CAGD 230

Game Scene Final Project Post

Final Render 1

Final Render 2

Final Render 3

This project's purpose was to recreate a scene from a game. My group's scene was based on the game Zelda: Breath of the Wild.  This game has a rustic or wilderness-like type of look, with cottage looking houses or houses that look like clay abodes. The general look of the scene had to lean more towards outdoor secluded urban areas rather than city or metropolis looking areas. 

Combined Into Once Scene In Maya

Modeling and UVing took about 2 weeks to complete in this project, which would be close to around 20 hours. Texturing took less time, maybe a week to complete. Putting the project together, with everyone's pace, took another week to complete. 

Some problems included the general modeling an time management of the project. In the future, it would be better not to model everything at the same time so that I have more time to work on how the things will look and to reorganize to accommodate for the poly count.

Game Scene Project Week 4

Unity Screenshot 1

This week consisted of finishing my project by exporting the materials and assets into unity, as well as exported the unity package, making my project ready to be combined with my group members' projects.  

As all of my textures were ready to go, I also went about organizing the project in the hierarchy in maya by placing module pieces in a folder and UV sets of each model, consisting of the highs and lows, into separate folders. 

Unity Screenshot 2

Problem 

I wanted to make the terrain look nice, and not the flat default terrain. 

Solution

I looked up a video on how to make simple mountains and downloaded terrain textures that somewhat matched my scene. While this is simplified, hopefully my group can figure out how to make a nicer looking terrain when we combine all of our projects into the scene.

Last week, me and my group members all were on the texturing phase, and since each individual Unity import only takes about 5 minutes, we all should be ready to combine our projects into once scene and duplicate as many of each others models as needed by this coming week.  

Unity Screenshot 3

Game Scene Project Week 3

House Textures

This week I textured the scene, finished creating UVs, and imported my materials into unity. This week was a lot of busy work with hours of organizing UVs and finding and tweaking textures, which, like modeling, takes a long time to get looking right. 

Problem 

The front of the house needs to have rock, however, the textures in Substance Painter for whatever reason, appear stretched and ugly.

Solution

A solution that I came up with was to simply move the texture so that it only showed the moss area of the rock texture that I used to make it blend in more with the grass. Reorganizing UVs would  be long and tedious, so in order to save time I am going to have to sacrifice the front of the house having a stone-like appearance. In the future, it would also be nice to be able to have more color ID, because I used the same ID for all the rocks in the house model.

Problem 

I had some issues learning how to import textures into unity.

Solution

I solved this by looking back to videos and following closely of how to create new materials and place them into the right areas. 

Next week will focus on finally bring my buildings into unity, and after that learn how to combine and organize everything into a single unity project with my group members. 

Game Scene Project Week 2

House and Fountain 

This week, I completed all of the modeling for my part of the project. 

Problem 

I had some issues deciding how to go about the walls of the house when modelling separate pieces. 

Solution

My solution was to create a series of multi-cuts on the bottoms of the walls and extrude inwards. This will make the stones inside the wall pop more without creating too many extrusions. 

Modules

Problem 

Creating the roof without too many faces. 

Solution

In order for the roof to be simplified, I deleted half of a cylinder and  shaped it in a roof tile shape. I simply extruded every other one of the tiles for more detail and copy and pasted each cylinder. 

House

 

Game Scene Project Week 1

My group for this project decided that we liked the aesthetic of the game Zelda: Breath of the Wild. To start, we began mapping what the scene will look like and where our houses will be placed in the finished product. The map looks like this:

Map of Town

In this map, the buildings roughly block out the placement of our town. Added around it will probably be trees and fences or other items to decorate the scene. All of the paths from the buildings will converge into the center 

Next we each needed to choose the building that we wanted to build based on in game images. Since we wanted a diverse bunch of houses, we each chose a variety of ones that we found on Google Images from screenshots of the game. Some include:

Cube Buildings Concept

Cottage Building Concept

Steeple Buildings Concept

Tiny Buildings Concept

After we decide who is doing what building and how the scene should be set up, the next step in this process is to create a new scene in Maya and begin to model separate pieces of the house we are making and additional props that we want to decorate the scene such as lamp posts, torches, flower pots, and fences.

By the end of the first week, we should be finished with ideas and setting up our personal work space scenes in Maya. By the end of the second week, we should have completed the separate parts of our buildings and UV those pieces. 

Western Scene Final Progress Post 

Final Western Scene 

In this week, I worked on the final product of the Western assignment.  A lot of work needed to be done from last week, including the baking of at least 6 or more materials that were modeled last week.

Problem 

There were many issues with UVing the last couple items. Lots of overlapping UVs and I had a very frustrating unwrapping most of the items such as the middle wall and especially the wooden crate. As a result, the textures seemed to kind of do what they wanted. The couch, for example, has a slanted texture on the back rest, and I only noticed that this was more noticeable than I thought after I had textured it. 

Couch UV

Solution

My solution was to improvise and fit the textures onto the messy UVs as good as possible. This was especially frustrating because I wanted to make the UVs look good, but some were beyond saving and involved me having to redo the entire unfold again. Nevertheless, I managed to make the UV mistakes less noticeable, sometimes putting non substance painter materials in order to patch up unfixable UV mistakes. 

The Wooden Beams on the Mid-Wall Frame and the Floor Frame are Improvised Materials

Problem 

The last issue with the scene was that it looked a little damp and depressing. The lamp was the only light source and it just was too....brown.

1st Render

Solution

To fix this issue, I put in lights on the walls in order to have a more cohesive looking scene. With the addition of small point lights that are similar to the lantern's light, it creates a more aesthetic looking image, as well as having a part in framing the chairs and tables. 

2nd Render

Western Scene Progress Post Week 2 

Western Scene Progress Week 2 (1)

Western Scene Progress Week 2(2)

This week comprised of modeling pretty much everything in my western scene: walls, floor, big furniture etc.  I have only made UV's for about half the items that I have modeled this week. 

Problem 

UVing once again is very difficult and severely restricts creative modeling or any shortcuts I do with the multi-cut tool. I still have a lot to learn for creating a single mesh with good UVs. 

Table UV 1

Solution

The UV's take a lot of time to figure out and none of them come out perfect. I take what I can get with most of them, even though there is a lot of overlapping, I figure it will be in places that are hard to notice, ie: bottom of the table.

Table UV 2

Some UV's come out almost perfect however.

Pipe UV

 

Bar Table UV

Problem 

A lot of the items in the scene I felt were unnecessary and might create a longer render time. 

Solution

I took out the weird jugs on the table in the corner, as well as the flour sack which had way too many faces. 

Without Flour Sack and Jugs

Western Scene Progress Post Week 1 

Western Scene Progress Week 1

The Western scene progress so far involved all of the object coming into the scene together. I also modeled two more items in this scene which were the chairs and a wine bottle. I made a list of assets that I think I would need to model to completely model, UV, and place into the scene in order for it to be complete. 

Wine Bottle Screenshot

Problem 

I had a difficult time with modeling the chair. I had never done this before and it took a lot of planning and time redoing it so that it would be easier to UV.

The UVs Still Are Not Perfect, But I've Improved

Solution

I researched a YouTube video that showed me how to model a type of chair, and I altered it to fit in my scene. I think that in the future I will need to continue to reference, but now I think with basic knowledge of how to create a chair that I can start making the table, bar table, and other wooden objects in the scene.

Chairs Closeup

Micro Scene Polish 

Polish Final Render 1

Polish Final Render 2

The Micro Scene Polish project required modeling, UVing, and texturing a barrel, a sack, a lantern, a bottle, a glass cup, and two other items of our choice. In my case, I created a cowboy hat and a bullet to match an old-timey saloon theme. Once the items were created, we were to compile those objects into one scene. 

Problem 1

In this project, UVing is defiantly a new concept to me. Before starting this project, I had only a minimal knowledge of the ins and outs of UV maps. Creating the UV map for the barrel proved difficult and ended in many overlapping UVs. While this never became a huge issue visibly in the final render, it provided less texture flexibility for certain parts of the barrel. It was only in the next project of modeling the lantern that I figured out that I needed to select the UV mesh in the UV editor in order to use the Planar option that is used for unfolding the UV mesh.

Solution

After the barrel model, I knew I needed to focus more on more organized and neater UVs. I learned how to cut and stitch the models so that they look flat in a 2D plane. By the time of UVing the cowboy hat, I could UV everything component of the hat without overlapping or reversed UV pieces. In future projects, it would be useful to practice how to make neat UVs that have few distortion problems, just in case I need to do something such as drawing on the texture of the 3D model. 

Barrel Render With White Background

Problem 2

The next struggle of this assignment involved texturing the lantern. There were many issues that involved missing vertices which messed with the placement of the textures and distorted the UVs. This created a huge hole in the back of the glass part of the lantern that did not look as intended.

Lantern, Glass, Bottle, Sack Render

Solution

Most of these issues were resolved by creating more edges by manually using the multi-cut tool. It was a lot of work and was frustrating to get the tool to align up with the vertices across one another. The reason why there were missing vertices in the first place was because I had to fix the bottom of the model several times, and I did so using box selection, which may have accidentally affected the top of the model when I deleted vertices on the bottom of the model. After creating the fixed edges, I fixed the UV map, which was also really time consuming to do. I learned that accidentally deleting vertices may take an extremely long time to fix. 

Polish Final Render 3