So the past three weeks have been quite pivotal in our project, thus I wanted to collate them all into one blog post, as it's previously been quite difficult to do a week by week breakdown of everything both me and Chris do; especially with so many minor tweaks and changes.
Through the mentor system that's taken place at Uni, I have been assigned Creative Assembly Environment Artist Ben Keeling. He's been a great help so far, and has offered some good feedback for the level already. One thing he suggested was changing up the post process of the level, knocking down the contrast and changing the green atmospheric fog to a more complimentary colour such as blue or purple. We trialled both of these, and whilst it worked well in some areas, it really washed out and affected others quite badly. However, I'm really glad that Ben brought up the point, because that means that from an exterior point of view there's something quite off with it. It's nice to have feedback from a fresh pair of eyes, and no doubt something we'll look into at a later date.
Above is an in engine screenshot of a building made using a very different workflow to previously. Up until recently, we've been going down a pure hand painted, diffuse map only route. This has been working well, and for the most part looks good. However, we've started using techniques to push that further and get (more often than not) consistently better looking and quicker results from it. This method involves sculpting detail that would otherwise be painted by hand in Z Brush, and then baking maps out and using a texturing process of smart materials and generators in Substance Painter.
Achieving a hand painted look with things such as edge wear, dirt gradients and then using baked maps such as curvature and height to enhance / sharpen the detail in Photoshop is a quick and almost effortless approach to texturing that gives you a near final result in a pretty short space of time. At first I was unsure of how to use procedural texturing to achieve such a stylised look but it does work. I seriously need to scrub up on my sculpting skills however, Z Brush is still very new to me.
I'm very new to Z Brush, but am trying to pick up the tools quickly and keep practicing in the context of this project. I've tried not to get disheartened with bad sculpts, as I'm constantly learning from Chris and just through using it. Half of the battle with this particular software is getting used to the interface and the navigation. The above screenshot is a render of a couple of components for the large towers going around the level, they baked out well and were much easier to texture using Substance Painter rather than just painting every detail.
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