A Path Through The Trees

This was a quick update to show what the castle looks like with the trees I made and the overall layout I'm going to be using because my idea has changed a lot and everything within that has developed as well.

The whole idea of my layout with the bridges and stairs connecting different parts of the level is still the same it's just been arranged and presented in a different way. Rather than it being a village it's one huge castle that you get to walk around and explore.

Here you can see I made a path in through the trees. The reason I did this isn't just because it'd almost be like an area of interest but it's a great way for me to show off the different textures I've used on my tree. I also think it's fitting for the overall module which is sceneography.T

Low Poly Tree?

I decided to work on modelling my trees while I think about what direction I'd like to go with my castle. I wanted to go for something with a bit more colour so I decided on an Autumn feel and I was browsing the internet for different kinds of trees and I was really drawn to the Maple tree. The colours were also with the season I decided to work with so it was a win win. 

This is the finished model of my maple tree textures and bump mapping included. As you can see from the screenshots I decided to use two different leaf colours just to add that little bit extra and make it more colourful and appealing to look at. As you can see though this tree ended up being quite complex with lots of polygons and such because it was really difficult to properly populate the tree until I was happy with it without making a tree with a highish poly count or at least I think it's high?

Anyway moving on. Here you can see the texturing and bump mapping for the tree. I found a very nice, seamless semi realistic bark texture that has a really nice grain which is the main thing I look for when making  a good bump map. 

Overall I'm happy with the tree model because during the low poly tree exercises I struggled with modelling and uv mapping the tree. I feel  lot more confident about it now though and I might carry on modelling some trees just for some practice on the side maybe an independent project here and there. 

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.

Modeling

I had a pretty slow start with modelling cos I found it quite hard to understand so I did a lot of tutorials and work at home and I eventually got there. 

The first thing I started modelling was the apple on my character, Pommie's head. I started with the basic shape and then worked into it using the edge loop tool and your standard resizing and moving tools (W,R). 

As you can see from the image below, I used a reference picture to help me sculpt the apple shape. I was surprised at how far from spherical an apple actually is. You can also see from the images that i've experimented with the number of divisions around the apple, the more there is the more round and smooth it looks but with the smoothing feature handy there isn't really need for it. I just thought it looks better with more.

To finish the apple off I just added a hypershade using the blinn because it's nice and shiny and of course a nice deep red colour. 

 Now for the body. As you can see here, I've just imported the apple I made into a new project and started modelling the rest of his body. The eyes and the body were quite simple to do because I learned pretty much everything I needed to use by creating the apple first, which was the intention after noticing I was struggling to pick up the basics of modelling.

For the body and the eyes, I needed to get around how to do UV mapping. I first saved a JPEG image of the nets for each body shape. Because they're all sphere's it wasn't too complicated. I then moved onto creating an image in Photoshop which I would then put back into Maya, assign to a new hypershade. I used Lambert for all the body parts. And as you can see if you compare the images above, I changed the number of times this pattern is repeated to get a nice even amount of spots in reference to my model.

I found it pretty hard to model the eyes funnily enough. Even though I drew circles for the pupils, every time I applied it to my model the image I drew would stretch across and his eyes ended up being oval shaped instead of circular. It doesn't look so bad for the 'happy eyes' of course cos they're arc shapes anyway. Knowing this, I then tried using a vertical oval thinking it would stretch out into a circle. No. It didn't work. So in the end I managed to get it where it wasn't so noticeable and looked half decent.

This is my finished model. I'm really happy with how it turned out because it looks strikingly similar to the model and of course, I couldn't really ask for anything more.

The apple is actually my favourite part of my character's model because it kinda symbolises my turning point and I also put a lot of time and effort into making it despite it's such a small part of the model as a whole.