Collab2021-WIP-Daddios

Collaborations

Mountains for me

  • Neil Jenkinson(daddios) replied

    Here's my current progress on Mountains O, the one on the right is a sculpted cube with currently a subsurf and displacement modifier, the one on the left is a boolean chopped cube with another simple subsurf with displacement. I assume in the final scene some volumetrics will be applied so not sure which one to proceed with. Any suggestions recommendations?  

  • yukino hatake(yukinoh1989) replied

    hey nice work, in my opinion i like the one on the right side the most (perhaps a bit lesser smooth lines , by scraping and pinching and flathen out some places ) already a really great job :)

  • adrian replied

    Nice work daddios 

    I would go with the one on the right

    I assume you will bake high poly details to a low poly mesh? 

  • Neil Jenkinson(daddios) replied

    The one on the right it is then, just blocking at the moment. Just added the displacement to break up the surface a little.

  • Neil Jenkinson(daddios) replied

    Thanks yukinoh, the one of the right has two votes so that's the style I'll stick with.

  • Neil Jenkinson(daddios) replied

    Week 1 Homework Submission for Mountains O. First image of mountains with basic sculpt, not sure how much detail will be needed for the stylized mountains in the background. Enjoying experimenting with different methods of modelling them.

    Second image with them in the scene.

    I watched part of casual stream today and you were talking about the rear of the property, in my mind if this is a spice vendors property the at the rear there would be some open water (lake) with a quay to take deliveries of the raw spices and to ship them out once processed in the mill.  Just a thought.

  • adrian replied

    👆Homework Submission - Week 1 - Mountains 'O'👆

    @theluthier 

    daddios add this as a heading and tag Kent so he can spot your homework easier.


  • Neil Jenkinson(daddios) replied

    👆Homework Submission - Week 1 - Mountains 'O'👆 

    @theluthier 

    Week 1 Homework Submission for Mountains O. First image of mountains with basic sculpt, not sure how much detail will be needed for the stylized mountains in the background. Enjoying experimenting with different methods of modelling them.

    Second image with them in the scene.

    I watched part of casual stream today and you were talking about the rear of the property, in my mind if this is a spice vendors property the at the rear there would be some open water (lake) with a quay to take deliveries of the raw spices and to ship them out once processed in the mill.  Just a thought.

  • Kent Trammell replied

    Fantastic mountain work daddios! This is perfect for week 1. You've earned full points from me 👍

    I'm thinking each mountain should be a fully-realized shape from all sides. This way they can be duplicated and rotated for unique looks from the perspective of the house.

    As for the amount of detail, I recommend going fully detailed for you sculpt. We can always dial down the detail when we map bake. But it's better to have too much detail in this case rather than too little. This kind of quality is what I'd love to see:

  • adrian replied

    Great work daddios , full points week 1. Can't wait to see your results from week 2.

  • Neil Jenkinson(daddios) replied

    👆Homework Submission - Week 2 - Mountains 'O'👆

    Feedback only if you feel you need to, I know I'm not where I wanted to be at this stage, but hope to be back on track by next week.

    Well I've had an interesting week I started by making the two mountains into a single one using same data block and matching the artwork, then sculpting the single mountain with Dynamic topology, then retopo and and preparing for mutil-res, I even tried a bit off baking, however nothing seemed to go right, I new this Mountain would be a challenge.

    Then @theluthier posted an excellent and very interesting tutorial on how to convert the high resolution Dyno to Multi-res. Unfortunately it came too late for me to accomplish any changes, as I kept getting artifacts when applying the shrink wrap to my existing model, any comments.  I'll have more time this coming week so I shall probably remodel the mountain and work my way through the mountain tutorial workflow, ready for UV mapping, normal map baking and texture painting by end next week . 


  • Neil Jenkinson(daddios) replied

    At last manged to bake a normal map and a dirty vertex color map. I think my UV.s need a little more seam work to blend them in a little bit more. But at least I've got something that sort of looks like a mountain. Started dabbling with the Texture painting  this evening. 

  • Kent Trammell replied

    Your mountain looks promising daddios! I opened your WIP file but it doesn't look much like the screenshot. Can you make sure your WIP is up to date so I can take a look at it?

    Any idea what's happening here?

  • Neil Jenkinson(daddios) replied

    👆Homework Submission - Week 3 - Mountains 'O'👆

    What a week, I knew taking  on two mountains would be a challenge, I have modeled these mountains at least 3 times with different methods each time and based on the feedback.  The images below are this week's submission. The biggest challenge was making a single mountain fit the art work and then after sculpting and baking the multi-res finding it didn't. So in the end I modeled them with very little geometry (about 100 polygons) from a square pyramid and then applied a re-mesh modifier to increase the geometry. I found that large objects when UV unwrapped to a 1024 texture, all the UV's are red in the UV editor, so I needed extra polygons to obtain a blue area stretch. The mountains below are now the ones in the WIP and master folder, I'm not too happy about the texturing, I don't think it's possibly stylized enough but time was getting limited, and I have to own up that I have resorted to Substance Painter to do the texturing, at least it has given me an opportunity to use it.

    I've found the the Collaboration very useful, and good for making you get on with doing something constructive with Blender, doing something less hard surface than I normally do has certainly taught me a fair bit. I think you @theluthier have handled the project very well, and with the patience of a saint. Looking forward to Tuesday's stream. @jlampel @adrian2301 

  • Neil Jenkinson(daddios) replied

    👆Homework Submission - Week 3 - Mountains 'O'👆


    Part 2 - @jlampel @theluthier, I had to make two separate mountains for the scene as I couldn't give them different co-ordinates for keyframe 1 when the shared the same data. So they are the same model just ones a duplication of the other. 

  • adrian replied

    You accepted the challenge and ran with it. There is always something, we all say we could do better or we are not quite happy with. Turning to substance for texturing is not an issue, if it works for the project. The mountains were always going to be a challenge, the artwork is quite vague, all you have to work with is a silhouette, the texturing comes down to individual interpretation of the style. It is very difficult to texture a mountain based on the style of a house, the main focus of the artwork. You have created a good solid mountain.

    I don't think it's possibly stylized enough but time was getting limited,

    Did you have a go at a painted style like that of Kent's earlier post ?

    The Collabs are a great way of focusing on doing something constructive whilst learning Blender. I see it as something to build on, meaning you have a mountain based on this artwork, you could now expand on that and create your own scene a little at a time, take a look at other work within the Collab, trees for example, have a go and add them to the base of your mountain, the focus doesn't need to end after the Collab ends.

    We have one more week as a buffer, so if you wanted to try a more stylized look, then you have a week. If you try and don't succeed in time then at least you had a go and it gives you a chance to practice. You already have this as a submission.


    If you notice it has been modified by me on google drive, I added the Master collection in your file, this will be used for linking in the final scene.

  • Jonathan Lampel replied

    Hey Neil, nicely done! Full points for week 3 for finishing the texturing and shading. 

    I know you're already finished with the modeling, but I do want to point out these artifacts that are in several places on the model:

    '

    I'm not sure how they were created, but the solution is taking the vertex that's overlapping an edge in that area and either dissolve it or slide it over. 

    The bottom could also be optimized quite a bit with selecting a face, Shift+G to select similar, Coplanar, and then F to make an n-gon, and then Ctrl+T to immediately triangulate that n-gon. That'll get rid of all that geometry we won't see without messing up your UVs.

    There's also some texture stretching here on this peak, which doesn't appear to be due to the UVs so I'm guessing it was something in Substance. 

    I would agree with your assessment that it's not quite stylized enough, but I think you're closer to it than you may think. I don't mind whether you use substance or not, but you'll need to try painting things manually rather than smart materials, at least for the color map. The normal map seems fine, so try to use that as a guide to paint your snow and rock materials. It doesn't need to be complex. Just start with a snow layer and a rock layer as solid colors and get that sharp transition drawn in. No need for grass or anything else. 

    Once you have those two layers, you can leave the snow as white and then move on to detailing the rock. Use a very large and soft brush to get a good overall gradient and then work your way down to the smaller details by adding splotches of slightly different colors, sort of like the below image but with curved edges following your normal map lines rather than squared off brush strokes:

    Keep it really loose and don't worry at all about it being perfect.  Look at lots of reference as you work. I know you can do it! 

  • Kent Trammell replied

    Your mountains turned out well daddios! Here they are in the assembly:

    By themselves the look a bit geometric and less organic. But they work quite well in the assembly 👍

    Thanks for joining the collab! I hope you enjoyed and learned from the experience. It's been a pleasure working with you 🤝