Cabin Finals!

Yesterday morning, at around 5:15am, I rendered out these final stills from my cabin environment project:

Initial concept by Olga Orlova

I was pretty happy with how this environment came together. This was my first time attempting a large scale project in Unreal by myself, and I learned a lot from it. I did run into some technical issues with the foliage and lightmaps. I'm going to have to do some research and actually try to understand lightmapping because it was really killing my final build and I just had no clue how to fix it. Even with those issues, I feel that I was able to get fairly close to the initial concept. I plan on going back and texturing the environment to really complete it for my portfolio, although for now I'm going to render out a flythrough of the landscape to show it off in its current state. I'll post that here when it's ready! 

I've also got an idea for a personal project I'll be starting during the Holidays involving some tiny landscapes... more on that soon. Graduation has opened up the ability for me to start making my own art for a little bit and I'll be taking full advantage of it! 

 

 

Cabin Moves to Unreal and 3December Begins

Finals are ramping up here at CCAD, and all my projects are starting to hit the end stages of production. Last weekend I started building my world in Unreal Engine 4 and getting the basic features laid out and working. 

Overall I'm really happy with the layout and the lighting, and I've had some good results with the water. I'm using packs from the UE4 marketplace to fill out the mass foliage and for the water spray effects around the rocks. 

I did run into an issue with the cabin though where it imported without smoothing groups and looks pretty funky, so I'm going to have to go in and fix that and some of the UVs. The normals are doing weird things right now. But once I can get that fixed, I can move some of the smaller world detail stuff into the scene- some scattered rubble and wood, various personal effects, maybe some signs and a few other basic structures. I just want to really build out this hero area and make sure the rest of the level within the colliders is still worth exploring.

I'm also participating in 3December, where you're supposed to be doing something in 3D every day and posting it on social media. Because of my schedule for finals I've only posted 3/6 days so far, but I'm getting more consistent. Last night I sat down and sculpted something just for myself- I haven't done that in a long time. I sketched out a character for my storyboarding final earlier and had such a fun time with it that I spent an hour sculpting his head: 

I was pretty proud for sticking to my self-induced time limit and making something that was just entertaining for me. I'll be posting the rest of my 3Decembers on here as they happen, but for other updates check out my Instagram (@abbytheturkey).