, though if it is not good enough of course I will need to spend more time on this.

One problem I have encountered that I am not sure how or whether to fix is the overall tri count is rather low from what I expected. My initial goal as mentioned was 30-40k however with everything retopped now, I am only really just hitting 30k. I am hoping this is still acceptable and realistic for the character I have created.

Other than the problems that I have listed I am done with the retop of the character, I am hoping to have it unwrapped by the beginning of next week so I am all ready for texturing once I get back round to this project in the coming month.