The challenge I faced with this update was the fact that I've never done Ivy before and had a very rough idea as to how the heck I'm going to tackle it. One of the things I did was look at a breakdown that Billy Matjiunis shared during my mentorship which insanely helped with the process.
So the breakdown is by Vytautas Katarzis who worked on a Seaside Town environment piece. THIS breakdown of the Ivy that he did was incredibly useful as he showed almost step by step on how you go on to tackle Ivy.
I pretty much took the same approach with mine. I took some scans from Megascan that had vines, leaves and modelled them out on Maya, lay them out like how I wanted the Ivy to look like and used SpeedTree to bake them down and create an Atlas on photoshop just like the breakdown and then it was just a matter of adding variations of them into the scene. It does get a little repetitive when you're laying out the Ivy but once you start spamming them into the scene, you do appreciate the effort a lot more.
pretty much all of the props that needed texturing have been textured and added in the scene. With the exception of the Jeep that i'll be making later in the process to learn some Vehicle Modelling techniques. The generator prop has been added. I really wanted to give it a weathered look and maybe have a scratch on the side of it just to tell a story that a raptor or small dino dropped by and scratched it with the claws. It was a nice break from doing repetitive process like the foliage. Some of the textures of the generator will likely change depending on what it looks like close up on the rendered shots in UE4 but we'll see how that goes. The scratches at the bottom of the generator are there due to a metal stairs being there to be able to get to the control panel as it's quite a tall machine for an average human. Since it's portable stairs, it would hit the generator often and scratch it out.
NEXT UP: The Treeeeee
So in the coming week, I will be tackling the tree! (HELP MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE)
Before I tackle it, I know I need a good tree bark texture so I decided to go into substance designer and make a simple tree bark texture that you see in the rendered still below. I'll be adding more things on top of it such as moss and some ivy starting to grow onto it from the bottom.
I'm pretty sure SpeedTree has a tutorial on Clusters for trees that I'll be taking a look at and learn more about the process. I will keep you guys updated on that front. Sorry it took so long to update with a progress but as you can see, I've been busy spamming Ivy everywhere and try to make sense out of it.
Once the tree's been added the plan is to sort out the plants around it as I feel like they don't look settled in the scene as well as the others and doing some Decaling and material blending with repeated props and the on the wall etc to really add some Dirt, Grime, and some discolouration to make the vegetation sit better and make it seem like they've been there for a long time.
But yeah, thank you for reading my Blog on the progress of this environment! Still got few weeks left to finish this piece off. It's been one heck of a ride so far. I hope this helped, even a little. If it didn't, I'm sorry. I'll do better. I promise o_o.
As usual, if you guys have any feedback, be sure to let me know!
I'll try and make the next update, sooner as this one was quite a bit apart.
Cheers!
-Raj
