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.