Finishing line - Weeks 18&19

These past two weeks have gone very quickly. We're on the border of the dreaded deadline week, and safe to say we're ready to finish and move on to new things. This project has been such a huge learning curve and great fun, however it's time to find something new. We've been taking older assets and remaking / refining them, creating new ones, and Chris has taken on the hero job of 'propulation'.

Populating the level is something we've been responsible for doing throughout, however the Level Design side of things is definitely more up Chris' avenue. We've been making heavy use of Z Brush to try and get as much polish done as quickly as possible. We both remade the early tileable textures from the level and replaced them with sculpted, refined ones.

The process of sculpting a tiling, hand painted texture is quite a frustrating one. I wondered the most 

logical way to do it, as my first approach wasn't as successful as I'd hoped initially, and I had to edit the texture quite a bit in Photoshop. Sculpting a pattern in Z Brush that is more organic such as rock, is more difficult because of its 'random' nature, you need to make it look convincing and not too uniform. However, things such as bricks and floor stones can be made before hand in 3Ds Max, to give at least a rough idea of what works, or a perfect translation if you're lucky. I found with the rock that the slightest little detail could look too repeated and throw the whole thing off, which then had to be painted over or replaced in Photoshop after baking. 

Trying to keep coherency, even when sculpting two completely different assets, was key. Chris made the lone set of stairs a couple of weeks previous to me making the blacksmith ones, so when I had to take them in to Z Brush, I used the same techniques to try and get a similar approach. The stairs are just done using mainly the mask / move tools to extrude shapes out in a clean way, and then trim dynamic and Michael Vincencte's 'Orb' brushes to add cracks and crevices in.