Painting Lab: Inspiration from Mirror's Edge

 

An Inspiration from Mirror's Edge

 For this week I created a piece inspired heavily from the look of Mirror's edge. To start my project I created a PureRef for my references and payed close attention to how color was used. In Mirror's Edge there is a lot of different shades of blue to show depth while the main character is able to pop against the blue with her hints of red. 

Inspiration and Reference

Once I decided on the look of my piece I knew I wanted the Character to be the main focus.  I grabbed the mannequin's controller and put a parent and scale constraint on it to easily move and scale the rig.  I then brought in some reference and began to manipulate the character's joints into the position I wanted them to be in to give the falling feel. 

Posing the Unreal Engine Mannequin 

From here I then began to create my background with simple primitives and using extrusion to create some interesting buildings.  Because you would only be seeing a the one angle I created a small scene that is dedicated to only being in that one angle versus creating an entire city. 

Building the City Background

Once I got my city set up I created my render camera.  The trick to getting the angle was to have the dual panel layout because you can see that your render camera is looking at in one and then use perspective to manipulate it into place. When I rendered I also rendered 5 different passes so I can set up my passes in Photoshop to create different effects. 

Camera Angle and Bringing in Posed Mannequin 

From here I brought everything into photoshop and used the different passes to create my fog, ambient occlusion and base colors.  I used the same technique demonstrated in the previous assignments to set the stage for this piece. 

Fog, Ambient Occlusion, and Base Colors

I then began to hand paint in details in the midground buildings to give them a little bit of pop.  I also added the sky behind all of the buildings with a color fill layers so that the background buildings can be seen.  

Creating the Background, Giving Depth

From here I began to work on my character.  because the mannequin is mechanic looking I created a design that gives him some more mechanical areas.  I used a dark grey and red to pop him out from the background and left the color fill color as his main color to fil the other areas. For the extra design elements I hand painted them onto the mannequin. 

Working on the Mannequin Character

For the last part I worked on the foreground building.  The foreground building was difficult because I did hand paint over it and finding where the extrusions are became very difficult since they do blend in with where the windows are.  I colored in where I thought the windows were and made each window lighter as they got further away.  On top of creating different shades of blues for each window I also made a ground with the window pieces and made a gradient that went over all the pieces to blend them together. 

Foreground Colors

  To make the window more interesting I created some white lines that show the perspective and give the building a little design.  I also added a second gradient that effects the extruded parts so that they get lighter the further away they are.  Lastly I added a slight reflection of the character in the windows.  Using my ID map I selected the character and gave him a grey fill color.  I then used transform to flip him over the horizontal axis and then distort it a little bit. One I got the placement for the reflection I used the opacity and then used the gaussian blur filter to create it's final look. 

Adding Mannequin Reflection, Gradient, and Perspective

Spoopy Game Asset Crate

Spoopy Game Asset Crate Reel

This is part three of creating my crate game asset!  This week I brought some color into my crate and brought it into Unreal Engine 4 to create a sequence.  To start my process for part three, I wanted to make my crate Halloween themed and thought about the colors I often see associated with that holiday.  I then came up with a purple and black base color for my crate.   Substance painter is very similar to Photoshop with working with layers.  So I created multiple different layers with different filters on them to create the base.  The base color on my crate is purple and then I created a separate layer that was on the multiply mode and have the 3D distance effect to create my dark parts and for the detail with the wood grains, I had a normal layer that had the effects blur, levels, and fill.

Bringing in Color

The next part I found to be very fun as I could actually paint on the 3D model.  I created a layer that was just for painting.  Looking at the colors on my crate I thought having a tortoise/light blue color would pop against it.  I selected the Dot brush and changed the size of it to have multiple different sizes of dots and painted them all over my model.

Painting on My Crate

To add some more fun to the design of my crate.  I added some symbols that were in substance painter and I added a filter to one of them to give it the look of spray paint and then I added different handprints to the crate. 

Adding Design

After painting my crate, I created custom export settings and then I exported my color maps and checked them in photoshop. 

Creating My Export Settings

Color Maps

After I exported my maps, I Imported my crate model into Unreal Engine 4 and connected my maps to the crate so that it would appear in the world just as it did in substance painter. 

Color Maps in the Unreal Engine 4 Material Editor

Posing My Crates in Unreal Engine

From here I created a new level and imported an infinity wall for rendering.  I also added some lighting by creating a spot light and environment light.  I also added some green fog for atmosphere. I also put in a post process volume to create a bloom effect. 

Bringing my Crates into a New Level

Once I got my render level set up, I created a sequence and animated the camera.  I also created a fade filler and added it to the beginning and the end of the sequence. 

Using the Sequence Editor

Final Posed Spoopy Crates

Perspective Study

 

Perspective Study

For this project I worked on the concept of perspective.  I was heavily inspired by the idea of the way cities show perspective and used buildings from Chicago for inspiration for my building designs and then letting my own imagination to evolve the look and concept. 

Reference and Inspiration

After looking at some reference, I modeled four different buildings in Maya to create my city with. 

Creating Four Different City Buildings

To make it easier to create my city, I exported my buildings as obj's and saved them in a folder that my content browser accesses. 

Creating a Content Browser Folder for My Buildings

When I was building my city, I payed close attention to variety by scaling and rotating individual buildings.  I then explored one point perspective, two point perspective, and three point perspective. 

One Point Perspective

Two Point Perspective

Three Point Perspective

My favorite was the one point perspective scene and I added the unreal mannequin to add some fun!

From here I rendered an ID, normal, ambient elusion, z depth, and beauty pass to bring into photoshop. 

Beauty Pass of One Point Perspective

From here I brought all my renders into photoshop and used several filters and paint brushes to create my colored scene. 

One Point in Photoshop

Game Asset Creation: A Simple Crate Part 2

 

A Simple Crate Model

This week continued my progress on my crate game asset.  After creating a crate in Maya, I exported it and imported it into ZBrush to start my process of adding on detail.  When I started sculpting, I sculpted both the top and bottom part of the crate separately.  After looking at multiple boxes I decided to go with an old box design that is soft on it's edges and uneven on some of the edges but with detail on the main wooden parts.  For the brushes I used, I mostly used the DamStandard.

Old Crate Look

From here I created a high and low resolution crate using decimation.  The high resolution crate took longer to decimate than the lower resolution and it was definitely a lot of playing around with the decimate values to make the lower version still have enough detail from the high resolution. 

High Poly Resolution

 After I decimated my crate, I exported my crate out of ZBrush and into Maya to create game resolution on my model.  

Crate Model in Maya

In Maya I did explore quadrawing, I ultimately did not use quadrawing but I though the process of quadrawing was interesting.

Crate Lid with Quadraw

To create my game resolution crate I took my high resolution crate from ZBrush and made a poly cube the same size and placement and began to shape it into the high resolution model.  To do this I used the extrusion tool, multi-cut tool, and I worked with a lot of the faces for clean up and for quick duplications.  To make sure that the game resolution was the same as the high resolution crate I looked at them side by side. 

Creating Game Rez of my Crate

Once I checked my model up against the high resolution model, I began to create my UV's. The UV process did show some issues with my model that I cleaned up using the mesh cleanup.   The UV process was a lot of cutting and sewing the geometry and then I adjusted the layout in the UV editor. To UV I UVed the top and bottom crate separately and then selected both to layout the pieces together. 

Crate UV's

Once I created my UV's I exported my game resolution crate into Substance Painter.  I made sure to rename my export into CrateTop_low and CrateBottom_low before I exported because I will be baking my geometry. 

Crate in Substance Painter

After I exported the game resolution into substance, I opened up my high resolution in ZBrush.  I first named my two parts CrateTop_high and CrateBottom_low to match the naming convention on the low resolution crate.  I also created a color ID on my model for future easy selection.  To do this I simply shift selected the individual pieces and added a color to them.  In the Decimation settings I turned on Use and keep Polypaint and then re-decimated and exported my pieces as FBX files. 

Crate with Color ID

I then I baked my game resolution model and my high resolution model in Substance painter.  With the baking setting it allowed me to select my high resolution pieces and bake out several different maps.  I then checked the different maps to see my result!

Crate Checking Baking Maps