Professional Brief Test (Playground Games): Week 1

Day 1:

For the final brief I chose the art test given to us by Playground Games. This brief is good for helping me learn to be more careful with my modelling and tri count along with figuring ways around this. Along with the photos we were supplied I found a bunch online of the real stall in the UK. This was good for helping me identify the fruit in the baskets. 

This time I want to stick to my Trello plan as much as possible because I tend to diverge from the plan a lot if I'm not careful.

I started blocking out the cart and boxes closely referring to the image supplied.

I also blocked out each fruit in a very simple low poly way from spherified cubes. 

For the cart I have a limit of 2k tris, and 5k for all the fruit and boxes. For the cart I think 2k should be plenty but I will have to find ways around the fruit to stay within budget. This will either be baking fruit down to a plane, reducing the amount of fruit I have and making the baskets bigger and prioritising the larger fruit, using my sculpts from ZBrush in Substance Designer to make a texture for the bottom of the baskets, OR do a mix of all three. I would like to try and keep all the different fruits still if possible but just reduce the amount there is. A more efficient way which would stay within budget would be to model each fruit and instance them in UE4 and if necessary making a blueprint of them grouped together. This would allow the level designer to be able to drag and drop the blueprint like an asset whilst making the asset much more efficient. (I was later told I won't be able to do the latter).

Day 2:

I feel the hardest thing to do will be the fruit so I want to start with that to make sure I can plan that right before moving onto anything else.

To create the brushes I followed these steps in photoshop to make alphas for ZBrush: http://archive.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?111618-Making-of-fur

The Kiwi's were quite fiddly, so I used Zmodeller to extrude and mask off parts of the shape to create the end of the fruit. I then smoothed it and warped it to make it look more organic.

I added in a plane and warped it to create the soft petals on the fruit.

I sculpted each fruit roughly going through this process. I left some without texture as the imperfections are best left to the texturing stage to add more variation.

Day 3:

I modelled some planes in 3ds Max which I then took into Zbrush to warp and place. I'm still not entirely sure how I'm going to approach the leaves on the pineapple but I'm thinking of baking the leaves to a cylinder and/or plane. It all depends on how well I can stick to the tri budget.

My fruit sculpts :)

I tested baking the fruit down to a plane using Max and exported just the normal and diffuse maps to test.

I baked the Normal to a plane and added the diffuse in Painter.

Knowing this method works really well I'll take the high poly next to be textured, either in Painter or I'll polypaint them in ZBrush.

Day 4:

I took my rough blockout for the cart and started modelling the highpoly. 

I used turbosmooth and added in loops to control the different thicknesses of the edges on the wood and wheels.

By the end of the day I started getting a bit carried away with the details.

Day 5:

I then took the highpoly and sculpted in the carved edges and large chips in the wood. Any other details I will add in the texturing phase.