New Castle

Okay so after modelling my trees I went back to my castle and redesigned my main tower and added some more elegant features to my castle.

As you can see I sorted out the white and red colour scheme and tried my best to balance the colours out. I'm pretty happy with the dashed of red in the design on the columns and the top. The dome at the top adds a point of interest when you go up the tower and I'm thinking of adding windows at the top to show off the texturing because I spent a long time fixing that window up in photoshop to fit the colour scheme.

Here I added some nice detailing of red ivy climbing up one of the towers which I'm wanting to put a spiral staircase down. again showing off the textures and creating more interest within my area. I was thinking about adding more ivy around the castle but I didn't want to go too overboard because the trees are already quite vibrant and decorative. 

Here I decided to add a bridge to my castle because what's a castle without the good old classic bridge? then again I don't have a moat around but I still wanted a bridge. As you can see I did a arched bridge to begin with but it looked so out of place although it looked pretty good close up where you'd be able to walk under. So, I decided to make a basic bridge and put the posts all the way across to give my game space a sense of continuity.

Here are the textures I used for the window and the door. The door actually looks pretty good close up but with the brief beging scenography I built the bridge so you can get a better look at the castle as a whole and appreciate your surroundings a bit more.

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. 

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.