Castle Model

After struggling a lot to settle with a castle house design I decided to drop the house bit and just work with pure castle instead. So far I've made a few basic towers and the main body to the castle. The design overall is looking very classic so I think I'm going to try stone and brick textures. This design has no roof at the moment and I'm contemplating whether to add on or just leave it and make it all stone but I'll get to that when I start experimenting with textures. 

Colours, Models and Textures

So this is a basic model I did based on my concept art and it doesn't look all that bad but it lacks so much character and style. It's very boring to look at and I'm not very happy with it which moves me onto my next design underneath.

This is the second house design I came up with. I like the overall shape of the house, the roof has a lot of character and looks quite quirky and the colour scheme actually works nicely. I'm happy that it's not looking so stiff any more but in doing this I've strayed away from the castle theme. This design is great if I were making a cottage scene but as you know I wanted it to be a castle house and the design so far has absolutely no reference to castles maybe aside from the roofing perhaps? Either way I still gotta do a lot of work with my design.

First steps in Unity

So today we were introduced to the game engine we'll be working with for the next 3 years. Unity is a great piece of software. It's very flexible will tool sets and allows you to really add the finishing touches to your models. The basic tools (move, rotate, scale) were easy to pick up because they're pretty much the same in Maya and across any 3D software which I didn't actually know. On that note there were a lot of new things introduced to me when I was going through the basics of the program and I've put up some screenshots to demonstrate some. 

This image shows several different things that were new to me but first I'll start with the lighting. In Maya I've messed around with lighting, shadows and reflectivity so this wasn't exactly new so to speak. The standard types of lights being the spot light, directional light and points light were easy to grasp but it was only until  messed around with all this lighting in Unity that I discovered how lighting can really have an effect on the kind of mood and atmosphere of a game. It's one thing to see it when you're playing on a game but you get a real sense of meaning when you try it yourself. Here you can see I was trying to accomplish a night time setting by tinting the light a blue/purple colour which I think actually worked pretty well~

The skybox is another component in this image. The sky box is very simple to set up but very effective but I've still to learn hot to perhaps set up my own skybox but for now the default ones are all good. I think the skybox definitely works well with lighting and would also have a big impact on the kind of lighting you decide to choose dependant on the time of day. Here you can't see the source of the light but the colour is suppose to work along side the night time setting. It's not too bad for a first go~

The next thing is the water. Now this particular asset is only available on Unity Pro but it's a nice and easy way to add some interest in your scene. I've recently downloaded Unity 3.5.1 on my laptop and you can get different water effects such as a more calm and slow one which would be ideal for lakes. I also had a go at changing the colour but I actually think it looks rather strange. I tried changing it into a orange colour to go with a sunset drop I made but the colour is only visible from some angles so I don't think it worked very well.

This was a package that really surprised me because it was a lot easier to achieve this look than I thought it would be. Here I used the terrain tools to create everything from hills to mountains in the click of a button or rather a click and hold. The terrain tool is amazing for creating a suitable environment for your models as you can see below.

This is basically a more detailed version of the loading docks I made at the top but this time I added a rocky terrain to surround it and you can see how much of a difference it makes. It's now starting to look like something slowly but surely. All it needs now is some texturing~

So, sticking to the terrain tools you can paint textures on your terrain. At first I experimented with the pre-set textures which aren't actually so bad but to achieve a more realistic environment the trick is to use more than one texture so I went hunting on http://www.cgtextures.com/ to find some appropriate rocky/mossy textures to add to my piece. I think I used 3 overall and it's starting to look pretty good. I don't think there's a limit to how many textures you can really use but I do think that too many would swamp the environment and for this dock I've created here, the terrain is part of the background so it doesn't need to be in such great detail plus, you don;t want to draw attention away from your main assets.

This is my finished piece and the end of the Unity tutorial as it were. As you can see I've also added in some trees which can be found under the terrain tools as well. It has many trees, textures and plants to offer but these are only good for decorating things in the distance like I've done here otherwise it's more of a modelling job in Maya.

So overall there was lots of new things that I learned by doing this dock exercise and I'm more than sure it'll all come together when I start creating my own level.

Layout

Okay so before I move onto doing any kind of modelling I decided to block everything out in Unity to get an idea of my game space. From the notes you can see that I was thinking of using the purple and cream for my colour scheme but I'll have to experiment on how I can incorporate that without it looking really odd and out of place. 

Additional Moodies~

These are some new mood boards made prior to my latest concept art of my Castles in Trees. As you can see from the tree house images, I really liked the idea of having a spiral staircase heading up towards the house and you can see that the style of houses I looked at are all wooden and cottage-like. I'm now trying my best to keep to the theme a little more so the cottage look would be best I think.

This next one is more focussed on castle designs. At the moment I'm not sure whether to try a more modern or classical style yet or even a combination so I've tried picking up some nice designs that I could take influence from and just go from there really.

Castles in Trees

So after a long time of thinking on how to make my idea more fairytale related I figured the use of castles will close the gap so I present to you, castles in trees! Funnily enough it took me a long time to come up with this idea because I was trying to find other ways around it like using scale to my advantage to make things look less realistic in reference to Alice in Wonderland but nothing was really clinging to me. So, I sat down and looked through my mood boards again and started re sculpting my village into a castle village community. I took a lot of inspiration from castle houses and tree houses and eventually drew up this in a combination of Paint tool SAI and Photoshop.

As you can see I also had a go at colour theory which is something I really want to get the hang of for my concept art in the years to come. I'd like to think I have a good eye for colour and knowledge of colour combinations because of my interest of character design from a young age but there's still a lot of things I don't fully understand, colour theory being one of them.

This colour scheme I have going here is something I might actually bring to my models when I come to textures them but I'll have to experiment with that. I do think that the colour scheme is fitting for my fairytale theme though.

For this image I decided to use silhouettes which is a nice change to doing sketchy outlines and details. It's very simple yet effective and silhouettes are very important through concept art anyway. The silhouettes also allowed me to focus on the colour theory side of things a little more as well but next time I'd like to try with a more details piece.