Category: Modeling

Hidden Tavern: Almost-Finished

After several rounds of landscape reshaping and designing, my landscape started to look very similar to my initial design. I am quite happy with this, as I am keeping up with the estimated deadlines I had given myself at the beginning of the project, which will hopefully allow me to have more time to edit and refine certain issues with it.

Having now essentially finished the bulk of it, I am now starting to think of ways I could further upgrade it. These are my ideas so far:

  • Adding more rocks and trees in the background – make it look a bit busier?
  • Adding actual grass to the ground/ changing the texture
  • Changing the colour of the stream – make it look more stale/ forgotten?

Problem-Solving: Unexpected Maya Exporting Issue

View in UE4 vs Original ZBrush

Unfortunately, I ran into an issue when it came to importing the OBJ pebble archway from Maya into UE4. For some reason, it imported as an incomplete mesh (see above), no matter how I exported it.

I ended up having to use the school facilities to do this – it seemed like there was a problem with my at-home software. Once I did this, the mesh was fine, and I could continue onto texturing normally.

I was concerned, however, that it would take too long to export a series of different rocks for the landscape, so I decided to use the original pebble OBJ and scale and rotate it in various ways to create the rocks within the landscape design in UE4.

I also added the two sculpted and unwrapped background trees I had done, to add more life to the overall landscape:

Hidden Tavern: Final Model

The final Maya model for the whole tavern includes a door surrounded by pebbles embedded into the wood. I modelled and unwrapped the door in Maya, whilst the pebbles are a duplicated OBJ I sculpted in ZBrush and unwrapped in Maya.

I hoped to make the ‘tavern’ design more apparent through this, as it is supposed to be hidden, but still visible. I also intended to strengthen the organic style I had chosen for the tavern by adding more natural aspects to it.

I am quite happy with how efficiently I finished this; I have now finished most of my asset list below:

Composition: UE Experiments

Initial Terrain Experiments vs Original Concept Piece

I began by mapping out the hill-like terrain I had planned to have around the tavern by primarily looking at the concept art I had made for it.

I think this was important as it allowed me to have a visual representation of what I wanted in UE, and to see if it was actually manageable and relatively realistic.

I also managed to add a small stream of water to the landscape to complete the original design for the landscape. I am quite happy with how it looks so far – the depth of the stream seems realistic, and even the colour matches the overall vibe of the 3D style inspirations I had gathered.

I will now have to fix some distortions along the landscape, as well as see if I could find more suitable materials for both the ground and the river.

Tree Tavern: Unwrap

This was by far the most challenging part of my project – I struggled with this a great bit.

In an effort to keep as much detail and shape as I could, I imported the decimated version of my tree into Maya so that I could manually unwrap it.

In the end, I managed to figure out a neat and practical unwarp, which will hopefully allow me to go through this process a lot quicker in the future.